Asian Am. Studies Conference in Chicago
April 28, 2008
The 25th annual Association for Asian American Studies Conference held in Chicago last week had workshops, panel discussions, literary readings, neighborhood tours, banquets — and an earthquake.
Like previous AAAS conferences, this one provided opportunities for out-of-towners to get out and see the local APA community. The Chinatown Chamber of Commerce held a tour of Chinatown, while the Japanese American Service Committee of Chicago discussed current community issues as well as the flood of Issei and Nisei who changed the local landscape when they emerged from the internment camps after World War II.
Other tours were held in the Hyde Park community (home of the University of Chicago, with its research holdings by scholars such as Paul C.P. Siu), the Uptown/Argyle Street community (home to many Chinese Americans and Vietnamese Americans), the Lawrence Avenue area (home to many Korean Americans and the site of the only Cambodian American museum in the country), the Northside/Devon Avenue area (home of the Indo-American Center and many South Asian Americans and Filipino Americans), and the Pilsen neighborhood (home of the National Museum of Mexican Art and many Mexican Americans).
The Chinese American Service League and the Chinese American Museum partnered on another tour that featured a look at Southside Chinatown, the museum’s many exhibits, and the social service needs of the APA community in America’s second-largest city.
Utilizing local community leaders and scholars, in-depth workshops were offered on mixed-race APAs, adoptees of Asian ancestry, mental health issues in APA communities, the history of the Japanese American post-war resettlement, and tips for teaching about Muslim, Middle Eastern, Arab and South Asian images and communities.
Scholarly panels focused on the usual broad array of topics, from colonialism to war brides and from poetry to public policy. One timely panel focused on Asian Americans in politics, and featured Dr. Konrad Ng of the University of Hawai‘i (also known as Barack Obama’s brother-in-law), local Judge Sandra Otaka and Dean Frank Wu from the Wayne State School of Law in Detroit.
The politics panel, which focused on money and influence issues, represented a joint endeavor between the scholarly community within AAAS and local public policy and activist groups. These included the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, the Asian American Policy Council of Illinois, the Japanese American Citizens League, the Chicago chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, and the South Asian American Policy and Research Institute.
Representing a seamless transition from the scholarly to the practical, Dean Wu highlighted five challenges facing APAs in the political sector: lack of unity; lack of organizing that is forward-looking (as opposed to defensive or reactive); stereotypes; challenges from other communities of color; and internal constraints (holding ourselves back).
Professor Ng, interweaving his scholarly understanding of new media in politics with his personal experiences in the Obama campaign, highlighted the importance of blogs, podcasts, videos and music as a new way that APAs are getting involved in the political scene.
Judge Otaka, a multiracial white-Sansei graduate of Berkeley and UCLA Law, has been a change agent since her days as a student activist in California. Now a longtime Chicago area resident, she described the on-the-ground politics of getting APAs elected in Chicago, specifically, and generally in all of the Midwest.
While Illinois has a population that is four percent APA, like the country as a whole, the smaller absolute numbers of activists has meant that groups must work across ethnic and political party lines, and must depend on the cultivation of relationships with political power brokers to gain access and power for the community. Recent community victories have included the legalization of acupuncture, the provision of scholarships for needy APA students, and the election of a few APA public officials, including Judge Otaka herself.
For me, the greatest earthquake of the conference was not the one measured on the Richter scale, but the one measured by the growth of the local APA community in numbers and political sophistication since I first visited many years ago.
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