Asian American studies, like other ethnic studies programs, was developed to help change the focus of college curricula from the achievements of great white men to the history, demographics, experiences and needs of everyone in this diverse nation. The Third World Strikes at San Francisco State and U.C. Berkeley in 1968 and 1969 established California as the epicenter of Asian American studies, with major research centers soon established at UCLA and other schools on the West Coast.
While City College of New York, Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) and other schools have had Asian American studies courses for decades, the impression that Asian American studies is primarily a West Coast phenomenon persists.
As the middle-aging and retirement of the founder generation of Asian American studies faculty took place over the next 40 years, other Asian American studies programs began to spring up in places as disparate as Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Texas. These newer programs soon realized that they needed to discuss issues not as relevant to the older, more established programs. These issues included how to establish a program and how to have faculty with appointments split between Asian American studies and other departments.
The East of California movement, ironic in its name because it included schools as far west as Colorado, became an established caucus within the Association for Asian American Studies after it was formed at a conference at Cornell University in 1991. Its focus is on nurturing new teachers and programs, developing region-specific research, and creating alliances with local communities and students who could support Asian American studies outside of California.
I attended a meeting of the East of California caucus at the AAAS meeting in Chicago on April 17, and was pleasantly surprised to see colleagues from schools such as NYU and Hunter College in New York, the University of North Carolina, the University of Chicago and the University of Connecticut. One colleague, coming from a school really east of California, was Jacqueline Lo, head of the School of Humanities at the Australian National University. She, Tseen Khoo and others have started an Asian Australian Studies Research Network (asianaustralianstudies.org) that is seeking to build bridges to AAAS and others studying the Asian diaspora around the globe.
Many steps have been taken to institutionalize Asian American studies east of California since 1991. For example, Larry Shinagawa, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, was able to report that an Asian American studies minor had been approved at Maryland, as well as a program specifically focusing on Filipino American studies. Laura Chen-Schultz, deputy director of the A/P/A Program at NYU, reported the development of a strong artists-in-residence program and a major archive to house the papers of Asian Pacific American community leaders.
One problem identified at the East of California meeting was that the institutional history of Asian American studies has sometimes been lost when there were long gaps between efforts to institutionalize courses and programs on campuses. For example, Jennifer Hayashida, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, did not know that Shirley Hune, well known as a professor and associate dean at UCLA, had once been an administrator and Asian American studies advocate at Hunter.
My own efforts to restart an Asian American history course at Yale in 1985 would have foundered if we did not know that Don Nakanishi, usually thought of in his role as head of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Program, was a student leader and founder of Asian American studies at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His advice about how to establish the course and create the syllabus were essential, because I had grown up on the East Coast and never taken or taught an Asian American history course.
The next East of California conference will be held from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1 at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Between now and then, however, conference organizers Cathy Schlund-Vials of UConn and Jennifer Ho of UNC are hoping to start an online location where the founder generation of Asian American studies can share their memories of when Asian American studies was in its early stages. Oral histories also are needed of pioneers such as Jean Wu at Tufts, Setsuko Nishi at Brooklyn College and Betty Lee Sung at City College of New York.
For more information about the conference or the project to
preserve institutional memories: asianamerican.uconn.edu/events.htm.