Joseph Bernardo (History)

Symbol Lai (History)

Christopher Patterson (English)

Kim Trinh (English)

Kayomi Wada (Interdisciplinary Studies)

This project stems from questions that emerged out of the (dis)Orienting Asian American Studies project. The overall aim of the (dis)Orienting project was to gauge the current standing of Asian American Studies (AAS) and the field’s future direction, specifically in the areas of comparative racialization and diasporic studies. Through these events, we have noticed points of contention in the present state of the field that we find imperative to explore further. As the Fall UW faculty roundtable articulated, Asian American Studies is becoming increasingly global in its approach, whether we consider imperial expansion, highlight the permeability of national boundaries through worldwide migrations, or examine international manifestations of race. Although it grew out of a radical student movement seeking to address issues influencing Asian Americans on a daily basis, Asian American Studies has now shifted toward a macro-perspective of the transnational—a shift that we feel has not been adequately interrogated. While we find transnational frameworks to be one means that AAS can fundamentally intervene in our respective disciplines, we also see that these sweeping methodologies often risk overlooking the impact of large-scale social transformations on local communities. Despite this potential shortcoming of AAS’ current propensity for more wide-ranging approaches, we believe that the global and local, while frequently at odds, need not be mutually exclusive. The events and activities we wish to organize in Local Communities and Global Identities in Asian American Studies will bring us closer to developing methodologies and producing scholarship that can effectively navigate this tension between the global and local.

To guide our collective inquiry about the relationship between the global and local, we have formulated the following questions:

1. How do global processes affect local communities and vice versa? How does the immediate local environment reflect larger transformations like imperial expansion, global migrations patterns, and economic growth?

2. Is it possible to produce works that address the tension between the global and local without being disruptive to progressive movements? Though we hope for our scholarship to bridge the divide between the global and local in order to highlight the processes affecting our surroundings, we recognize that to simply account for these changes may not necessarily be the most efficacious. For example, if we ignore our own privileged position in academia, we could reaffirm the very hierarchies that we wish to expose in our endeavors. As such, we wish to explore different methods that will allow us to produce scholarship that is both forward thinking and complementary to work outside of academia.

3. How does the racialization of Asian Americans relate to that of other groups both globally and locally? What is the connection between the transnational racial formation of Asian Americans and other racialized peoples of the world? How might these international conceptions of race be analogous with American social, economic and political conceptions of race?