A Chinese restaurant in Drogheda, Ireland. Photo: William Murphy (Flickr/Creative Commons)
I remember being very taken with the idea of how Asian American Studies grew in the USA from the civil rights movement, and how it emerged as a new and dynamic field. Students and academics, many of them Asian American themselves, were discussing Asian American identities, stereotypes and North America’s exclusionary dynamics! There was momentum, courses, majors!
This was the kind of thing I wanted here: articulate Asian communities who knew their rights and would fight for them, groups who understood what it meant to be racially marked and seemed to be so well represented in the public sphere, with enough momentum and investment in Asian Australian cultural pursuits that they could have writing, film and visual arts organisations dedicated to community creative work and advocacy.
The above is from Tseen Khoo’s excellent article on Asian Australian networking for human rights blog Right Now. In that article, she discusses the development of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and of the field of Asian Australian studies. This excerpt positions Asian American Studies in the US as the center, a source of inspiration for developments in the periphery.
In Asian American spaces in Philadelphia, I’ve seen a similar dynamic. Philadelphia is the periphery, while New York is the local center and California is the supreme center to rule them all. “You’re so lucky to be moving back to LA,” an Asian American college friend from New York City told me. “All the good Asian music is there!” In her mind, Los Angeles was the center of the Asian American entertainment industry, akin to Atlanta for black Americans, and also the center of political organizing and community building. She might be right; a look at Hyphen Magazine’s “Hyphenite’s Social Calendar” blog posts reveals that most of the events that they list are in New York, LA, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with only the occasional gathering in “second-tier” Asian American communities like Philadelphia and Seattle. (We must keep in mind, though, that Hyphen is based in San Francisco.)
