The Mentoring Future Faculty of Color Project

I was honored when my colleague Kristina Huang asked to hold a conversation with me and my co-conspirator Chris for publication in the Graduate Center Advocate. The following appeared in the May 2014 issue. Many thanks to Kristina for making this possible! She's also posted a PDF version, along with the issue's editorial, here.

Mentoring Future Faculty of Color: A Brief Conversation with Chris Eng and Melissa Phruksachart

In its previous issue, which also inaugurated a new editorial staff, The Advocate began with an open letter to the Graduate Center community for contributions from diverse perspectives. “Diversity in the abstract,” they wrote, “as a bureaucratic checkbox is a fiction that must be superseded by diversity as an actual social and political linkage between the academy and society.” Indeed. This sentiment is shared by many in the Graduate Center student community and the following conversation—between me and two other doctoral students Chris Eng and Melissa Phruksachart—responds to the editors’ call and reiterates the value of a critical consciousness that bridges academic work with social realities.

This conversation serves as a reflection on a particular initiative on critical diversity work at the CUNY Graduate Center: the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color Project. Now in its second year, largely run by a collective of students and their mentors, MFFC set into motion vibrant discussions about the professional and political lives of students of color, and discussions about current academic work in U.S. universities. Professors who have been a part of this lecture series include Daphne Brooks (Princeton), Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers), Tavia Nyong’o (NYU), Nikhil Pal Singh (NYU), and, most recently, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brandeis). On Friday, May 2nd, at 2pm in room 5409, Tina Campt (Barnard) will be giving the concluding lecture of this semester.

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Kristina Huang (KH): Both of you are among the collective of students who helped in spearheading the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color initiative a year ago. Can you provide a bit of background for this initiative? How did it get started?

Chris Eng (CE): Well, basically the Diversity Project Development Fund was being offered and advertised two years ago, in the fall. Kandice Chuh, one of our mentors, suggested that this (MFFC) might be a good project to put forth. Her recommendation stemmed out of previous informal meetings, one of which Kandice invited several students of color from the English Program to a dinner to chat about the experiences and challenges in navigating the English Program particularly and academia more generally. It was a space for us to discuss the different programs and structures of support that we found helpful for really starting a conversation about race and diversity on multiple types of level. We also reflected on the various formal and informal relations that we’ve built in our graduate careers thus far. Collectively, we seemed to identify mentoring as a desirable and desired practice that we wanted to further foster, particularly in relation to questions of race and diversity. After applying for and receiving the fund last year, a group of students talked about moving forward and outlined what the initiative would eventually become.

Melissa Phruksachart (MP): We decided we’d invite three to four scholars per semester to have lunch with a small group of students to talk about their experiences navigating academia as a scholar of color. Afterward, they give a public lecture about their current work.

KH: Can you talk about some highlights of what MFFC has done so far?

MP: One of the highlights has been getting to know scholars in an informal setting and hearing about their own struggles in getting through graduate school, the job market, and the early career stages. Most people did not have it easy, and no one could predict that they’d end up in a fabulous position at such-and-such school. I appreciate how frank people have been and how they let us know how difficult it can be for anyone to pursue work in academia.

KH: Yeah, what I’ve found super interesting too is the idea that one’s personal, graduate student journey is part of an institutional history. Our lunches with Daphne Brooks and Nikhil Pal Singh come to mind. I’m thinking, specifically, about how they noted that their politics came out of an intersection of their scholarship, graduate experience, and personal experiences.

CE: To build off of what Melissa and you have been talking about, the reason for inviting these scholars who are amazing and produce all this cutting edge work is to get a chance to sit and talk with them about questions around race and diversity. Doing so is immensely helpful because it gives you an understanding about the struggles they have and continue to experience in their academic careers. This is just to say that after you become a professor, after you “make it,” there are still challenges that you continue to be a part of. The structures and institutional conditions that inhibit critical diversity do not disappear with tenure. And this isn’t something you talk about at conferences and events, right? You usually just talk about research, but the institutional diversity work isn’t something that’s always talked about.

KH: I know you from Hunter College, Chris, when we were undergraduates, and I want to ask you to talk about your work there.

CE: I was involved in CRAASH, the Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter College, and it was a colleague who tapped me into the status of the Asian American Studies program and that nothing was happening. Based on her suggestion, a few of us collaborated and coordinated a series of campaigns and events to raise awareness about the Asian American Studies Program to get more funding and support. That experience was great and in directly diving into these issues, I became aware of the university and the discipline as an important site of struggle for questions relating to social justice, in terms of where and what we get to learn.

KH: I think of CUNY as being a particular and very interesting site for these conversations. And I was wondering, Melissa, if you could talk a little about your experience thus far. Chris and I have both gone through the undergraduate program here, and that has shaped how we approach our work here at CUNY. Can you speak about your experience at CUNY, diversity, and people of color in higher education?

MP: So you’re asking me how this particular location helped me think about those kinds of questions?

KH: Yes, and maybe reflect on teaching at CUNY and the kinds of courses they offer here.

MP: I definitely see the university and higher education as a site of social production and reproduction, in terms of all types of capital. To my mind, that is why students come to college—to gain certain kinds of capital, whether they know it or not. And so, teaching the students of NYC, it was important to me to know where they were located in relationship to social, cultural, and economic capital and to try to think about how I could help them walk the fine line of gaining different forms of capital but also help them to be critical in what it means to be reaching for that. Understanding the diverse contexts of CUNY undergraduate students is really important to me, even on a personal level because I am also a child of immigrants. I feel that I have some sort of kinship with our students on that level, and a responsibility to them.

KH: Relatedly, I’m of the school of thinking that politics and scholarship are not separable. I wonder if you can talk about your own scholarship in relation to what you do; if there is any overlap between what you study and your involvement in MFFC.

MP: I’m not sure if MFFC has informed my scholarship as much as it’s influenced the way I see the potential roles of an academic — not to only produce scholarship but in other administrative and community functions. I think that’s where this project helped me grow in terms of my work: in terms of understanding how else scholars create spaces for critical discourse in the academy. It’s not just about what you publish.

CE: For me, I think of critical diversity work as labor that operates on multiple levels. And, reflecting upon MFFC and the scholarship that Melissa and I do, it’s very much about the types of conditions or structures that don’t allow for certain questions to be asked or certain bodies to become legitimate or enter certain types of spaces. It seems then that our work on MFFC and scholarship are thus animated by the following question: what are the conditions of possibility, or impossibility for certain questions around racial difference to be discussed, asked, and probed–within the university, either in actual programming but also in terms of the scholarship we produce. Questions of race are so embedded within everything we do in the university, and our work strategizes about and labors toward shifting the current conditions to allow for the flourishing of students of color within and beyond the university.

Critical Karaoke

I recently participated in an event sponsored by my department called Critical Karaoke. The CFP was thus:

Thinking alongside Alexandra Vazquez, this is an invitation to listen in detail—or “listen to it all at once”—in preparation for an experimental Critical Karaoke event hosted by the English department this fall. The event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and will celebrate the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound.

Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty (tambourine), Eric Lott (cowbells and backing vocals), and Danica Savonick (lead vocals, lead guitar, drums, bass, and harmonica)—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Papers will be read aloud in accompaniment with the song, and should last no longer than its duration (“cut it down to three oh five,” or thereabouts). Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. Performances can move freely among keywords and key changes, the popular and the peripheral, the lizard and the lyric. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.

What can possibly be said, thought, or felt, in such a short space? How can a song—or a movement from a larger piece—move us beyond inherited major and minor scales of thinking? Honoring Jose Munoz’s queer feeling that “this world is not enough,” how might listening practices help us hold dissonance in harmony?

I chose to riff on an excerpt from Neil Cicierega's Mouth Sounds mixtape, specifically a little section called "D'Oh," which I chose for its brevity and its amusing amalgamation of Homer Simpson, "Ants Marching," Austin Powers, Sir Mix-a-Lot, the Doug theme song, and the Talking Heads:

How will future generations tell the cultural history of BIE, or Before Internet Era? I believe this excerpt from Internet meme-maker Neil Cicierega’s 2014 mashup mixtape “Mouth Sounds” can give us an idea. A fifty-six minute cacophony of earworms, catchphrases, and number one pop hits from the turn of the century, “Mouth Sounds” is a musical version of the Buzzfeed listicle “How to Tell You’re a Nineties Kid.” It’s a chronicle of the cultural knowledge of the last cohort of American children to grow up with a finite number of media sources: Billboard radio, live-action PG-13 comedies, basic cable television. The novelty that Poe described in “The Imp of the Perverse” as “the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories” is simply now called a meme.

How to explain the Talking Heads, though? It was dance music from our liberal arts college youth, as kids clad in thrift store finds who scoffed at the sexual sincerity with which our peers moved to hip-hop. The Talking Heads refracted the Africanist presence in American rock through academic polyrhythms, shepherding irony-laden brains to the dance floor, cajoling us to ask:

How -- did -- I -- get -- here?

The event was a rousing success, with participants musing on everything from Townes Van Zandt to No Doubt to Calexico to the Arcade Fire to classical piano to The Carpenters to Bon Jovi. Each one just kept getting better and better. Really made me proud of the critical intensity/perversity of my fellow GC colleagues. Hope to do it again soon...

On The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra, 1933)

Had the chance to see this at Film Forum. Was immediately taken with Barbara Stanwyck. She's like the original Greta Gerwig!

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), set in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War, features Barbara Stanwyck as an American missionary’s fiancée who develops a psychosexual interest in General Yen, played by Nils Asther in yellowface. General Yen, too, is fascinated with Stanwyck’s character Megan and holds her hostage at his estate. The film is not a romance in the usual sense of the word; rather, Yen waits patiently for his hostage to capitulate and accept her capture, while Megan fights against the anxiously erotic feelings she has for this strange, baroque man. After an intense sex dream, Megan decides to give in to Yen, but it is too late — the general has poisoned himself because of his unrequited love. While other films may portray the female figure as a damsel in distress against a foreign Other, no white man comes to save Megan and preserve her white purity. The film is less an action narrative in which Megan is to be saved than a horror film about interracial desire. While the configuration of the General Yen character as a godless heathen yet elegant mandarin is undoubtedly racist, it is canny casting: for what is General Yen but an erotic fiction of a white woman’s imagination in the first place? Orientalism is a way to read and author text into being. The text does not produce itself. The character is so ridiculous, and so intertwined with Megan’s own sexual self, that he does not really exist at all, but is a mirror or projection, a phantasm. Asther’s performance is not that of an Oriental mad villain, but an impression of the white imagination. The on-screen prohibition of sexual contact between actors of different races belies a thematic fascination with miscegenation.

"Serve the People Film Night: Short Films from the Movement" at the Interference Archive

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Interference Archive in Brooklyn to peruse Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York, an exhibit of cultural artifacts produced within the Asian American movement. The items date from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The exhibit was put together by Ryan Wong, a former curator at the Museum of Chinese in America, and was culled from MoCA collections, the A/P/A Collections at NYU, and various private collections. It offers a chance to learn more about this under-documented history and allowed me to reflect upon how much Asian American lives have (or haven’t) changed politically, aesthetically, and socially in the past thirty years.

The exhibit is attentive to the multimodal ways activists communicated with each other and fostered relationships with the broader community: there are the traditional political tracts, photographs, newspapers, and magazines, but also buttons, protest signs, drawings, and musical recordings. The material trace left by the movement is impressive, but it is merely evidence of the more vital, physical means by which these folks organized for change: in person, in space. While the Internet has undoubtedly opened up vast avenues for connection and conversation, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like for these political intimacies to occur in the flesh. A gathering spot like the vibrant Basement Workshop on Elizabeth Street seems all but impossible today in post-recession Manhattan.

Notable also was the movement’s occupation of the public sphere, from the protest marches over the police beating of Peter Yew in 1975 to the multiday renegade street fairs providing community services in Chinatown; organizers publicized the event by driving through the narrow streets, announcing details via bullhorn (!). Complementing the use of physical space was the open acknowledgement of the laboring body in those spaces; people identified, across racial lines, as workers. The deep working class roots of the Asian American movement was the most striking aspect of the exhibit and something I will return to in a moment.

The archives also suggest that the movement also carved necessary public spaces out of privatized ones. Wong has displayed a number of flyers from college and university events which showcase the breadth of topics that once stood under the rubric “Asian American.” I was surprised to see that student groups held informal conferences featuring racially diverse speakers on various platforms from Third World Feminism to Black Power to antiwar work. These gatherings were voluntarily attended by students and were hosted at – but were not of – academic institutions. They are a far cry from the university-sponsored events populated by academics that are the norm today, and raise questions about the future sites of Asian American activism in the neoliberal university.

In the arts, tales of racial oppression and calls for interracial solidarity were expressed, without irony, through the lyrics of folk groups like A Grain in the Sand (listen to “A Wandering Chinaman” on the exhibit’s iPod) or the postmodern jazz experimentation of Fred Ho. The earnestness of these artists was alienating for a moment; I had forgotten how effective a political tool music had been in the past. How and why have popular music forms become so neutered from contemporary politics? We can point to some (only some) hip-hop, but what’s keeping other genres from touching upon issues other than love and partying? And what new forms would it take?

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Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at the Interference Archive has made the rounds amongst AAWW bloggers, notably here and here. While Esther Wang noted that “the mood inside the gallery was more 30-year college reunion than political education session” at the exhibit’s November opening, I’m happy to report that the exhibit has grown to attract a younger, broader crowd and has been extended until March 23.

This new energy was evident at Serve the People Film Night on January 14, a screening of short films produced during the Asian American Movement. The conversation afterward, moderated by the exhibit’s curator, Ryan Wong, and film programmer Chi-Hui Yang, opened up a space for face-to-face public dialogue that distinguished physical spaces of the movement, like the Basement Workshop or renegade Chinatown Street Fairs, from online conversations on blogs and social media or enclosed university classrooms.

The short films screened were Wong Sinsaang (1971) by Eddie Wong; Manzanar (1972) by Robert Nakamura; Cruisin’ J-town (1974) by Duane Kubo; …I Told You So (1973) by Alan Kondo; and excerpts from Spikes to Spindles (1976) by Christine Choy and Fall of the I-Hotel (1983) by Curtis Choy. Wong introduced the screening, and Yang and framed these films as attempts to self-consciously create an Asian American aesthetics. In the past few decades, scholars and critics such as Lisa Lowe and Yen Le Espiritu have asked us to be attentive to the ways in which the movement was propelled by a masculinist, heterosexist cultural nationalism, negating other ways of defining “Asian American” in favor of a unitary ideal. Despite that, the films also remind us that class awareness was an essential organizing rubric for the Asian American movement: Asian Americans in the films repeatedly express their alliance with blacks and Latinos via shared residential and class segregation and their status as racial others. Wong Sinsaang is a study of the director’s toiling laundryman father; poet Lawson Fusao Inada, in …I Told You So, surprises us with a primarily Chicano social milieu; the artists and musicians in Kubo and Kondo’s films admit they expect to be poor; and cross-racial labor alliances imbue the struggles for rights in Spikes to Spindles and Fall of the I-Hotel with tremendous energy and power. It was no mistake nor accident that Reagan and the neoliberal private sector would assiduously destroy these modes of sociability in the years to come.

The films show us that the Asian American movement saw not just interracial and inter-ethnic solidarities, but inter-generational understandings as well. They feature young Asian American activists, dream-seekers professing deep confusion about their identities, who have their sincerity matched by radical, fiery elders giving voice to their experiences of racial oppression. Despite the linguistic and cultural disconnect between generations, the films suggest that the Asian American movement would not have happened without mutual support between the generations.

This concept was tested in multiple ways in the public discussion following the screening. It was heartwarming to see so many different generations – from older folks originally part of the movement, to bespectacled graduate students, to the timorous and college-aged – speaking freely in a non-institutional setting about the history and potentiality of Asian American identities. Nearly everyone who spoke included some disclosure about their parents’ immigration history or their experiences growing up in majority white or majority Asian environments, suggesting the extent to which for many, to be “Asian American” is not merely a theoretical exercise but remains rooted in the awareness of being materially situated in a particular time, space, and place.

Many young people spoke, in particular, of the marked difference between West Coast and East Coast Asian American communities as evidenced by the films. Instead of seeing the activists of the 1970s as our forebears, they seemed to be peers to many of us younger folks in that New York audience. Although the activists of the Asian American Movement could have been our parents, they were decidedly not. Rather, like them, our experience of being Asian in America is partially defined by moments of cultural distance from more recently immigrated parents. On the East Coast, the influx of Asian immigrants and refugees of recent decades has necessitated that the Asian American movement continually renew itself, repeating the anxieties and disidentifications (the word of the night) of an earlier era. Many in the audience noted these parallel struggles.

There were fissures, too, between the older generation, American-born and hungering for Sixties-style activism, and the current generation of millenials, the children of the post-1965 professional managerial class. Although we only briefly interrogated the incontrovertible fictiveness of “Asian America” in the first place, there seemed to be a general understanding of the limitations of assuming a coherent Asian American identity. The most pressing issue, to me, was the juxtaposition between the working-class consciousness of the originary movement and the growing embourgeoisement of the current generation of young Asian Americans. Many young Asian Americans today do not anchor their racial identities alongside Latinos and blacks, but through lived experiences with white middle-class lifestyles. (This is not to speak for everybody, or to critique anybody, but to acknowledge the changing referents by which many Asian Americans are forming their racial identities.) Given these shifting circumstances, the exhibit and screening allowed us to ask: what forms should future activism take? How can this new generation of largely -- but not uniformly -- middle class, college-educated digital natives learn from and continue the work of the Asian American movement?