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?
