UCLA Asian American Studies Department

First Light: Settler Colonial Science and Kanaka ʻŌiwi Resistance at Mauna a Wākea
2023-03-13 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Who’s ready for this series of research talks?!🤩 First up is Dr. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar’s presentation on Settler Colonial Science and Kanaka ʻŌiwi Resistance at Mauna a Wākea. Learn more about decolonization, self-determination, and so much more! Come to ask him about his past research on social movements in and beyond Hawai’i!
Stay tuned for more on this series of research talks on our Instagram, Facebook and website (relaunch coming soon 👀)
When: March 13th 2023 📅
Where: Rolfe Hall 2125 📍
Time: 2pm- 3:30pm 🕑

Book Launch for "The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives"
2023-03-16 12:30 - 13:45 | Online via Zoom
Please join us for the virtual UCLA Book Launch for The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives! The 38 chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. This book launch will feature presentations from 8 of the volume’s authors.

Check out the QR codes on the flyer for the Zoom registration info and open-access volume link! Alternatively, you can visit https://tinyurl.com/RoutledgeHandbookRegistration to register and https://tinyurl.com/ReadtheHandbook to read.

U.S. Settler Militarism and CHamoru Survival in Guåhan
2023-03-24 14:00 - 15:30 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
The UCLA Asian American Studies Department will be hosting our second Pacific Islander Studies Research Talk by Dr. Alfred Flores:

In 1944 the US military began occupying privately owned land throughout Guåhan as part of its reinvasion strategy. The US government facilitated this process through the creation of the Land and Claims Commission (GLCC), which accelerated and legitimated the military’s condemning of these lands during World War II and the Cold War. Together, the GLCC, the “liberation” of Guåhan narrative, and the Organic Act of 1950 enabled a process of US settler militarism that resulted in the US military’s occupation of approximately 50% of all land on the island in the early 1950s. Despite these draconian policies, CHamoru land stewardship persisted through the låncho (ranch) and other forms of survival that challenged US military occupation.
Alfred Peredo Flores is an assistant professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Harvey Mudd College. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, his M.A. and B.A. degrees in Public History and History from UCR, and an A.A. degree in Liberal Arts from College of the Desert. His research and teaching focuses on Pacific Islander Studies with an emphasis in diaspora, indigeneity, labor, militarization, oral history, and settler colonialism in Micronesia. Dr. Flores’ research has appeared in Amerasia Journal, American Quarterly, Critical Ethic Studies Journal, Brill, and Oxford University Press. His forthcoming book titled, Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944-1962 (Cornell University Press), will be released in September 2023.

Never Forget: Filipinx Americans and the Anti-Martial Law Movement: A roundtable session for the 2023 Asian American Studies Conference
2023-03-31 11:45 - 13:15
Throughout Ferdinand Marcos’s 21-year reign over the Philippines, resistance movements took shape, continued, and developed alongside and against the regime. While these movements formed in opposition to the brutality of Marcos’s rule (tortures, disappearances, and killings; political corruption and crony capitalism; censorship of the press; support for and advancement of imperialist programs), they also functioned as a network of political organizing that struggled against the long legacy of colonialism and racial capitalism.
This roundtable focuses on understanding the anti-martial law movements to discuss historical revisionism, knowledge formation, and Filipinx American political organizing. This session also introduces an upcoming online exhibit of rare posters from the transnational movement against Marcos’s martial law, part of the ongoing archival process led by the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. The collection of posters and materials were collected throughout the 1970s and 1980s as part of anti-martial law political work in Los Angeles and California and transnationally in the Philippines.
Roundtable members include Xenia Tupas (Human rights activist and Migrante Los Angeles), Cathy Miraballes (Migrante Los Angeles), Joy Sales (Cal State LA, Malaya Movement Los Angeles), Josen Diaz (University of San Diego), with Karen Umemoto (Asian American Studies Center, UCLA). Moderated by Lucy Burns (UCLA).

Pacific Islander Studies Research Talk Series: Moompetam: Trans-Indigenous Recognitions and Futurities
2023-04-03 10:00 - 11:30 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
We are excited to welcome Professor Kēhaulani Vaughn for our next Pacific Islander Studies Research Talk! Her talk is entitled, “Moompetam: Trans-Indigenous Recognitions and Futurities.” See the flyer below for more information!

Book Talk: "Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations"
2023-04-05 12:00 - 15:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Please join Professor Yu Tokunaga and Chao Romero in their book talk on the new book “Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations” 📖 and his student workshop right after! 🗣Learn about new and interesting things in YRL, but make sure to RSVP before March 24th!
Where: Young Research Library (YRL) Presentation Room 📍
When: April 5th, 2023 📆
Book Talk- 12pm 🕘
Student Workshop 3-4pm 🕘
RVSP before March 24th: bit.ly/3HT82XI

Student Workshop: "Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations"
2023-04-05 15:00 - 16:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Pacific Islander Studies Research Talk Series: Pacific Cultural Performance and Social Media as ‘Digital Malae’
2023-04-10 14:30 - 16:00 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
We are excited to welcome Lisa Uperesa for our upcoming Pacific Islander Studies Research Talk! Her talk is entitled, “Pacific Cultural Performance and Social Media as ‘Digital Malae’”. Come and listen to her talk on April 10th! See flyer below for more information.

Research Talk Series: "Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Palestine and Hawai'i"
2023-04-14 14:00 - 15:30 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Joining us in another installation of our Research Talk Series is Dr. Nour Joudah, who will be talking about her research on “Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Palestine and Hawai’i.” Please refer to the flyer for more details.

Alumni Career Panel
2023-04-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Online via Zoom
Join us on April 26th 6-7:30PM on zoom for our Alumni Career Panel! You will have the opportunity to learn about the different career pathways that Asian American Studies alumni have taken themselves and be entered for a chance to win one of three Squishmallows in our raffle.

RSVP now at tinyurl.com/AASDAlumniPanel

Panelists include:

Lotay Yang | CEO, Investment Management
Trung Nguyen | AAS Professor at San Jose State
Lawrence Lipana | Anesthesiologist
Erica Yamamura | Consultant, Professor
Brian Kohaya | Master in Urban and Regional Planning

RSVP as soon as you can here or on tinyurl.com/AASDAlumniPanel.

Spring Undergraduate Check-in
2023-04-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library Main Conference Room, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Please join us on Friday, April 28th from 1-3PM in the YRL Main Conference Room for this quarter’s undergraduate check-in! It’ll be a fun day of activities (including scrapbooking, mahjong, and coloring), food, and good conversation.

RSVP today at tinyurl.com/AASDSpring2023!

Nothing Follows: A Poetry Reading and Conversation with Dr. Lan Duong
2023-05-08 15:30 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 156, 10745 Dickson Ct., Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Dr. Lan Duong will read from Nothing Follows, a collection of poetry that traces her family’s arrival to the U.S. in 1975. It narrates their resettlement as they move from Pennsylvania to California during Silicon Valley’s high-tech boom. With each city and street that the poems crisscross, the girl and those around her experience racism, objectification, and sexual violence. In marking the places that she has been, her stories map out the coordinates of a refugee girlhood, one that is spiked with brutality, joy, and longing all the same. Intermixing memoir and poetry, Nothing Follows is an accounting of everything that follows in the wake of war. UCLA Bookstore will sell books at the event.
Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oberon and Spoon River Review as well as the anthologies Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. Her debut collection of poetry, Nothing Follows, is published by Texas Tech UP.

Spring Fling: Angela Peñaredondo's "nature felt but never apprehended" Book Celebration
2023-05-09 12:30 - 14:00 | Haines Hall 110
Celebrate poet Angela Peñaredondo’s new poetry book–nature felt but never apprehended

Book Talk - "Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the 'American Dream'"
2023-05-10 17:00 - 18:30 | Haines Hall Room 220
Please join us Wed, May 10th for this book talk on “Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the ‘American Dream.'”

Information from the flyer:
“Beginning with the early development of LA’s Koreatown and culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their aftermath, Lee demonstrates how Korean Americans’ lives were shaped by patters of racial segregation and urban poverty, and legacies of anti-Asian racism and orientalism. Koreatown, Los Angeles tells the story of an American ethnic community often equated with socioeconomic achievement and assimilation, but whose experiences as racial minorities and immigrant outsiders illuminate key economic and cultural developments in the United States since 1965.”

Another Land in the Sky
2023-05-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Northwest Campus Auditorium, 350 De Neve Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
In collaboration with the UCLA Asian Pacific Coalition, we present: Another Land in the Sky! Join us on May 15th, from 5-7PM at the Northwest Campus Auditorium for a night of powerful art and community building with @jessxsnow and @treyalam. Experience live poetry, music, and cinema that will take you on a journey through Asian American resistance and the healing of collective trauma.

Free food and drinks will be provided after the show!

RSVP at tinyurl.com/2023alits or click here.

Workshop for UCLA AASD Fulbright Scholar Nguyễn Thị Minh
2023-05-18 14:00 - 15:30 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
During this workshop, participants will give feedback on Nguyễn Thị Minh’s paper entitled “Women’s Love in Antigone by Sophocles and The Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du.” The paper will be circulated one week in advance. Engaging feminist scholarship, the paper critiques how Antigone has previously been read within a Eurocentric frame and masculine model of subjectivity while Kiều has been positioned within a male-centered interpretive history in both Vietnam and the US. While Antigone is seen as “the hope” of feminism (Bonnie Honig 2013, 36) and “the occasion for a new field of human” (Judith Butler 2000, 82), Kiều’s story is viewed as conveying “a message of hope” for both the individual and the country of Vietnam (Huynh Sanh Thong 1983). Drawing on feminist philosophical reflections on love and utilizing the perspectives of women thinkers such as Maria Lugones, bell hooks, and Trinh Thi Minh-ha, the paper analyzes the possibilities of women’s love evoked by the figures of Kiều and Antigone in the two works. Highlighting the experiences of harmonious subjects who are moving beyond the private realm into the public sphere, these works offer new potentials for resistance and reflections on love. From this, the paper proposes a direction towards a “harmonious feminism” as an alternative projection for the future of feminism.

Nguyễn Thị Minh, a Fulbright research scholar in the Asian American Studies Department, UCLA, is a tenured lecturer in the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature Studies, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. Her main research interests are comparative literature, film adaptation, gender studies, and semiotics. She is at the forefront of initiatives to cultivate Gender Studies in Vietnam, and to that end has worked with the Vietnam’s Women Publishing House to build the “Women’s Book: Gender and Development” series. This series critically addresses women’s history and gender inequities, advancing a feminist agenda amidst Vietnam’s current socioeconomic development. She is also a translator, co-translator, and editor of many classical book translations in philosophy, gender, and cultural studies. She translated Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt (Knowledge Publishing House, 2020); History of Philosophy, Volume 2 by Johannes Hirschberger (co-translation, Knowledge Publishing House, 2020); Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler (Vietnam Women’s Publishing House, 2021); A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom (Vietnam Women’s Publishing House, 2022); and Key Concepts in Gender Studies by Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan (Vietnam Women’s Publishing House, 2022). She has also edited and annotated Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (Vietnam Women’s Publishing House, 2022). She won the Best Translated Book Award in Vietnam in 2022 for Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt. Regarding community services, she is the co-founder of The Ladder, a community learning space where academic knowledge is shared and made more accessible for everyone, especially the youth in Vietnam.

Airing History: Pilipino Workers Center Timeline Installation
2023-05-20 10:00 - 16:00 | Pilipino Workers Center, 153 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, 90026, United States
Participants will:

take a tour of Historic Filipinotown led by Pilipino Workers Center staff Hannah De Castro-Abinuman
meet PWC staff and learn about their current campaigns including domestic workers’ rights education and advocacy
work with artist Tala Mateo to install a timeline in the PWC office.

Please make sure to RSVP. The first 15 students to sign up will receive a transportation stipend which will be disbursed after May 20th.
The deadline to RSVP is Thursday, May 18th 5 p.m.
All participants must sign a waiver form. Please contact Professor Burns at lmburns@g.ucla.edu.

Beyond the Anti-US Base Movement: How the Corals of the Jeju Eco-Peace Movement Resist the Nations
2023-05-22 16:00 - 17:30 | 10383 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join the UCLA Center for Korean Studies on May 22 at 4PM in 10383 Bunche Hall to learn about how feminist, eco-peace movements are reshaping the politics of antimilitarist and anti-US base movements in Jeju Island (South Korea) and its connections with movements across the islands of the Pacific. Our speaker, Hyeayoung Choi, is a long-time feminist-peace activist and artist-scholar based in Jeju, currently finishing her PhD in Sociology at Jeju National University, and she will share her experiences organizing in the Jeju town of Gangjeong, a key site of militarization resistance of the Korean peninsula and the Asia Pacific region.

Launch of Never Forget Online Exhibition
2023-06-06 12:30 - 13:45 | Online via Zoom
Please join us for the launch of Never Forget, an online exhibition of archival posters and oral histories from the transnational movement against martial law in the Philippines! Make sure to register for the event at neverforgetposters.eventbrite.com or through this link!
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.

Never Forget: Art-Making Workshop
2023-09-09 13:00 - 16:00 | Robinson SPACE, 4308 Burns Ave, Los Angeles, CA, 90029, United States
Join an interactive art-making workshop centering and building on the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s digital exhibition Never Forget: Filipinx Americans and the Philippines Anti-Martial Law Movement.

Artist Mae Decena will lead an art-making process and, with scholars and activists, provide the historical and social contexts of the transnational anti-martial law movement and shed light on contemporary struggles of the people of the Philippines.

Limited number of participants- early registration is recommended! Free signup at https://bit.ly/NeverForgetRSVP.

Department Open House
2023-09-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Rolfe Hall 3336
Looking to meet up with old friends from your Asian Am classes, or make new ones for the upcoming year? Stop by the Asian American Studies Department Open House between 12-2PM on Wed Sept. 27 (week 0) at Rolfe 3336! Free food and drinks will be served at the event.

Above and Below the Ground
2023-10-16 15:00 - 18:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join AASD and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies for the screening of Above and Below the Ground directed by Emily Hong, with a discussion to follow! This documentary follows Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors as they lead Myanmar’s first environmental movement against the construction of the Myitsone Dam. The film explores how music, community organizing, and women’s leadership can empower ordinary people in challenging authoritarianism. Above and Below Ground is a simulcast screening at 15 universities across the US, with UCLA’s located at 10383 Bunche Hall.

Halo-Halo Mixer
2023-12-06 15:30 - 17:00 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join the Asian American Studies Department and Samahang Pilipino on December 6th for some Halo-halo while learning more about the Pilipino Studies Minor as well as how to get involved in Pilipinx for Palestine. This event is also sponsored by the Pilipino Transfer Student Partnership, Kappa Psi Epsilon, Anakbayan at UCLA, Asian Pacific Coalition, and Students for Justice in Palestine!
RSVP here: https://bit.ly/Halo-HaloMix

Anti-Asian Violence Graduate Writing Workshop
2023-12-15
Graduate Writing Workshop on Anti-Asian Violence CFP! Deadline December 15th for abstracts. To submit and for more information please visit: https://tinyurl.com/aav-grad-workshop

Winter 2024 Undergraduate Check-in
2024-02-20 11:00 - 13:00 | Young Research Library Presentation Room
Join us for the 2024 Winter Check-in brought to you by the Asian American Studies Department Undergraduate Leadership Committee! We’ll have free food, a raffle for prizes, and good company. Hear about our Spring and Summer Sessions course offerings and talk with faculty.
RSVP here or through http://tinyurl.com/AASDW24Checkin.
We hope to see you there!

Book Talk: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community
2024-03-03 14:00 - 16:00 | West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple, 2003 Corinth Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90025, United States
Please join us on Sunday, March 3rd at the West LA Buddhist Temple for a Book Talk and Signing with author Tritia Toyota for her b! RSVP with the QR or through this link. Read below for more on Tritia Toyota and the discussants for the event:
Book: Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020 by author Tritia Toyota
https://tupress.temple.edu/books/intimate-strangers
Book description
At the end of the twentieth century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland.
In Intimate Strangers, shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the United States, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship.
Intimate Strangers charts the experiences of shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the United States, their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning. The Nikkei community (Americans of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States) has been transformed by the inclusion of shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging. Intimate Strangers is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.

Speaker
Tritia Toyota is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and is a Research Scholar at the Asian American Studies Center with the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging. She also wrote and produced the documentary Asian America. She is a recipient of the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association.

Discussants
Valerie Matsumoto is the UCLA George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress and Community and a Professor of History and Asian American Studies. She is the author of “City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950” and “Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982” and co-editor of the essay collection “Over the Edge: Remapping the American West”. She is the recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, among several teaching and mentoring awards from faculty colleagues and students at UCLA.

Yasuko Takezawa is a Visiting Professor serving as the Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations with UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for 2023-2024. She is also a Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, which she retired from in 2023. She is president of the Japanese Association of Migration Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). After her award-winning first book on the transformation of ethnicity among Japanese Americans which focused on their war-time incarceration and redress, her research interests shifted from ethnicity to race. Over the past two decades, Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects. She has earned a reputation as the leading scholar in race studies in Japan.

Books will be on sale at event for book signing by author after program. Prefer payment by credit card – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover.

Sponsored by:
Japanese Institute of Sawtelle
Sawtelle Japantown Association
West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple
West Los Angeles United Methodist Church
Asian American Studies Center – University of California Los Angeles
UCLA Asian American Studies Department
UCLA Nikkei Student Union

The Manicurist's Daughter: A Memoir Reading with Susan Lieu
2024-04-04 17:00 - 18:20 | MS 5200, 520 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Please join us in welcoming writer and performance artist Susan Lieu, who will read from her new book, The Manicurist’s Daughter–an emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery. The Manicurist’s Daughter is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American author, playwright, and performer who tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. A daughter of nail salon workers, she took her award-winning autobiographical solo show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother on a ten-city national tour, with sold-out premieres and accolades from the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and American Theatre. Eight months pregnant, she premiered her sequel, OVER 140 LBS, at ACT Theatre. The Manicurist’s Daughter is her first book.

Starry Field: a Memoir of Lost History
2024-05-02 17:00 - 18:30 | Rolfe 3126, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join the UCLA Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group in discussing Margaret Lee’s newest book Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History. Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History is a poignant memoir by journalist Margaret Juhae Lee, who sets out on a search for her family’s history lost to the darkness of Korea’s colonial decades, and contends with the shockwaves of violence that followed them over four generations and across continents. Combining investigative journalism, oral history, and archival research, Margaret reveals the truth about the grandfather she never knew. What she found is that Lee Chul Ha, her grandfather who left her grandmother and two young sons in 1936, was not a source of shame; he was a student revolutionary imprisoned in 1929 for protesting the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea. He was a hero—and eventually honored as a Patriot of South Korea almost 60 years after his death. But reclaiming her grandfather’s legacy, in the end, isn’t what Margaret finds the most valuable. It is through the series of three long-form interviews with her grandmother that Margaret finally finds a sense of recognition she’s been missing her entire life. A story of healing old wounds and the reputation of an extraordinary young man, Starry Field bridges the tales of two women, generations and oceans apart, who share the desire to build family in someplace called home.
Location: UCLA Rolfe 3126
When: May 2nd, 2024 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM (reception to follow)
Margaret Juhae Lee is an Oakland-based writer and a former literary editor of The Nation magazine. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. She is also a Tin House scholar, and has been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, the Anderson Center, and Mineral School. In 2020, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha. Her articles, reviews, and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and The Rumpus.
Purchase a copy of the book here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/starry-field-a-memoir-of-lost-history-margaret-juhae-lee/20141983?ean=9781685890933

No-No Boy in Concert at UCLA
2024-05-02 18:00 - 19:30 | UCLA Fowler Amphitheater, 308 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
Ticket reservations are required. Doors open at 5:30PM. Concert will start at 6PM.

Please bring a blanket to sit in the grass area to enjoy the live concert!
No-No Boy is an immersive concert experience that illuminates hidden Asian American histories through folk songs, sound pieces, live projections, and storytelling. NPR Music has hailed it as “one of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect… An act of revisionist subversion.” Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War as well as many other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville-born songwriter and scholar Julian Saporiti has transformed his years of doctoral study into an innovative project that bridges a divide between art and scholarship. This performance will celebrate No-No Boy’s third full-length LP EMPIRE ELECTRIC released by the Smithsonian Folkways label.
Sounds contain histories and prophecies. If you listen closely, there are winding tales to be found in a string brushed by a handmade bow, worlds to be uncovered in the trill of a bird about to take flight, and truths to be reckoned with in the grain of an unknown voice. This is the revelation at the core of Empire Electric, the third album by No-No Boy, and its songs that examine narratives of imperialism, identity, and spirituality. It tells stories rooted in years of research and relationship-building, made vibrant and profound through a rich congregation of instrumental, environmental, and electronically manipulated sounds from Asia and America. Every single sound, from the gracious swell of a pedal steel to the warbling pluck of a koto, becomes a part of the poetic recasting of shared post-colonial trauma and the startling joys that can be wrung out of that hardship.
https://www.nonoboyproject.com
Dr. Julian Saporiti was born and raised in Nashville, TN. He enjoys making music, encountering the arts, and exploring the outdoors. He currently lives in Portland, OR with his wife and collaborator Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti.

A Conversation with No-No Boy
2024-05-23 14:30 - 15:15 | Online via Zoom
No-No Boy illuminates hidden Asian American histories through folk songs, sound pieces, live projections, and storytelling. NPR Music has hailed it as “one of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect… An act of revisionist subversion.” Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War as well as many other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville-born songwriter and scholar Julian Saporiti has transformed his years of doctoral study into an innovative project that bridges a divide between art and scholarship. No-No Boy’s third full-length LP EMPIRE ELECTRIC was recently released by the Smithsonian Folkways label.
Join us on May 23rd from 2:30-3:15 PM via Zoom for a conversation with No-No Boy! This conversation is part of the course “Asian and Asian American Classical Reception” taught by Professor Kelly Nguyen (Department of Classics) who will moderate the discussion with No-No Boy on the themes of fragmentation and creation. Students in the course will have engaged with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and the poetry of Hoa Nguyen and Vi Khi Nao. Their conversation will discuss the legacy of the Vietnam War and the concept and consequences of the myth of Western Civilization and the false binaries between East and West, especially as crafted and wielded by imperialism. No-No Boy will also share his music and experience with diaspora. This event is open to the public.
Scan the QR Code or visit this link to register for the event!
