EVENT: 10/24 "Stars, Earth, and Coral: Pacific Entanglements and Futures Beyond the Human"

We are delighted to announce this Department of Asian American Studies roundtable event, "Stars, Earth, and Coral: Pacific Entanglements and Futures Beyond the Human" featuring Aimee Bahng, Nicole K. Furtado, and Frances Tran. The roundtable presentations will address how we can reimagine futures when we center Pacific, Oceanic, and Indigenous histories, aesthetics, and ways of knowing. It will be held on Thursday, October 24th @ 4pm in Hart Hall 3201. Dinner will be provided so please come and then stick around for some informal conversation with our guests! Free and open to the public.

 

 

 

This roundtable will be followed by a special event at the Mondavi Center. "Asian futures, without Asians" is a multimedia performance lecture by artist Astria Suparak, which asks: “What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?” Tickets here.

 

 

 

 

More information below: 

The Department of Asian American Studies presents a roundtable presentation on how we can reimagine futures when we center Pacific, Oceanic, and Indigenous histories, aesthetics, and ways of knowing. Such a reimagining will raise questions and topics such as: going beyond the human in imagining the future; critiquing settler colonial practices and their relationships to capitalism; interrogating the blindspots within Asian American studies in relation to projects of reimagining the future. The panel will feature three leading scholars (bios below), who will present brief papers followed by conversation, Q&A, and dinner.

 

The roundtable will be followed by a special event at the Mondavi Center. "Asian futures, without Asians" is a multimedia performance lecture by artist Astria Suparak, which asks: “What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?” Part critical analysis, part reflective essay and sprinkled throughout with humor, justified anger, and informative morsels, this hour-long illustrated lecture examines nearly 60 years of American science fiction cinema through the lens of Asian appropriation and whitewashing. Tickets here.

 

Bios for Roundtable Speakers

 

Aimee Bahng is Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies as well as American Studies at Pomona College. Author of the award-winning book Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018), she has also co-edited the Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies volume, with the Feminist Keywords Collective, as well as a special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies on Transpacific Futurities with Christine Mok. Her current book project, Settler Environmentalism and Pacific Resurgence, engages environmental law’s settler colonial history and points to alternative models of planetary accountability that highlight ongoing Native Pacific environmental movements.

 

Dr. Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado is a Kanaka Maoli writer and Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the History of Art and Visual Culture department. Her research builds on the methodology of moʻolelo, or Kānaka Maoli storytelling, as a way to (re)imagine Indigenous futurities that move us beyond a “here-and-now” temporality and that which supports critical fabulations of Native relationality. Her work aims at centering how Indigenous digital arts restore kinship relations, develop land-based pedagogies that challenge the settler commercialization of land and landscapes, and emphasize the need for ethical networks of relations for how we encounter social technologies into the future. Nicole’s academic and creative writing has been published in Trans-Indigenous Science Fictions, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Beyond Mimesis: Aesthetic Experience in Uncanny Valleys, and The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.

Frances Tran is a Lecturer of English at Rollins College. Her research and teaching interests focus on Asian American and multiethnic literature and the genres of science and speculative fiction. She has published pieces in American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body.  Her current book project, Sensational Futures: On Asian Racialization and Speculative Aesthetics (Duke UP), examines discourses of Asian futurity and the multisensory worlds of Asian American speculative fiction.  

 

Bio for Mondavi Center Performance

 

Astria Suparak is an artist and curator based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism, feminisms, and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. In recent years, Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; she has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, in New York. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award.

 

Reach out to Mark Jerng with any questions:

mcjerng@ucdavis.edu