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Upcoming Events Educational and Cultural Programs Thursday, Decemeber 2, 2004
The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative, the German Studies Department, and the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures will present a trilingual reading by acclaimed German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada and her English translator, Susan Bernofsky.
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960
and educated at Waseda University, and now lives in Hamburg,
Germany, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She
made her debut as a writer with "Missing Heels," which was awarded
the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991. In 1993 she received the
prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Japan's equivalent of a Booker or a
Pulitzer, for "The Bridegroom Was a Dog." And in 1996 she won the
Adalbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign
writers for their contributions to German culture. She has also
received the Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg (1990) and
the Lessing Prize (1994). She is currently writer in residence at
New York University. Susan Bernofsky, Assistant Professor of German at Bard College, is a distinguished translator from the German. Among her authors are Robert Walser, Ludwig Harig, Peter Szondi, and Gregor von Rezzori. Last year she received honorable mention for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize for her translation of Harig’s “The Trip to Bordeaux.” Yoko Tawada and Susan Bernofsky will read selections from several of Tawada’s works.
This event is open to the
public free of charge and will take place at Wesleyan University's
Center for East Asian Studies Gallery, 343 Washington Terrace,
Middletown, on Wednesday, December
2,
2004 at 4:30 p.m. Past Events Monday, November 1, 2004 Martin F. Manalansan IV, Lecture Professor Manalansan of University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign will give a lecture entitled: "Fenced-out
Lives: Queers of Color and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in New York
City".
lecture at 4:30 pm at the
Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies April 14, 2004 Lok Siu, Lecture
Professor Lok Siu of New York University will give a lecture
entitled: "Queen of Chinese Diaspora: Performing Race, Gender, and
Nation".
April 10, 2004
*Fugitive Pedagogy: A re-examination of the way we conceptualize the space, history, and identities of the "immigrants" vs. "refugees". *One-Woman Shows: Two collections of monologues, one dealing with Filipino immigrant experiences and the other with women of color in America. *The development of Chinatowns in Yokohama, Japan and London, England *How the consumption of Japanese food in the United States after the 1960s reflects the way Americans think about Japan and Japanese Americans. *Japanese immigration to Hawaii *The international matchmaking industry and its effects on Filipinas in America Student Conference: 10:00
am - 4:00pm
Thien-bao Thus Phi was born in Saigon , Viet Nam and raised in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis. He is the undefeated Slam champion of the Macalester Cultural House Poetry Slam, where the Grand Prize is named after him. Bao Phi is also published in various literary magazines and anthologies, including the Def Poetry Jam Anthology. He will appear in the 3rd season of HBO's DEF Poetry Jam. He has performed and taught workshops at numerous rallies, universities, and community organizations around the nation. Giles Lung-Hwa Li came into the world in 1978 in Boston as the son of two Chinese immigrants. He attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in public affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He also serves on the staff of the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth in Boston. He formed the Asian American spoken word duo re:verse with Leah Taguba in 2000; they dropped their debut CD Regarding Verse in early 2002. His first chapbook of poetry, The Only Poet Left is Mei, was published in 2001. Performance: 8:00pm-10:00pm SamulNori, Korean Drum
Ensemble Co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts, the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, and the Music Department.
February 4, 2004 Poetry reading at the Russell House and lecture at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, "Only What We Could Carry: A presentation regarding the WWII Japanese American internment experience." Lawson Fusao Inada, poet
Lecture at 4:30 pm at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Poetry Reading at 8:00 pm at the Russell House Co-sponsored by the The Russell House, Wesleyan Writing Program, The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Center for the Americas, and Center for African American Studies.
March 31, 2004 Joshua Roth, Lecture Professor Joshua Roth of Mount Holyoke College will give a lecture entitled: "Mean Spirited or Civic Minded? Japanese Brazilian Croquet in Sao Paulo's Public Spaces".
Lecture at 8:00 pm at the Mansfield
Freeman Center for East Asian Studies November 9, 2003 Regie Cabico, spoken word poet
"A
whirlwind of comedic timing & brilliant spoken word!" Location: World Music Hall, Wesleyan University Co-sponsored by the Supplemental Events Fund English Department, the Theater Department, and Wesleyan University Press.
Gallery Talk on Davison Art Center Exhibition
"Performing Images, Embodying Race" October 15, 2003
The speakers are prominent authors of scholarly books on related topics. Robert G. Lee is an Associate Professor of American Civilization at Brown University and the author of Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Temple University Press, 1999). An Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Mari Yoshihara is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2003). The talk will take place at 7 P.M.; the gallery will be open from 12-8 P.M. that day. Admission is free of charge.
The exhibition will be on view from October 15 through December 12 (closed November 26-30). Gallery hours are Tuesday-Sunday, 12-4 P.M. The Davison Art Center is located at 301 High Street in Middletown, Connecticut. For further information, phone (860) 685-2500 or visit the DAC website at www.wesleyan.edu/dac/exhb/current.html
September 16, 2003
Like the terms "Asian-American" and "jazz", this burgeoning Asian-American jazz scene cannot be easily described or pigeon-holed. It ranges from musicians incorporating traditional Asian instruments into modern improvised contexts, to Asian-American artists using jazz as a means of expressing personal, cultural, and political identity, to musicians who happen to play jazz and be Asian-Americans and are proud of the tangled historical legacies of both. It includes artists like Fred Ho, Jason Kao Hwang, Jon Jang, Jin Hi Kim, Francis Wong, Tatsu Aoki, Miya Masoaka, and many others. All individuals with different personalities, different agendas, and different music, but all artists who have stayed true to the core motivation of jazz musicians from the beginning: using the music as a means of personal expression and musical innovation. Major festivals celebrating the Asian-American
jazz scene have been held in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.
Location: World Music Hall, Wesleyan University
May 14, 2003 K. Scott Wong
The Asian/Asian American Initiative is also proud to support to the following April events! April 3, 2003 April 15, 2003 "The Making of a Movement: The Story
of the Successful Campaign for a April 19, 2003 Kate Rigg
February 1, 2003 (The start of Chinese New Year) Performance: Dragon Versus Eagle: Fred Ho and The Afro Asian Music Ensemble with Martial Artists.
Fred Ho is a one-of-a-kind revolutionary Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, political activist and leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble. Writes The New Yorker: "It's not every day that you run into a musician who joins a protean range of talents..." For two decades, he has innovated Afro Asian New American music with the musical influences of Asia and the Pacific Rim. As Larry Birnbaum writes in Down Beat: "Fred Ho's style is a genre onto itself, a pioneering fusion of free-jazz and traditional Chinese music that manages to combine truculence and delicacy with such natural ease that it sounds positively organic." The performance will feature: Fred Ho, Michael Weisberger, David Bindman (Wesleyan alumni), Warren Smith, Royal Hartigan (Wesleyan alumni and former faculty member), Taru Alexander, Wesley Brown (Wesleyan alumni) and five martial artists. September 25, 2002 Gary Okihiro is professor of international and public affairs and director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He is author of books on ethnic studies and African history, including Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (1994) and The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (2001). |
Professor
Manalansan will examine the contours of emergent practices of policing,
marketing and consumption of traditionally queers of color spaces
in New York City. Utilizing enthnographic fieldworks, he extends
Lisa Duggan's concept of "homonormativity" or the sexual
politics of neoliberalism as the background and driving forces in
new forms of governance and insidious forms of "gentrification".
As such, queers of color are in the middle of discrepant narratives
that stake out urban spaces and venues in the early twenty-first
century.
The
lecture explores the beauty contest of Chinese in Central America
and Panama as a microcosm of the larger diaspora. As a site
where difference is performed and negotiated, the beauty contest
elucidates the various contradictions, tensions, and conflicts
within and among the different Chinese communities of this region.
Situating the beauty contest in historical context, the paper
also shows how localization of transnational processes is shifting
not only the meaning of Chineseness but also the terms of diasporic
Chinese belonging.
This
day-long series of presenters and panels will feature topics such
as:
Thunderous
and engrossing, the intricate rhythms of SamulNori have entranced
audiences around the world. Accompanied by dancers whose movements
are accented by flame-like paper streamers suspended from their
hats, these four percussion players perform their unique and intoxicating
rhythms with impeccable precision and will guide you on a journey
through the colors, sounds, and movements of traditional Korean
music and dance. 
Lawson
Fusao Inada, winner of the 1994 American Book Award for Legends
from the Camp and Oregon State Poet in 1991, is a significant
figure in Asian American poetry and literature. He has received
a number of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts. His poetry spans from his personal experiences in a
Japanese American internment camp during WW II to tributes to
well known jazz musicians. Mr. Inada was featured on
"CBS Sunday Morning." He was one of twenty-one poets
to be honored at the White House, for a "Salute to Poetry
and American Poets."
In
many public parks and sports centers that dot the vast undulating
concrete surface of Sao Paulo, elderly Japanese immigrants and
their descendants play "gateball" a game based on croquet
developed in Japan in 1947 and brought to Brazil in 1979. The
City of Sao Paulo offers the public a variety of recreational
facilities to support activities with broad appeal such as soccer,
basketball, volleyball, and swimming. It is more difficult to
justify the use of public spaces and funds, however, for a sport
that is practiced almost exclusively by a single ethnic group.
Japanese Brazilian historical memory partially motivates
their enthusiasm for gateball, an enthusiasm that propels them
into public spaces. Other strategies justify their use of public
spaces for private purposes. This investigation provides a revealing
perspective not only on the social and cultural lives of Japanese
Brazilians, but also on their peculiar position within larger
context of ethnic relations in Sao Paulo and a transnational Japanese
diaspora.
Winner
of top prizes at numerous National Poetry Slams and a three-time
recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for
Poetry and Performance Art, Regie Cabico is a Filipino-American
spoken word artist who has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, PBS'
In the Life Series, and MTV's Free Your Mind Spoken Word Tour.
Drawing
on a wide range of print media, the exhibition offers a critical
view of how images of real and imagined Chinese, Japanese, and
Asian American performance supported racial ideology.
The
creative music known as "jazz" is universally recognized
as one of the great artistic contributions of American culture.
From its original roots in the music of African-Americans, Africa
and Western Europe, so called "jazz" has incorporated
music and musicians from around the world. One of the most interesting
developments of the past 25 years has been the emergence of a generation
of Asian-Americans who bring a new set of cultural perspectives
and musical influences to the music.
Wesleyan's
festival will be a modest, but an exciting addition, and a fitting
musical event for an institution widely respected for its contributions
to bringing world music and jazz to a university setting.
This festival will feature the Far Side Band, led by one of the
most celebrated performer and composer in the Asian-American jazz
scence, Jason Kao Hwang: and SpiderMonkey Strings, led by one of
the most acclaimed young Asian-American voices, Taylor Ho Bynum
(also presently a graduate student in composition at Wesleyan),
with special guest, Wesleyan's own master vibraphonist Jay Hoggard.
In addition, each band features some of the most creative improvising
musicians on the east coast!
Composer
Fred Ho and his Afro Asian Music Ensemble celebrate their 20th anniversary
year in a return to Wesleyan University. This performance will feature
Ho's innovative music as well as a fantastic display of Chinese
martial arts choreography. 