Indie Rock Band Johnny HIFI performance and workshop on "Passion and Profession"

Panel Discussion: 8-9 PM
Performance: 9-10 PM , Opening by Wesleyan's own APPLES FOR IMMIGRANTS

Asian American Indie Rock band, Johnny Hi-Fi, will perform and lead a workshop on "Passion and Profession". One critic calls them the "Radiohead of the boy-band generation". Another reviewer created for them a new genre "Asian-Britpop". Their fans simply call them the "American Coldplay". They have toured all over the US and Asia. All of band members are full time professionals such as doctor, IT ceo, graphic designer etc., as well as members of Johnny HiFi. They will come and share their music but also hold a workshop on their experiences as both band members and full time professionals, the pressures they faced from their parents and peers, and how they currently maintain this tenuous balance between working full time and expanding their creative and artistic talents through music. The discussion will begin at 8 and the performance at 9 pm. Wesleyan's own Apples for Immigrants will open Johnny HiFi's performance with a fifteen minute set.

Begin your Saturday evening with good music and good conversation as musicians share their personal experiences.

Location: 200 Church St.
DATE: April 28, 2007

Past Events 

Chinese Lunar New Year

Abigail Washburn

Saturday, March 31, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$12 A, $10 B, $6 C Online ticketing now available!

Songwriter and recording artist Abigail Washburn brings her unique blend of Appalachian mountain music and haunting Chinese melodies to Wesleyan for an evening of music, history and crossing cultural boundaries. Merging her love of China with her own American roots music background, Washburn sings and plays folk songs and original material in both Chinese and English. Washburn comments,"...I want to keep going to China and living a creative existence. I want to learn more about Chinese folk traditions, so I can integrate them into my music and continue to be a part of the development of a more universal language." Co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts

Thursday, December 7
Singing the Way Home: A Personal Research into Hokkien Dialect Songs
Lecture
Ang Gey Pin, performer

Raised in Singapore in a time when the use of dialects was strictly restricted, theater artist Ang Gey Pin describes how she searched for songs in her family's Chinese Hokkien dialect. In this talk, Ms. Pin emphasizes the connection between imagination and memory, linking the process of recovering cultural heritage to her own creative experience as a performer. Ms. Pin is a former member of the Work Center of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, and this fall she is premiering her new performance By the Way for Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Outside the Box series.

Location: Mansfield Freeman Center For East Asian Studies
Phone (860) 685-2330 for more information
Time: 4:30PM
Refreshments

Friday, December 1
Presentations of Last Summer's  Research Conducted by the  Recipients of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative Summer Research Grant.

Cecil Apostol, Kim Baskin, Lisa Cunningham, Sarah Fajardo, Ben Fash, Nicole Gentile, Nick Nauman, Annie Park, Jean Park, Joshua Stevens, Nhi Ha Truong, Jeffrey Walker, and Dan Zolli

Each student will have 10 minutes to present their research. Click here to visit their executive summaries and papers. Reception to follow!

Click here, to see if you are eligible and are interested in applying for this year's summer research grant.

Location: Mansfield Freeman Center For East Asian Studies
Seminar Room
Contact: Stanford M. Forrester(860) 685-3425 for more information
Time: 2:15-5:00PM with a reception to follow

Thursday, November 9
Asian Migrations and Intimacy
Nayan Shah, Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative

Professor Shah's lecture, drawn from his new research project, pursues the history of migration of men from the province of Punjab in British colonial India to Canada and the United States from 1890-1950. Court cases illuminate how regulatory systems shape subjectivity, social dynamics, and categories of race and sexuality in 20th-century North America. Nayan Shah, author of Contagious Divides:Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, is currently teaching a course at Wesleyan on the history of interracial  and intercultural intimacy generated by the migrations from Asia in the Americas.

Location: Mansfield Freeman Center For East Asian Studies
Phone (860) 685-2330 for more information
Time: 4:30PM
Refreshments

Friday, November 10

Asia, Asian Americans and African Americans through the prism of the Cold War militarism, social movements and gender.

 
The forum will explore American wars of the twentieth century and their impact on the Asia/Pacific region and on Asian migration and Diasporas.  We will explore how the history of wartime service, dislocation, and devastation generated the terrain of intimate collaborations, traumatic exchanges and political transformations for Asian peasants, soldiers, entertainers and workers; Asian American migrants and refugees; and African American soldiers and activists. These subjects of wartime mobilization, dislocation, and resistance are often considered subsidiary to the popularly dramatized and conventional epic history of military and political power of competing empire-states and nation-states, the United States, Japan, China and the Soviet Union, that have contended for dominance in the Pacific Rim.  This forum will engage how research on trauma, intimacy, and cross-racial and cross-cultural collaboration that offers fresh perspectives on everyday politics and social affiliations of Asians, Asian Americans and African Americans that have been proximate and enmeshed through the Pacific Wars.  These projects help us in exploring contemporary political and social movements that circulate transnationally in the Asian diaspora and African diaspora in the era of the U.S. war on terror and the continuing militarization and war of the twentieth-first century in Asia.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Americas, the Center for African American Studies, and the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies.
 
Chair:                     

Scott Wong, Williams College
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Ohio State University, Revolutionary Travelers:  Peoples Diplomacy, Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism
Daniel Widener, University of California San Diego, "They Did Not Like White People Very Much: the Korean War in the African American anticolonial imagination"
Grace M. Cho, City University of New York College of Staten Island , Traumatizing the Discourse of Honorary Whiteness:  Assimilation as an Effect of War

Comment:     
Daniel Kim, Brown University
Renee Romano, Wesleyan University

Location: Center for African American Studies
Time:2-4 pm with reception to follow
Contact: Stanford M. Forrester (860) 685-3425 <<or>> bottlerockets_99@yahoo.com

San Jose Taiko

Friday, September 29, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Tickets: $19 A, $17 B, $6 C

The music of San Jose Taiko weaves traditional Japanese sounds with the beat of world rhythms. By fusing ritual drumming with contemporary jazz, Latin and African rhythms, these performers express the beauty and harmony of the human spirit through the voice of Taiko, while at the same time astounding audiences with their power, energy and precision. Co-sponsored by the Freeman Asian/Asian-American Initiative and the Office of the President.

For information please visit the Center For the Arts website.

"Exuberant, appealing and meticulously drilled, San Jose Taiko seem to genuinely love performing."
-San Jose Mercury News

 

Location: Buddhist House, 7pm
Sponsored by the Buddhist House, The Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative, The Film House, & Bayit.

Monday, February 20th
Film: From A Silk Cocoon (Directed by Satsuki Ina & Casey Peek)

From a Silk Cocoon is a true story based on the letters exchanged between a young Japanese American couple, Itaru and Shizuko Ina, while imprisoned in two separate American prison camps during World War II. Labled as "disloyal" and deemed "enemy aliens dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States," they struggle to prove their innocence and fight deportation.

Center for Film Studies, Screening Room 100
Time:8:00PM

Thursday, February 23rd
Lecture
The Columbus Exchange: Trans-Pacific Confrontation, 16th to 20th Century by Distinguished Visiting Scholar Evelyn Hu-DeHart

The Columbus Exchange usually refers to social relationships and cultural interactions that developed between Europe and America after 1492. Professor Hu-DeHart proposes to shift the center of this phenomenon by locating its focal point in the Pacific, to examine movements and exchanges of peoples, ideas, and cultures across the Pacific, from Asia to Latin America, from the colonial period to the present day.  This lecture uncovers much of what is hidden, discovers what is unknown, while reconstructing and reinterpreting some of the familiar.

Co-sponsored with the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian
Location: Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies
Time: 4:30 PM
Refreshments

Saturday, January 28, 2006
Chinese New Year Celebration 2006

January 28, 2006 is the traditional Chinese New Year Eve. This celebration is filled with cultural cuisines, traditional performances, and an interactive Q&A session. Since the Chinese New Year is also celebrated in Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore, other student groups to will participate in this big festival! This year’s program highlights include: Korean drumming, a Fashion Show of traditional costume, and a brief description of lion-head dance.  Every guest with receive a Hong Bao—red pocket (another New Year tradition)—which will be used for a raffle.

Location:MPR Campus Center
Time: , 6-9PM
Sponsored by the Chinese Student Association (CSA), Taiwanese Cultural Society (TCS), Vietnamese Student Group, Singaporean Student Group, Korean Student Association (KSA), Chinese House, AAA House, and the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative

Tuesday, October 25th & 26th
Open House
Host by Distinguished Visiting Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart

An invitation to Wesleyan students to meet Evelyn Hu-Dehart,  Distinguished visiting professor for the Freeman Asian/ Asian American Initiative.

Professor Hu-DeHart is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, and Director of the Center for Ethnicity at Brown University.  During Academic Year 2005-2006, she will be visiting at Wesleyan as a part of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative.  She invites Wesleyan students to an Open House on the following days to meet her and find out more about the seminar she will be teaching in the Spring on "Diaspora and Transnationalism."

Tuesday, October 25, 4-6 PM/Center for the Americas, Room 3
Wednesday, October 26, 2-4 PM/ The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

If you can't make any of these days, please email Professor Hu-DeHart for an appointment some other day. Email: ehudehart@wesleyan.edu

Tuesday, November 1st
Presentation of Summer Research Papers

All Wesleyan students, faculty, & staff are invited to hear the presentations of last year's recipients of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative Summer Research Grant. The presenters are: Mara Baldwin, Tara Fickle, Luling Osofsky, Ian Rios, Arijit Sen, Andrea Siu, Alex Weber and Steven Wengrovitz.

Information will also be available on how to apply for this year's summer research grant.

To see the presenters' papers and executive summaries please go to the "Summer Research Grants" on this website.

Location: The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, 1st floor gallery
Date: Novemeber 1, 2005
Time: 4:30-6:30 PM
Co-sponsored by the The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies
Questions should be directed to Stanford M. Forrester at: sforrester@wesleyan.edu

Thursday, November 10th
Talk by Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Jomo Kwame Sundaram (Jomo K. S.) is Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations. He will be giving a talk entitled: "Making Poverty History: Economic Developement in a Flat World".

Mr. Sundaram was Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Founder Chair of IDEAs, or International Development Economics Associates (www.ideaswebsite.org), and Professor in the Applied Economics Department, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, until late 2004.

Born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1952, Jomo studied at the Penang Free School (PFS, 1964-6), Royal Military College (RMC, 1967-70), Yale (1970-3) and Harvard (1973-7). He has taught at three universities in Malaysia, as well as Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Cambridge universities. He has authored over 35 monographs, edited over 50 books and translated 11 volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media. He is on the editorial boards of several learned journals.

Location: Memorial Chapel
Date: November 10th
Time: 8:30 PM
 

Thursday, December 1, 2005
Itchu Miyako:Shamisen Master

The shamisen is a banjo-like lute with three silk strings that has dominated folk and classical Japanese music for almost three centuries.  Itchu Miyako XII, a leader of this tradition, brings together an ensemble of premier artists featuring three shamisen players, three buyo dancers and five percussionists.  The colorful program is based on Miyako's Tsuzure Oto (Woven Sound). For more information please contact the Wesleyan Box Office.

Location: Crowell Concert Hall
Date: December 1
Time: 8 PM

Thursday, April 21, 2005
Talk by Helie Lee

Who are the people of North Korea and why should it concern us in the United States? Amid all the talk of nuclear weapons and the current tense U.S. relations with the Korean peninsula, come join us for an intriguing examination of the humanitarian face of North Korea. Helie Lee, nationally recognized author and public speaker, will share her family’s inspiring and eye-opening personal experiences in North Korea. She will be retelling her daring mission to rescue members of her lost family out of North Korea, one of the most repressive countries in the world.  Lee’s story has already been featured on Oprah, Nightline, CNN, the Associated Press, CBS News, Los Angeles Times, and various broadcasting stations and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.

Helie Lee is the author of the national bestseller Still Life With Rice (Scribner 1996), and In The Absence of Sun (Harmony Books 2002), memoirs in which she chronicles her family’s experience in war-torn Korea from the 1930s to 1997. 

Lee’s work, In The Absence of Sun, specifically details her Korean-American family's risky attempt to rescue her uncle from North Korea.  The story has been featured on Nightline, CNN, the Associated Press, NBC Nightly News, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, People Magazine, Life & Times, Today Show, and Oprah. She has spoken at Stanford, Princeton, USC, UCLA, Northeastern University, Amherst, the Korean American Coalition, the Korean Youth Community Center, KASCON, The Museum of Tolerance, CNN, AsiaWeek, and NPR.  Her courageous story led Cosmopolitan Magazine to select Lee out of thousands of women nominated for their "1999 Fun Fearless Female" competition as a "Freedom Fighter." 

Lee is on the board of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a member of the Asian American Writers Workshop, PEN, a community of writers defending freedom of expression and building a literary culture, and Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization that promotes Asian Pacific media arts for the American public. 

Lee lectures around the country on her bicultural heritage and human rights issues for North Korea refugees. Ultimately, Lee embraces her responsibility as an ambassador of Korean history and culture by creating awareness through stories that serve as a floodlight on the closed world of North Korea.

Location: Memorial Chapel
Date: April 21^st
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: Free of  Charge

 

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Jeffrey Santa Ana, Lecture

Professor Santa Ana will be giving a lecture entitled: "Feeling Multiracial: Emotions, Immigration, and the Geopolitics of Mixed Race America "
 

Racially mixed people are a hot commodity in today’s consumer market.  To be mixed race is in, as an ideal of global culture that is everywhere, in fashion magazines, on billboards, and in the window displays of downtown businesses, all capitalizing on racial mixture as a lucrative market.  The rise of mixed race as a transnational commodity coincides with today's political demand for a distinctive mixed race identity as a census category.  However, this demand for a mixed race identity raises a host of pressing questions.  For starters, is the multiracial claim essentially an individualistic concern?   Does the notion of a distinctive mixed race identity risk erasing monoracial categories (of Latina/o, Asian, Native, and African American)?  Focusing on cultural and literary representations of "mixed race" in an era of globalization, this lecture critiques the current fetish for—and politics of— mixed race identification.  A central concern will be the way mixed race functions in the U.S. national imaginary as well as in the global corporate economy.  The lecture concludes with an argument about how U.S. ethnic writers portray mixed race people as embodying the emotional contradictions of global capitalism: that is, our fears, anxieties, and uncertainties of living as subjects of globalization in a time of colorblindness in class-divided American society.  

lecture at 4:30 pm at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

Admission is free of charge and this event is open to the community. Refreshments provided.

 

Friday, April 15, 2005
Mabuhay

Wednesday, April 13, 2005
An Evening of Shinnai: Traditional Japanese Story-telling in Song

Traditional Japanese story-telling in song performed by Tsuruga Wakasanojo XI, a
 "Japanese living National Treasure". The program will be a combined Lecture and Demonstration.
 

Saturday, April 9, 2005
Chia Ti Chiu

ChiaTi Chiu, a highly acclaimed Taiwanese American performance poet and teaching artist, has performed nationally at theatres and universities and at New York City venues such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, and 13 Bar/Lounge. She was a Nuyorican Slam Finalist in 2000, and her publications include Dark Phrases, Rising (UK), and Tribes Magazine, as well as a self-produced chapbook called Fleeting Shadows. She will be speaking on April 9 (Saturday) from 4:00~5:30 on Asian American identity and her own personal journey through her discovery and acceptance of her Asian American-ness.

The New York Trio is one of the best examples of cultural exchange between Japan and the United States. Their 2003 worldwide tour celebrated their 15-year anniversary.  The Trio's founder, internationally renowned jazz pianist, Yosuke Yamashita, is a household celebrity in Japan who has recorded over fifty albums. He has toured throughout Europe since 1974 and has made annual appearances on the jazz scene in New York. In 1988, Yamashita formed his "New York Trio" with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. Their recent worldwide tour celebrating their fifteen-year anniversary also commemorated the 150th anniversary of US-Japan relations. Pheeroan akLaff is a private lessons teacher at Wesleyan University.

 
 

Location: Crowell Concert Hall
Time: 8:00pm performance

Tickets: $12 general, $10 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, $6 Wesleyan students
For more information about Center for the Arts events, please contact the box office at  (860) 685-3355 or e-mail us at box office@wesleyan.edu

Thursday, February 17th

SUHEIR HAMMAD AND BEAU SIA

SUHEIR HAMMAD (Poet), who hails from Brooklyn, has been called "a new voice with an authentic blend of language that's her own, and music that belongs to the streets" (Elmaz Abinader, author of Children of the Roojme). Suheir's appearance on the debut episode of HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry" merited generous media praise. Her work has been published in numerous periodicals, including The Amsterdam News,  Essence, STRESS Hip-Hop Magazine and the Middle East Report; in anthologies including New to North America (Burning Bush Press), Listen Up! (Ballantyne), The Space Between Our Footsteps (Simon & Schuster) and 33 Things Every Girl Should Know About Women's History (Crown Publishers). Her books Born Palestinian, Born Black and Drops of This Story, both published by Harlem River Press, have received critical acclaim:"[Born Palestinian, Born Black] is about culture, conflict and consciousness... I was born Black and Suheir Hammad has taught me what it means to be a Palestinian... this book opens a door." - E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University. Suheir's poetry has been featured on the BBC World Service and National Public Radio. She has also appeared at universities and prisons throughout the United States.
 

BEAU SIA is a Chinese-American poet from Oklahoma City.  Beau has been featured in the award-winning film Slam and the documentary Slam Nation. As an author, Beau wrote the poetry book A  Night Without Armor II: The Revenge.  A few of the anthologies his work appears in, include, Def Poetry Jam on Broadway... and more, Why Freedom Matters, and Spoken Word Revolution.  Beau has two spoken word CD's, Attack! Attack! Go!  and Dope and Wack. He was a recipient of the California Arts Council Writer-in-Residence grant for Youth Speaks in 2001-2002, and was the lead artist for the Creative Work Fund.  Beau has appeared on all seasons of HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry," and has also performed on ESPN's 2000 Winter X-Games, Showtime! at The Apollo, and the 2003 Tony Awards. He is one of the original cast members in Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, a 2003 Special Event Tony Award Winner, and has recently toured with Declare Yourself, a project dedicated to increasing the number of young voters in this past 2004 election.  This year, he plans to further develop all aspects of his craft, staying open to what that may bring him.  His home base is beausia.com and he does what he wants.

Tuesday, February 15th

Learn Tai Chi with Master Zhang Zhao Xun
(Taught in Chinese with English translation)

Tai Chi Quan integrates the philosophy of Taoism with the principles of martial arts techniques. It is proven that with regular practice Tai Chi Quan promotes vitality, clear mindedness, and overall health and well being.

Chen style Xiyi Hun Taiji Quan was developed by one of China's greatest living martial artists, Grand Master Feng Zhi Qiang.  This particular style of Taiji Quan incorporates elements of Chen style, Qigong, Xingyi Quan, Bugua Zhang and Tongbei Quan.  It emphasizes maintaining a deep level of relaxation, the development of internal energy, and increased flexibility of the joints, tendons, and ligaments. The smooth, circular body movements of this style generate significant energy for overall health and martial applications.

Master Zhang Zhao Xun is a 19th generation master of Chen style Tai Chi Quan, a 2nd Generation master of Huan Yuan Tai Chi Quan and a 4th generation master of Bagua Zhang.

Date: February 15th
Location: Woodhead Lounge
Time: 4:30-5:30 pm
Admission is free

February 3rd & 5th, 2005
Lunar New Year Celebration

 Lunar New Year Celebration Schedule

Thursday, February 3^rd/Dumpling workshop
- 4:00-6:00pm at AAA House (107 High Street)

Saturday, February 5th
- 6:00-10:00pm  on the 3^rd  & 4^th  floors MPR (Campus Center)
- 4:30pm to 6:00pm: Setup
- 5:30pm to 6:00pm: Chinese Graduate Students/KSA/CSA/Chinese House arrive with their dishes for potluck. - 5:45pm: Chinese Takeout Arrives
- 6:15pm to 6:45pm: Mini-Cultural Show first half. Performers:
       Chinese Ensemble; Dance by Ada Fung.  Korean Tradition Game with Prizes.
- 6:45pm to 7:00pm: Intermission/Food distributed
- 7:00pm to 7:30pm: Cultural Show second half. Performers:
        Korean Drumming. A cappella group Outside In. Chinese game with prizes.
- 7:30pm to 7:45pm: After meal clean up
- 7:45pm to 10:00pm: Movie show. (Movie to be announced, possible candidate: “A world without thieves”.)
- 10:00pm to 11:00pm: Clean-up

4^th floor conference rooms
- 6:00pm-6:45pm: Food preparations
- 6:45pm-7:00pm: Chess/mahjong/calligraphy setup
- 7:30pm-9:30pm: Games (chess/mahjong/calligraphy)
- 9:30pm-10:30pm: Clean-up

Organizing Parties: CSA (Chinese Student Association), KSA (Korean Student Association), East Asian Studies Department, Chinese House, TCS (Taiwanese Cultural Society), AAA house.

Parties involved: Chinese/Chinese American Undergraduate; Korean/Korean American Undergraduate; Chinese Graduated Students; Chinese/Korean Language Students; East Asian Studies Faculty / Families; General Student Body who is interested in Chinese culture and traditions. The Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative.
 

Zatoichi and the Doomed Man (Zatoichi Sakate-Giri)

With 25 film sequels and upwards of 100 TV episodes, Shintaro Katsu is the legendary Zatoichi! He's a low-ranking blind masseur who lives by the Yakuza code and answers his foes with a deadly cane sword. By far, one of Japan's most time-honored screen personas. Zatoichi is, to this day, the ultimate everyman anti-hero.

Paired with a witty, harmless con man, Shintaro Katsu mixes intoxicating swordplay and side-splitting slapstick in a tale where Zatoich's fate collides with an innocent man facing execution.
 

1965, Color, 88 Minutes, In Japanese with English subtitles.
Location: The Screening Room/The Center for Film Studies/Room 100
Date: December 6, 2004
Time: 7:30 PM
 

Green Tea

Made immediately after I Love You (2002), Green Tea also takes a look at male/female relationships, but with its glossy colors and stunning, immaculately lit compositions, it couldn’t be further away from the intense documentary realism and emotional turmoil of Zhang Yuan’s previous film.

Location: The Screening Room/The Center for Film Studies/Room 100
Date: December 7, 2004
Time: 7:30 PM
 

Everybody has secrets

Can a secret make people happy? Can larger secrets make people more happy? What if they are about your lover who flirted with your sisters? Director Jang Hyeon-soo says "yes" in his new film "Everybody Has a Secret. "The Romantic Comedy, a remake of the 2002 Irish flick "About Adam," is about a handsome, intelligent guy who secretly falls in love with three sisters is a chant to playboys.

Mi-yeong (Kim Hyo-jin), a jazz vocalist and the youngest of the three sisters, has a crush on a good-looking, cool guy who dropped by the jazz bar where she sings. That was Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a man born to be a Don Juan. An advocate of free sex who thinks love is like a shopping, Mi-yeong tells her sister Seon-yeong (Choi Ji-woo) that Soo-hyun is perfect and like a man who just walked out of a novel. She later asks him to marry her.

Korean/English subtitles
Location: The Screening Room/The Center for Film Studies
Date: December 9, 2004
Time: 7:30 PM
 

Discussion Forum on Asian American Sexuality
with Professor Allan Isaac (English Dept) and Freeman Post Doctoral Fellow Anita Mannur (East Asian Studies)

Forum Format:
7-10 minutes of media clips
10 minutes of each professor speaking
30 minutes to discuss 2 general questions: portrayal of Asian sexuality, possession/ objectification (eg sex tourism, mail-order brides)
index cards handed out beforehand to provide an opportunity for people  to anonymously ask questions
dinner/reception
hosted by AAA House and Asian American Student Collective

Day/date: Wed, December  8th
Time: 4:30-6pm
Location: To be announced

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Imelda, Film

Film at the CFA Theatre at 8:00 pm.

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".

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.

lecture at 4:30 pm at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

Admission is free of charge and this event is open to the community. Refreshments provided.

Regie Cabico, spoken word poet

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. Anthologized in over 30 volumes of poetry, his autobiographical work often deals with being a young gay Filipino man growing up in a strict Catholic family.  Writes The Village Voice: "Cabico, with his naked emotionalism and wry theatricality makes excellent smarmy diva material!"

September 16, 2003

Jason Kao Hwang's Far East Side Band & Taylor Ho Bynum & SpiderMonkey Strings with special guest Jay Hoggard
Performance: Wesleyan Asian-American Jazz Mini-Festival

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.

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.  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!

Location: World Music Hall, Wesleyan University
 

May 14, 2003

K. Scott Wong
Lunch Forum: "The Good Asian in the Good War" 

This forum will be conducted by Visiting Professor K. Scott Wong.  Profossor Wong will discuss various aspects of his research and how it  has culminated into a forthcoming book, which is to be published by Harvard University Press. This forum is open to all interested students, faculty and staff. 
Lunch will be provided. 
Center of the Americas, 1st floor. Noon

The Asian/Asian American Initiative is also proud to support to the following April events!

February 1, 2003 (The start of Chinese New Year)

Performance: Dragon Versus Eagle: Fred Ho and The Afro Asian Music Ensemble with Martial Artists.

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. 

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.


For more information about Fred Ho and The Afro Asian Music Ensemble please visit: www.bigredmediainc.com