The following panels were originally scheduled to take place during the 2023 Annual Meeting, but were postponed by panelists' choice to accommodate the November 4th Gaza Walk-Out in Montreal.
Rescheduled panels that took place at the 2024 May Mini-Conference are available here.
Roundtable: Making Connections and Sharing Lessons Learned from Campaigns to Build Communities, Not Cop Shops and Cages
Participants
Micah Herskind, Organizer (Stop Cop City)
Jordan E. Martinez-Mazurek,Campaigner
Jack Norton, Assistant Professor (Criminal Justice, Governors State University)
Justin Piché (Chair), Member (Coalition Against the Proposed Prison) and Associate Professor (Criminology, University of Ottawa)
Judah Schept, Professor (Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University)
Micol Seigel, Professor (American Studies & History, Indiana University – Bloomington)
Click here for additional roundtable information and bios
It is undeniable – policing and imprisonment kills. It is also undeniable that communities targeted by carceral state violence have had enough and are organizing to choose real safety and decarceral futures where the needs of all are met and transformative justice is practiced in the wake of violence. Yet, amid their increasingly mainstream calls and organizing to defund the police and abolish prisons, carceral state institutions continue to push for more funds and resources, including for new policing and prison infrastructure. This roundtable aims to bring organizers from across Canada, the United States and elsewhere around the world to make connections and share lessons learned from campaigns to build communities, not cop shops and cages to seed the ground for future abolitionist organizing.
Kinship and Inherited Legacies: Queer Formations of Asian American Intimacies and Histories
Participants
Joanmarie Bañez, University of California San Diego
S. Moon Cassinelli, Virginia Tech
Al Evangelista, Oberlin College
Jay N. Shelat, Ursinus College
Joo Ok Kim (Chair), University of California San Diego
Click here for an expanded panel description, individual paper abstracts, and presenter bios
Inheritance is often characterized in binary terms: either something we benefit from (especially in terms of generational wealth) or something we didn’t ask to receive but must carry. Within these logics, then, kinship can be synonymous with or limited to biological family relations. While this is a panel about family, it is not invested in defining it as an essentialized or universal form. By refusing strict ideas of descent, panelists consider nonbiological genealogies of kinship and inheritance. This panel is chaired by Joo Ok Kim, whose Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP 2022) offers a comparative study of Asian American and Latinx studies, insightfully connecting race, politics, and citizenship to critique the Cold War conception of the “national family.” Through Alex Tizon’s essay “My Family’s Slave,” Joanmarie Bañez analyzes the figure of the immigrant domestic worker, whose positionality makes legible the longue durée of imperialism, settler colonialism, and immigration in Filipinx family formation. S. Moon Cassinelli discusses Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental novel DICTÉE and how Cha’s aesthetic and affective experimentation constructs alternative models of history and intergenerational connections by asking readers to stay with incoherence. Even as DICTÉE defies genre categories, Cassinelli focuses on the interpretive potential of feeling as though one is “missing something” to examine how the text’s unorthodox features reimagine familial and national genealogies. In Al Evangelista’s performance production “somewhere good,” movement, technology, and dramaturgy confront inheritance and anti-Asian hate through the 1904 World’s Fair, using augmented reality and sound design. Evangelista explores how to choreograph and invite a literal moving with history and Pinay/x/o ancestors, communicating with words seemingly lost to colonial structures. In a turn toward what he terms desi millennial fiction, fiction by millennials who hail from South Asia and the diaspora, Jay Shelat examines queer kinship in Sarah Thankam Mathews’ novel All This Could Be Different. Shelat posits that the recent trend in contemporary literature urges for new forms of collectivity and kinship without erasing or jettisoning their inherent desi values and roots, namely those found in natal familial units. Ultimately, through this constellation of considerations about kinship, this panel critically examines ideas of inheritance for BIPOC scholars and artists. What does it mean to inherit both histories of oppression and possible solutions for building a better world and future?
Translation and Archipelagic Thought: American Solidarities and Melting Points
Participants
Brian Russell Roberts, Brigham Young University
Adrian De Leon, University of Southern California
Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawai’I, Mānoa
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, University of California Los Angeles
Elena Lahr-Vivaz, Rutgers University—Newark
Susan Gillman (Chair), University of Southern California, Santa Cruz
Click here for an expanded panel description, individual paper abstracts, and presenter bios
Allied with the ASA 2023 conference theme of solidarity, this panel examines two realms of solidarity-making: translation and archipelagic thinking. Translation has been a mode of solidarity-making to the degree that it has constructed bridges—no matter how contingent or tenuous—between languages and cultures. Meanwhile, archipelagic thinking has also attuned itself to questions of solidarity or connection among different islands. In considering the archipelagic Americas and American-connected archipelagoes beyond the Americas, what could it mean to suggest that translation and archipelagic thought are or may exist in solidarity, as intertwined, interdependent, and even co-constitutive practices? For translators and translation studies scholars, what could it mean to take the ocean-island complex of the archipelago as a methodological template? For scholars of archipelagic thinking (which has emanated from numerous archipelagic regions across the planet), what could it mean to take translation as a structuring metaphor for how we understand the ontologies of the archipelago? And how do we understand the epistemologies that the archipelago makes possible? Beyond structuring metaphors and methodological templates, what other and perhaps unforecasted solidarities might arise between archipelagic thinking and translation? And, of course, when and how do such solidarities fall apart, arriving at melting points beyond which solidness is no longer useful or desired? Addressing the conjunction of translation and archipelagic thought, the papers in this panel bring into conversation American, America-connected, and US imperial regions: Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam, Vietnam, Korea, the US South, Cuba, Spain, and Brazil.