Second GenerAsian #7: What is Asian American Studies?

Episode Notes

[“Second GenerAsian Theme” by Tenny Tsang]

Sophia Lo: Hello hello, and welcome to

All: Second GenerAsian!

Sophia: I'm Sophia.

Hannah Yoon: I'm Hannah.

David Deloso: And I'm David.

Sophia: And we are back with our first episode of the quarter even though it's Week Seven.

David: Yes.

Hannah: Hell yeah. So this topic is Asian American Studies.

Sophia: Since we've all taken classes on this topic, we wanted to go more into the history of Asian American Studies. But we brought in an expert to tell us more about the field. I talked with Ray San Diego, who's a Visiting Professor in Northwestern’s Asian American Studies Program. Before coming here, he taught Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and he's been teaching here since last quarter.

Ray San Diego: There's been a lot of changes with Asian American Studies since it started. And I think earlier in the late 60s and 70s, because of immigration policy at the time, it was mainly focused on Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, maybe to a degree Korean Americans. You didn't have much about Southeast Asians, people of mixed race, Filipinos even. And so I'd say over the past 40 or 50 years, you've sort of seen the incorporation of different ethnic groups and different perspectives. But also I would say what makes Asian American studies a little different than some of the other groups is how heterogeneous we are. So it's not like everyone speaks Asian, right, compared to like speaking maybe Spanish or something like that, or we don't have necessarily a shared history of how we came to the United States. It was much more staggered. On the one hand, it's the experiences, the politics, the cultural production, the stories of struggle and survival of Asians in the diaspora, and people of Asian descent in the United States or North America even more broadly, but at the same time, it's also just as perspective of how we understand power relations in our society and what is equity and what is activism.

Hannah: A major thread in Asian American Studies is activism. In fact, student activists are the ones who really pushed for ethnic studies, and they're honestly the only reason why they exist altogether. I personally didn't know anything about the history of ethnic studies until I took my first Asian American studies course, last year, spring quarter. But it all started with a student-led strike at San Francisco State University, and Ray’s going to tell us more about it.

Ray: In 1968, it was the largest student strike ever in history. It was about five months. Students were upset about the way that faculty of color were not being hired in the college or the university I should say, they weren't receiving tenure. A lot of students of color weren't getting admitted to schools. And when they were they were only learning from like a white male, upper class heteronormative, Eurocentric perspective. And it was sort of like if this is our money and our education, we should be able to learn about ourselves. And so it started with the Black Student Union. And they were upset over the firing of a professor and wanted to make change. And so they had 10 demands that included things like open admissions for students of color, hiring faculty of color, having a College of Ethnic Studies, and then a lot of the other student groups joined in so PACE, the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, Raza students, the Native American students, pretty much everyone and even a lot of whites joined in and were like, we want ethnic studies, classes, curriculum, content, faculty because it was really a time in the 1960s about self determination about understanding who you were as a person and where you fit in the world. And you sort of saw a lot of decolonizing movements