2017‐2018 marks 20 years of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois. As part of the ongoing celebration of this milestone, we have invited three scholars to present in their own unique ways on the topic of Refugees, Race, and Resistance.
4:00 pm
“water in/on my body, seeping through my bones” | Patricia Nguyen
In this artist talk Patricia Nguyen will discuss a selection of her solo and collaborative projects centering on land and water as the core material of her performance work and meditations on Vietnamese refugees, dispossession, and state violence.
5:00 pm
"Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art" | Yến Lê Espiritu
Joining the fields of transnational feminist studies with critical refugee studies, this talk introduces the concept feminist refugee epistemology (FRE) to re‐conceptualize war‐based displacement as not only about social disorder and interruption but also about social reproduction and innovation. FRE does more than critique Western media representation of refugees; it underlines the refugees’ rich and complicated lives, the ways in which they enact their hopes, beliefs, and politics, even when they live militarized lives. Given the ubiquity of visual representation of refugee suffering in Western media, it examines how refugee artists—specifically Vietnamese and Syrian artists—have articulated, contested, challenged and reconfigured ways of knowing. Fusing the critical with the creative, it conceptualizes refugee artwork as a critical site of knowledge production and encourages further and deeper inquiry into refugee cultural production as an essential element in refugee studies.
6:30 pm
“Where are you From From?” | Amer Zahr
A comedic tour of living as an Arab American in a world that “otherizes” us on a daily basis.