March 28 & April 3, 2024: Events Celebrating the Work of Grace Lee Boggs

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Channels: Asian Diasporas in Film, Art, and Media invites you to two upcoming events celebrating the life and legacy of pioneering social activist Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American philosopher, writer and activist in Detroit with a thick FBI file and a surprising vision of what an American revolution can be. Rooted for 75 years in the labor, civil rights, and Black Power movements, she challenged a new generation to throw off old assumptions, think creatively, and redefine revolution for our times.

EVENT 1 | AARG AND AADRG READING GROUP DISCUSSION

Thursday, March 28

7:00–8:30 p.m. via Zoom

The Asian American Reading Group (AARG) and the African American and Diasporic Reading Group (AADRG) invite you to a virtual meeting to discuss the work of Grace Lee Boggs. We will be providing excerpts of Boggs’s writing, so please send an email to szl598@psu.edu to receive a PDF of the reading and Zoom link.

EVENT 2 | AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS SCREENING & DISCUSSION

Wednesday, April 3

5:30–7:30 p.m.

Schlow Centre Region Library, Downsbrough Community Room

Join AARG and AADRG for a screening of the documentary American Revolutionary with discussion to follow. Dinner will be provided. We welcome students, instructors/faculty, and the general public!

More information about both events in the attached poster!

 

Jan. 18, 2024: *American Born Chinese* by Gene Luen Yang

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The Channels Initiative and the Asian American Reading Group invite you to a lunch and book club discussion of Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese on January 18 (this wonderfully entertaining book features appearances from the Monkey King, racist stereotypes, and Transformers, and it was also recently made into a series on Disney+). Undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and community members are welcome!

Sep. 28, 2023: *A Brief History of Fruit* by Kimberly Q. Andrews

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Kimberly Q. Andrews is visiting Penn State to give a salon-style reading on October 2, so AARG is planning to read and discuss an excerpt from her poetry collection A Brief History of Fruit in advance of this event. Here is the blurb for the collection:

In Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s award-winning full-length debut, A Brief History of Fruit, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral: full of “the beautiful science,” as she puts it, of “naming: trees of one thing, then another, then yet another.” Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place’s titular fruit—tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America—all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life’s whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all. Throughout, these searching, fiercely intelligent and formally virtuosic poems offer us a vital new perspective on biracial identity and the meaning of home, one that asks us again and again: “what does it mean, really, to live in a country?”

The AARG meeting to discuss A Brief History of Fruit will take place on Thursday, 9/28, 7-8:30pm via Zoom. Although you are welcome to purchase a copy, we can provide PDF copies of the excerpt (sections IV and V) to read in advance of this discussion. Please email szl598@psu.edu if you’re interested in receiving the selected poems and the meeting Zoom link. 

Apr. 21, 2023: *The Best We Could Do* by Thi Bui

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On April 21, the Asian American Reading Group and the Channels Initiative will hold a book club-style discussion of Thi Bui’s award-winning graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, open to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and community members. Registration for free copies of the book has closed, though if you have the book and are interested in joining, please contact Su Young Lee (szl598@psu.edu) or Rob Nguyen (ran22@psu.edu) for details.

This is the third Spring 2023 event sponsored by the newly formed Channels: Asian Diasporas in Film, Art, and Media initiative. Channels fosters conversations across the Penn State and broader State College, Pennsylvania community about Asian American and Asian diasporic cultural productions.

Poster advertising a discussion event for the book referenced in the original text, for Friday, April 21 from noon–1:30 p.m.

Feb. 23, 2023: *Everything Everywhere All at Once*

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Poster image advertising meeting. Text reads: a discussion on EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE Thursday, February 23rd, 3:30 p.m. Burrowes 159. ASIAN AMERICAN READING GROUP. Image is of actor Michelle Yeoh in a martial arts pose in an office. A googley eye is affixed to the center of her forehead.

The Asian American Reading Group (AARG) will meet on Thursday, February 23rd at 3:30 p.m. in Burrowes 159 to discuss the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. This discussion may be of particular interest to persons interested in Asian American studies, visual studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, genre, and popular culture.

While this action/comedy/drama/SF film defies easy classification and concise description, a reasonable attempt at a summary is made in this lead-in to the New York Times review: “Messy, and Glorious; Michelle Yeoh stars as a stressed-out laundromat owner dragged into cosmic battle and genre chaos.”

The film’s accolades, among others, include Golden Globe wins for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. It has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film’s positive reception occasions us to continue AARG’s conversation begun this past fall on the representation of Asian Americans in media, as we interrogate how Everything Everywhere uses the concept of the multiverse to explore issues of identity and familial relationships and as we consider what Asian American visibility means in this historical moment, one that includes both this blockbuster Hollywood success and a marked increase in anti-Asian racism.

Nov. 1, 2022: “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang

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Poster reading: EXHALATION by Ted Chiang. Tuesday, November 1, 3:30 p.m.

We invite you to join us for the Asian American Reading Group’s second meeting of the semester. Based on the last meeting’s conversation and suggestions received, we’ve chosen Ted Chiang’s Hugo Award-winning SF short story “Exhalation,” found in the collection of the same name.
The meeting will be held via Zoom on:
Tuesday, November 1, at 3:30 p.m.
For the link, contact Rob Nguyen (ran22 at psu dot edu) or Su Young Lee (szl598 at psu dot edu).
This story and conversation may be of interest if you work in Asian American literature, but also if you are generally interested in SF or the short story form. Chiang’s work is, arguably, exemplary of both.
To read Chiang’s work through the lenses of Asian American literature gives rise to challenging questions, as Chiang is an Asian American writer who does not explicitly engage with topics or characters concerned with Asian American experiences, leading Christopher Fan to write in Post45, “Chiang indicates and conceals his Asian American identity in the same gesture. What, then, are the features and circumstances of Chiang’s writing that produce Asian American racial form in the very same postracial move of not writing as an Asian American?”. Fan’s essay discusses “Story of Your Life,” the short story that was adapted into the film Arrival, but this may be an excellent question for us to work with as well.