 for those of you who were with us last night, and also welcome to all of you who are joining us, and welcome to Philadelphia, and the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival. My name is Gail Issa. I'm Executive Director at Asian Arts Initiative, and that is where you are. So, welcome also to Asian Arts Initiative. Many of you know that Asian Arts Initiative is a multi-disciplinary community-based arts center, and we actually have a range of programming that takes place. Later on today, you may be able to catch a glimpse of our after-school youth program in action, even though they've been a little bit displaced by this conference. But some of them will actually be attending some of the play readings as well. And we also, in addition to performances that we support, we also have a gallery and exhibition program. And I hope that you'll have a chance to interact with the exhibition that's up now in our gallery, which is called Neighborhood Workshop, really exploring the different ways that artists are engaging with this neighborhood and the neighborhoods that they are part of. And in addition, Asian Arts Initiative has an important part of our recent history is that over the past five years, we were able to identify and secure this building that we are in. We were one of the organizations, we began as a program at the Painted Bright Arts Center, which hopefully some of you will have a chance to see, either saw last night or we'll see tonight where Tree City Legends is being performed. We began as a program there, and then moved out into another space that was actually demolished to make way for the expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. And that actually launched a journey for us of trying to identify a new space, which is this building now, in this neighborhood, or this part of the neighborhood called Chinatown North, or that's what I call this neighborhood. It's a neighborhood of many names. Developers like to call it the Lough District. But it's also an amazingly diverse neighborhood in terms of the people who live and who work here. At one end of our block is a homeless shelter, and at the other end of our block is luxury loft condos and apartments. And so I hope that, I think that we're canceling the Chinatown tour that was being offered so that people could instead enjoy all of the other programming that's scheduled this afternoon. But if you have questions about the neighborhood, please, I would be happy, and many of our staff would be happy to share more about the history of the place that we're in and the present day dynamics of the place that we're in, and the ways that we are hoping to sort of participate in change-making for the future. So, and it's back to quick notes. I want to, before we start the plenary session, want to be able to quickly introduce, or reintroduce the Kata staff. Jeff Musso, who is running around maybe right now, but hopefully, okay. So everybody give a wave to Jeff, and also Juliet Lee, who you may have met at the registration table, and who I think will be up here later with some additional housekeeping announcements, but she has been our local Confest coordinator. And also to acknowledge just a few of Asian Arts Initiative's own staff members, definitely Melody Wong, who is managing the facility for the conference site. Also Alethea Karbaugh, who's our facility assistant, and operations assistant. Jay Shim, who's our director of finance and operations. And Nancy Chen, who's our manager of public programs. So I hope that you'll have a chance to be able to meet them and thank them for all of the work that they've done to make this gathering possible. Oh, and I wanted to also acknowledge the Kata board, but before that, I remembered that Jeff told me to also make an announcement that this session, the plenary, as well as a number of the home themed breakout sessions are being broadcast on HowlRound TV. So thank you to HowlRound, and then to all of you for participating in that. And I think I would like to now again, acknowledge the Kata board members who are here. Many of the board had a chance to introduce ourselves last night. But if the board members would like to just stand again this morning. And one very, very special board member who wasn't able to join us last night is Kata's board president, Mia Katibak, who is here this morning to be able to introduce the plenary session. So please welcome again, and welcome to the stage, Mia. Thank you, thank you very much Gail. Thank you to Gail for organizing this, for making this contest possible. And again, I would like to reiterate our thanks to the whole Asian Arts Initiative staff and the board and especially Jeff and Juliet who have been incredible. What I'd like to do if possible, if could I ask that our plenary speakers to come ahead and sit up here so I can park myself down and read my notes. At this conference, we're thinking about, we're asking about home. Is it here, here, here? Is it there, whatever there is? Is it here and there? Can it be anywhere? Someone said, my mother thinks it was Lorca, but we are not sure. There's no place like home and there's no place harder to find. This implies that there is a search for and a choice in terms of where to call home. To be an American citizen is to have the right to call America home. And anyone born here has the right to this citizenship. For those not born here who want this status, a prerequisite is usually for permanent residence, the attainment off and the maintenance of permanent residence to make America one's homeland. What happens when an American born citizen has to contend with a sense of conditional citizenship because of cultural difference, which is to me a very frustrating notion since cultural diversity supposedly acquintessentially American phenomenon. What happens when that American citizen is suddenly stripped of all citizenship? What happens when that American citizen is by governmental decree removed, displaced from his residence to be interned in a camp? It's a tricky word that there's summer camp, there's musical theater camp, there's concentration camp, there's internment camp. How is it that this can happen that an American can be unhomed here at home? This is as we know what happened to the American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Ginny Sakata's play, his one man play, Hold These Truths, is based on the true story of Gordon Hirabayashi, a native born Quaker Japanese American citizen who defied the order for Japanese and Japanese American internment during World War II. He was prosecuted for his resistance or rather he turned himself in, was convicted, which then allowed him to appeal his case all the way to the US Supreme Court. Originally entitled Dawn's Early Light, Hold These Truths has been performed across the country, premiering in East-West players in Los Angeles with subsequent productions in New York and Chicago and special presentations in Tennessee, Hawaii and multiple locations in California. It will be given a full production here in Philadelphia this February by plays and players and will star Makoto Hirano with direction by Daniel's student. We have the privilege of having Makoto here today and he will perform an excerpt after which our distinguished speakers will offer the reactions to the play. What I'd like to do is basically to introduce everyone here at the top so that we can kind of have a seamless uninterrupted flow of interpretation and ideas. So let's meet everybody. Makoto is a Philadelphia-based dance, theater, spoken word artist whose original performance works have been presented nationally in numerous venues and festivals. He has worked with Bill Irwin, pig iron theater company, Sub Circle, Nicole Caruso Dance Company and most recently with Fadea Sphilips, Lucidity Suitcase and the critically acclaimed Whale Optics. Makoto will begin touring his award-winning solo show Boom Bap Tourism, a former U.S. Marine. He studied dance at Columbia College in Chicago and earned his BFA at Temple University. He is also a founding member of Team Sunshine Performance Corporation which produces original ensemble-created performances and interactive audience-focused events that emphasize gathering through art. Mae Joseph. Our first speaker is the founder of Harmonton Theater, an environmental theater company based in New York City. She is professor of global studies in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in New York. Mae is the author of Fluid New York, Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination, Nomadic Identities, the Performance of Citizenship and she is the co-editor of Performing Hybridity. Other co-edited volumes include City Core, New Hybrid Identities and Body Work. Mae's Theater Work explores island cities, coastal areas and archipelagos. Through performances, she investigates the junctures between coastal communities, citizenship and water politics. She's currently completing a book about Indian Ocean Cities. The next speaker will be Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson whose research and teaching interests include contemporary art, Marxism, law, contemporary political theory, Asian American studies and queer theory. He is the author of Arrace So Different, Law and Performance in Asian America, which won the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theater and Higher Education. He is currently working on a second book project, The Coming Communism, Marxist Theory and Minoritarian Performance. Exploring contemporary performance in art that rehearses, anticipates and realizes concrete forms of actually existing Marxism and Communism. Our final speaker is Karen Shimakawa, who is the Chair of the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and an adjunct instructor in the NYU School of Law. She is the author of National Objection, The Asian American Body on Stage and the co-editor of Orientation's Mapping Studies in the Asian diaspora with Candice Cha. Her research and teaching focus in Asian American performance, intercultural performance, law and performance, critical race theory and affect studies. Her current research project is on discomfort. And now, Makoto will be performing an excerpt from Genie's Hold These Truths. The smell, and then, the air, except tar paper, flimsy woods, dust everywhere, wind, every merciless heat, the lines, the lines for meals, toilets, typhoon shots, lumber, watchtowers, guards with guns, guns pointing in. Art Barnett, the West Coast delegates to the House of Representatives introduced a bill to deprive you, Nisei, of your citizenship. Now, there's no way this could ever pass. It's a constitutional razziness, but I think you should know the score. Well, what's the press saying about this? Most of them, left wing, right wing, hell, even Walter Libman, you should know better, God damn it. They're saying, good riddance, Gore. Attorney General Biddle. Biddle? God, he's useless. Word is, both he and Stimson, the Secretary of War, had opposed this whole God damn sorry mess as unconstitutional, but neither of them had the guts to take a strong stand with the President. And now, Stimson is caved to the West Coast rabble, one of the Japanese farmers out, so they don't have to compete with him. And Biddle's collapsed, too, that's far in the son of a... Art, has President Roosevelt said anything? Anything in our favor? He's ill, zero. God, it's inexcusable. Granted, he's not famous for racial sensitivities, all of his dependence on some of the bigots in Congress, but why can't he say one word? Just one word to defend you. The fact that he isn't... is making everything go to hell. Thanks, Art. Don't thank me for telling you to use like that. If I were you, I'd punch me. And Gordy? Yeah. My kids said to tell you, you're still their favorite babysitter. Tell them thanks. You stay out of trouble. I mean, more trouble. Turned out, Art was right. The bill was too outrageous for Congress to pass it on. But what about the future? The U.S. had finally turned the tide of war midway, but it wasn't stopping the public from seeing us as the enemy. Roosevelt's refusal to publicly defend us, but the president doesn't see us as real Americans either. October 20, 1942, Seattle District Court. U.S. proceeding, prosecuting attorney stands. Mr. Hirabayashi, I have two questions. Are you a Japanese ancestry? Yes, I am. Did you knowingly violate the curfew and did you fail to report for evacuation? Yes, that is correct. Judge Lloyd Black turns to the jury. Gentlemen, based on the defendant's answers, you are instructed to find him guilty. And if you will not, you are violating your oath. So that's it. It's a gun drive. I never had a chance. Mr. Hirabayashi, your sentence will be as follows. 30 days for count one, 30 days for count two. To be served consecutively for a total of 60 days, does the defendant have anything to say? Yes, your honor. I would like a longer sentence. I beg your pardon. Your honor, I realize this is an unusual request, but I've been cooped up in jail for five months and I've been told by my cellmates that I can serve my time outdoors, you know, in a road camp. If the term is 90 days, that you won't process the paperwork for anything less than that. I hope you understand that I'd really like to do this outside. Judge cracks his smile. Okay, I guess I could accommodate that. I'm an outdoors man myself. Instead of two consecutive sentences, how about 90 days for count one, 90 days for count two, to be served concurrently? Any objections? Thank you. Mom and dad go back to camp and two days later, we appeal. We know we'll probably lose there too, but it's much the better. The Supreme Court is our aim now. It's the national issue. Then the judge and I, we lock horns over my bailiff's. We lock horns for four months. And by then the judge is racking his brain for some way to get rid of me. Finally, we hammer out a deal. While I'm waiting to hear the results of my appeal, I'll wait out the rest of my time outdoors. That's exciting. May 10th, 1943, United States Supreme Court. In the great marble palace, the red velvet curtain's part. Enter Chief Justice Harlan Stone, followed by Justice Jackson. Reed, Rutledge, Roberts, and Frank Verde. Our team's ready. A new attorney, Harold Evans, and the ACLU's back on my team. When they heard we were going to Washington, they agreed to back us. If we refrain from attacking the executive order in 19066, there's more than one way to skin it down. Proceedings between my first attorney, Frank Walters, stands to state the case of my facts. But the court interrupts it. Peppers in with questions. Why are you questioning the military in time of active war? Boom! Frank's 10 minutes are up before he's even started. Next, Harold Evans, who argues unlawful delegation of power. If America had been invaded and martial law declared, Congress could grant the president power to limit the citizens' liberties. But authority over citizens may not be given to the military when the area in question is not in the military area. We repeat, the question has been raised whether this country could wage a new war without loss of its fundamental liberties at home. Here's one occasion for this court to give an unequivocal answer to that question and show the world that we fight for democracy and preserving it too. And now the government gets their shot. U.S. solicitor, General Charles Fakie, stands to argue military necessity. They all need to go. Every last one, keep America safe. And that's what Charles Fakie must prove today to justify the government's orders. He starts with a tour of the Pacific Battle Front, declaring the war the most serious threat that has ever faced the United States. He stresses the importance of the West Coast battle defense facilities and the dire need to protect them against espionage and sabotage. He points out the fast number of Japanese-Americans living near those facilities, the fast number who attended Japanese-language schools or attended school in Japan, living along to Japanese social clubs who helped dual citizenship granted by Japanese law, fast numbers of East state who had never become American citizens. Somehow forgetting to mention that they were forbidden by law. He insists that during wartime, due process must be given way to the military's reasonable discretion. During time of war, it is not enough to say, I'm a citizen, I have rights. One must also say, I'm a citizen and I have obligations. And now the justice is deliberate. We are engaged in a war for survival against enemies who have placed a premium on barbarity and ruthlessness. Self-preservation comes first. United States wages war to win. Justice Frank Murphy, my champion, responds. But it does not appear that any serious effort was made to isolate the disloyal. Instead, 70,000 American citizens are deprived of their liberty because of a racial inheritance. Japanese-Americans maintain here a racial solidarity which has tended to prevent their assimilation as integral part of the white population. This is so utterly inconsistent with our ideals. I cannot, I cannot let it sit. I compare the orders with the military draft. A nation which requires the individual to give up his freedom and lay down his life certainly can demand a lesser sacrifice from its other citizens. Undoubtedly, we must wage war to win and do it with all our might. You cannot wait for an invasion to see a loyalty triumphs. A country that wages war to win cannot sit in judgment on the decisions of its generals. But it will avail us little to win the war on the battlefield and lose it here at home. We do not, we do not win the war. On the contrary, we lose it if we destroy the Constitution and the best traditions of our country. June 21, 1943, the opinion of the United States of the World. Where the conditions call for the choice of means by those on which the Constitution has placed the responsibility of war-making. It is not for any court to sit in review of the wisdom of their action or substitute its judgment for theirs. With a unanimous vote, I refuse to believe it. Surely the Constitution says what it says. The declaration, the Bill of Rights. Surely anyone who can read can see it. Surely any simpleton can see it. So why can't the Supreme Court of the United States of America entirely legal everything done by any other American perfectly fine, normal, but done by us, the military necessity for throwing us all behind a barbed wire. Justice Murphy. What happened to Justice Murphy today is the first time. So far as I am aware that we have sustained a substantial restriction of the personal liberty of citizens of the United States based upon the accident of race or ancestry. In this sense, it bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment according to the members of the Jewish race in Germany. In my opinion, this goes to the very brink of Constitution law. It hits me square in the face. It's been like a truck. How strenuously I've denied. How splendidly I've defied what I must have always, always done. An American, me, Gordon, Kiyoshi Hidabayashi, who'd grown up worshiping A. Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, who'd memorized the Gazeburg address, the preamble, who'd boasted time and time again that I am an American. Well, to many in this country, to most of the people running to the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, perhaps even to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I am no more. I want to thank Gail Issa for inviting me to speak here. This particular conference has been an inspiration for me over the years, the last 12 years actually, and I started my own company in 2009 because of the group of people in this room, and I am deeply grateful. It's been the most exciting thing to do is to start and be involved and immerse yourself in theater even though it's impossible to do it these days. And I just want to thank the performance. It just was so much more elegant when you did it than when I read the play because it was just such a hard text to do, such a gorgeous performance. Reading Sakata's play, Holdies Struth's, I was just so moved by the fact that it's one of the most pertinent texts I read for our time. You're confronted with people, Americans, who've invested time in the landscape, who've built farms, who've built lives, and overnight I asked to sell their things for a pittance. Farmers selling their farms, people burning their documents, their photographs, their family things. As they're rounded up to be sent to Tulile Lake, to a camp, a place they don't even know what it's going to look like, and you're confronted with this barren landscape of barbed wire and reeking toilets and horse manure and a stench that's just not, in many ways, American. You don't think you're gonna live in a horse stable, but that's what Tulile Lake was. So this is the kind of environmental devastation that Sakata sort of confronts you with when you read her play. And Hirabayashi sort of emerges as this incredible character that is incredibly American in many ways. He is at once a representative of a demographic, the Japanese American in the 1940s, who was abnegated by the state. They were created as internally displaced peoples, but also, he's the archetype American fighting for his rights, the American of the Democratic State of the United States, who believes that he is a citizen, has a right to speak. There's a line by Charles Fahey, which was performed today, and he says, in times of war, it is important to ask not just what are the rights of the citizen, but one must also ask what are the obligations of a citizen. And I think when you look around today across the globe, one could sort of say that this tension between rights and obligations, between the rights of who is a citizen and the rights of the limits of citizenship, this really encapsulates some of the most incendiary landscapes today around the world. And I think Sakata's play is incredibly timely and visceral and very physical about it. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, just before he died, he gave a beautiful talk. It was called On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. And what he was doing was, he was an Algerian Jew, and he was talking about the challenges of being Jewish and what happened in the Holocaust and really the limits of European citizenship and what it means today for immigrants from Africa and from a number of parts of the Southern Hemisphere coming to Europe who were being turned away and being deported and put on boats, particularly in Italy, in France. And he was sort of talking about why we are right now in Europe and the limits of cosmopolitanism, that Europe is at once cosmopolitan, but it can no longer allow new immigrants in its borders and what does this mean for European citizenship? And what Derrida says is, the promise of modern citizenship is that there will be certain states of exception, that there will be the Japanese American case, there will be the Jewish case, there will be the case of apartheid in South Africa, that there are these conditions and historic formations that make possible the rise of the nation state around scapegoats of history, of which Japanese Americans were in the 1940s because they were economically very vibrant, a very strong economic community, very rooted in the land and therefore the most gullible community to rally around at a time when people were very economically nervous, anxious and needed a suitable scapegoat around which a certain national sentiment could be mobilized. And Derrida says a very beautiful thing. He says, it is important to forgive the most unforgivable. It is at its most unforgivable that forgiveness most works. And it's a very hard concept to understand if you haven't lived through something like Japanese American internship to internment the Holocaust or apartheid in South Africa. But he was referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and its work and the work in Sarajevo and the limits of the degree of reclamation and forgiveness that Native American peoples and peoples around the world have to contend with the first peoples. How does one forgive a brutality and an absolute evisceration of rights? And therefore the big gap between the rights of the citizen, the obligations of the citizen, and the abnegation of the state. The, in others, when the state says you're a stateless subject, which they did to the Jews in Europe, even though you're German, even though you're French, you're stateless, we will put you in the zone of statelessness, which is the camp. So this place of the camp, the stateless place, is this profoundly strangely confusing and strangely legal place. It's a place where citizens have no rights. And so I will stop there because you read Sokata's play and you're confronted with all the issues of our time. Issues of deeply loyal subjects, rooted in Americanism, patriots of the state, and as performed today, become overnight, disappeared subjects, people who are shunted to a remote landscape in the interiors of the United States. And these were people who lived by the coast. And there's a very interesting landscape to Japanese-American internship. I keep saying internship because the idea of internment is very hard to grapple with in the US. But it is interesting to me when I have studied Japanese-American internment that these were peoples in very lush land, very fertile land, that were displaced onto extremely inhospitable terrain. And there is something environmentally disturbing about a country choosing to disappear an entire population, environmentally, but also economically in the interest of a certain kind of nationalist rally, which was what was going on in the 1940s and the Japanese-Americans were the obvious and unfortunate scapegoat. And I'll just close with a point of what Derrida said, which is, then the challenge is, how do communities like the Japanese-American or the Jews of Europe or the Africans of South Africa learn to forgive? Because the nature of the history is so unforgivable and so violent and brutal. And so far-reaching, because for the Japanese-Americans, they never recovered their land. They never recovered their property, their photographs, their memories, their families, their life. I mean, they were displaced onto parts of the United States that they had never had in a relationship with before. And these were people who had been there for at least 100 years in some cases. So this is the point, I think, that is very beautiful about Derrida and about Sakata, because I think Sakata plays a play of forgiveness. It's a play of saying, you know, we've got to look at this, we have to learn from this, and ultimately we have moved on and we have forgiven, even though people haven't asked us to forgive. So I'll just stop there, thank you. So I'm not nearly as elegant as that, so I just, I wrote words. Also, it would keep me in time. I'd like to also thank Mia for inviting me here. It's very much an honor. I'd like to begin by returning to Gordon's revelation at the conclusion of the excerpt that we saw, how he asks, surely the Constitution says what it says, the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, surely anyone who can read could see it, surely any simpleton can see it. It's common when reviewing the injustice of the Japanese-American concentration camps to understand the camps and the court rulings that authorize them as a miscarriage of justice and a failure of law. In spite of the extraordinary and ubiquitous evidence that white supremacy still plays a central role in our more perfect union, we are accustomed to rehearsing and celebrating the egalitarian promises of the laws that structure the state. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As Gordon says, surely anyone who can read could see it, the law says what the law says. This seems a reasonable approach to the problem. The law is exactly what is written, no more or no less. All you have to do to understand the law is read it. But as many of the actors in this room today will tell us, the same sentence can be read in a million different ways. To read is to interpret, and here is where all too often the rule of law becomes a false promise for people of color. Allow me to explain. In March, 1944, a group of Nisei activists detained in the Hart Mountain concentration camp were brought before camp director Guy Robertson after violating camp protocol and attempting to leave the camp without permission. They were actually like literally putting their toe over the line just to see what would happen. The hearing took the form of a court of law, but as the young men were quick to point out, it was within a context in which the law, and especially the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, which secure the right to trial and freedom from imprisonment without indictment, were entirely suspended. At the top of the proceeding, the young men were asked to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty, and Frank Emy, one of the leaders of the group, responded, is this a hearing or a trial? The camp director couldn't answer the question because of course for there to be a trial, there had to be law. On the one hand, there was law. He was authorized by the law to serve as an administrative director of the camp, placed in that position by the Department of the Interior under the authority of the president who in turn derives his power from the second article of the Constitution, which is authorized by we the people. But on the other hand, he had no power to hold them in violation of their constitutional rights. So the law was enforced but did not apply to their bodies, and as such, he could name no specific provision supporting his authority to detain the men, leaving him with the facile but wholly honest defense, quote, I have the power to do what I am doing. As did Hida Bayashi in the Supreme Court case, during the hearing, the men relied heavily upon the Constitution to challenge Robertson's right to detain them, but did their strategy place too much faith in the law? During a heated section of the hearing, Frank Emmy seemed to voice his confidence that the US Supreme Court would ultimately rule the camps unconstitutional, and we see the same confidence in Gordon's journey. He declared, I will abide by anything that the Supreme Court says because that is the law of the land. A few months later in Hida Bayashi's case, and the case of Kodematsu v. US, the US Supreme Court ruled that the incarceration was a legitimate and legal use of executive authority as provided by the Constitution. And as Justice Black wrote in his infamous ruling for Kodematsu, quote, to cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice without reference to the real military dangers which were presented merely confuses the issue. Kodematsu was not excluded because of his race from the military area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, end quote. Now what's important about this passage is that in spite of Black's hedging that the case is not about race, he effectively shows us exactly how it's about race. As people with the unfortunate luck of being Japanese at the time when the US state was at war with the Japanese Empire, the very racial difference of Japanese Americans rendered them a potential threat to national security. And it's important that he says fear, right? So fear actually comes to override what the Constitution seemingly secures. The racial difference which was inextricable in the state's eyes from the threat of the Empire posed an emergency to the US to such a degree that the military urgency of the situation and the fear that it brought with it justified the suspension of Japanese Americans constitutional rights. They were in effect rendered an exception to the Constitution as a means of protecting the constitutional order of the state from the threat posed by their presence. It is popular in legal circles to declare Kodematsu poorly decided law. Justices on all ends of the political spectrum are happy to do so. Chief Justice Roberts during his confirmation hearings was happy to say that it was badly decided law, but he wouldn't go so far as to say that they should overturn the case. I'll get to that in a moment. As a matter of law, Hidabayashi and Kodematsu are still on the record. They are from a technical standpoint still good law. They still have the force of precedent. Even if it is one that justices and politicians have so far been unwilling to invoke, although they are cited on technical grounds. Indeed, at the beginning of the 21st century, US courts were faced with a series of cases with some uncomfortable resemblances to the Japanese American incarceration cases. And while US courts never openly cited Kodematsu or Hidabayashi in their decisions to support the Guantanamo program, they often used logic that was in perfect accord with Black's decision. Over a half century after Hidabayashi took his case to the Supreme Court, a new racial spectrum began to haunt the US, requiring extraordinary legal measures to secure the state, this time from the terrorist, which was regularly racialized in the body of the brown Muslim. In 2009, the DC Circuit issued a ruling in Kiemba v. Obama with a shocking resonance to Hidabayashi's case, determining that the US government could indefinitely detain a group of Uyghur men in Guantanamo. Even after the State Department admitted that the men had been improperly classified as enemy combatants, illegally detained effectively as a result of racial profiling. Now what I'm trying to suggest here is that Gordon Hidabayashi's imprisonment without trial, as with the indefinite detention of the innocent Uyghurs, was not the result of a failure to carry out the true meaning of the Constitution. The Constitution is in fact designed to allow such things to happen, affording the state an extraordinary amount of latitude in matters of national security and during moments of extreme emergency. And the problem for people of color is that our bodies, our very presence in the US, is often framed as a threat or emergency, which means that when the state fears this threat enough, the Constitution is placed in a state of suspension. In the era following the progressive years of the Warren court and the civil rights movement, the left was seduced into believing that the rule of law could adequately protect the rights of people of color and serve as a remedy for forms of racial injustice. And indeed, in some cases, it was able to do so. But if Gordon's personalized rage towards the specific justices on the court should teaches us anything, it's that in this country, the law of the land is ultimately what the last highest court says it is. And this is particularly influenced by the personalities of the justices and judges making those determinations. In the era of the Roberts court, we should be very suspicious of the notion that one simply needs to read what the law says without asking who exactly is doing the reading and more importantly, on whose behalf. The ideal of rule of law sounds nice. A series of mechanical provisions that assure that everyone has equal access to rights, protections, liberty and justice. You simply read it and see it for what it is. But the reality of the law is a lot messier. So I'm gonna go back to the 40s, but to another period. During the collapse of Germany's first constitutional republic, a conservative jurist named Karl Schmidt struggled to make this very point. Schmidt famously entered into an intellectual battle with the positivist jurist Hans Kelsen who understood the rule of law to be a machinery of justice. For Kelsen effectively, the law is what the law says. One simply has to develop a perfect series of statutes which will allow for the state to function as a kind of neutral machine. If the law says you have liberty, you have it. If the law says you have equality, you have it. But against this position, Schmidt argued that while the law is on its face a series of rules and norms, it is actually filled with interpretive gaps, places in which interpretive determinations have to be made. And so the law is inherently political for Schmidt and indeed the performance of interpretation is where the law starts to have material force in the world. For Schmidt, the most interesting thing about the law was not its normative status, but what he called the exception, the moment of emergency in which the law has to be suspended in order to protect the normative order. And I say suspended because the law isn't abolished in this moment. It remains in place, just not in force. This is precisely what black demonstrates in the Kodematsu decision. To protect the constitutional democracy of the US, the law had to be suspended for Japanese-Americans whose very presence is figured as a threat to the US. But if Japanese-Americans were also citizens, who exactly was the court protecting? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Those insidiously stupid words were written by a man who owned other human beings as property. They were in no uncertain terms not equal. Indeed, the framers were terrified that women, slaves, and Native Americans would demand these unalienable rights to be equally extended to them. There's a letter exchanged between Abigail Adams and John Adams where she asks him in declaring independency to remember the ladies. And he names slaves, school children, Native Americans as taking inspiration from their resistance as a real problem that they're facing. As a result, from the very beginning of the Republic, bodies of color were codified as the exception to the universal assurances of the Constitution. This is most evident in the apportionment compromise which determined that slaves could count as only three-fifths of a person for representational purposes in the House of Representatives. When the framers wrote of all men and used the universal category of person, they did not, of course, mean all men, but instead a particular category of person, white-landed beings with penises. I know that's vulgar, but that's literally what they meant. From the inception of the nation, bodies of color could, I don't know why it's vulgar to say penis, actually. From the inception of the nation, bodies of color were considered so great a threat to the security of these subjects that the law was mobilized time and again to neutralize the threat that they ostensibly posed to the U.S. And indeed, one of George Washington's first constitutionally authorized acts as president was to declare a genocidal war on a confederation of Native American tribes in what would come to be known as the Northwest Indian War, the first thing we did as a country. The Constitution was designed to promote the eradication of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans and the subordination of women. It was done so in order to protect the white men who wrote it. Now Carl Schmidt, who I mentioned earlier, was a famous conservative, and his favorite enemy was Marxism, which was at the time the greatest threat to the traditional European sovereign state. But by determining that the law was political and structured by the particular, rather than neutral and universal, Schmidt shared something with Marxist critics of the law. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, jurisprudence is but the will of the dominant class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the norms of the ruling class. That's the quote. Classical Marxism understood the law as merely a tool of the ruling class. The history of Asian America bears this out. Asian immigrants were not subject to exclusion barred from owning land, detained in concentration camps, and racially profiled as an aberration of the law. All of these discriminatory practices were and are carried out and bolstered by the authority of the law. When it comes to matters of racial discrimination, the law is all too often the source of injustice, if not the thing that protects the structures and logics of white supremacy. Now, why am I saying this today as we reflect on events from the 1940s? Two days ago, a young black man was shot in St. Louis. The police claim they have ballistic evidence proving that the young man was shooting at police. Witnesses claim he was carrying a sandwich. They might have that evidence, but the truth is we're at a state where we can't actually believe what the police say in cases like this. A few months before this, as we all know, a young man named Mike Brown was shot by white police officer, Darren Wilson. Again and again, I heard calls for the Ferguson police to be answerable to the law. Meanwhile, we watched as tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets, and militarized police were called out against the very people they were sworn to protect. We saw the insanity of mass arrests of peaceful protesters, alongside the harassment, and in some case, arrests of the press. And all the while, people around me were asking, where is the law? And promising that one day the police would eventually have to answer to the law. And then Ferguson was over. Certainly, there will be a formal civil rights inquiry by the Justice Department, which I'm sure will result in the tedious bureaucratic regime of reports, recommendations, and fines. But I don't believe any of us think for a second that Darren Wilson will be indicted for murder, or worse, that any of the leaders responsible for declaring war on civilians will be indicted on a single charge. To be clear, the law authorized Darren Wilson to kill an unarmed young man. It also authorized the state to declare a ground war on protesters in Ferguson, an action that we are so far unwilling to do with ISIS, and for what reason? Because they burned down a quick trip, the equivalent of a 7-Eleven. An unarmed citizen is shot and bleeds to death on the street in front of his grandmother, and that's justifiable and legal use of force. Angry people respond by burning down a convenience store selling delicious Cheetos and Slurpees, killing no one, and the state turns a suburb into Fallujah. Why? Because black people protesting were not seen as citizens exercising their constitutionally protected right to peaceably assemble and petition their grievance. Instead, due in large part to the fact of their blackness, their very presence as a collective was figured as a mob that was a threat to the state, not unlike Japanese Americans during World War II. And as such a threat, the Constitution is again suspended in order to preserve the integrity of the Union. We hold these things to be self-evident. It was the law that pulled the trigger and killed Mike Brown in much the same way that it was the law that protected George Zimmerman and allowed him to walk after shooting that little boy on a dark night in Florida over a year ago. It was the law that protected Vincent Chin's murderers after they beat him to death with a baseball bat in a parking lot. And it was the law that authorized the dispossession and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II that affected the exclusion of Chinese from entry into the US that barred Asian immigrants from owning land and that kept a group of innocent Uyghur men in Guantanamo until late last year. These were not aberrations in the law or miscarriages of justice. This is the law functioning as it was designed. This is what the rule of law looks like. Thank you. I better go after Josh on one of these things. Okay. So I also wanna thank Mia, Juliet, Asian Arts Initiative, Akata. And I wanna put in a plug for those who are visiting the East Coast for this, you gotta go down to New York and see Mia and see him from a marriage. It's fantastic. So, and I also just wanna thank you guys for including a panel like this in the festival. It's not often enough that scholars and artists get to talk to each other about ideas. It's hard sometimes, but it's really necessary. I work in a very nerdy scholarly program in a school of the arts. And we almost never get a chance to actually talk to each other. And when we do, we're often, we sort of see those other people in the elevator. And when we actually get to talk to each other, it's incredibly generative for us, at least. So I hope that what we have is will be generative for you guys. I also wanna thank Makoto for the fabulous performance and for his play to begin with. I actually teach this case, the Hirabayashi case all the time. But it's often a challenge to get law students to think seriously about the human stories that come before and beneath and within those Supreme Court opinions. Hirabayashi, not so much, Korematsu is taught regularly in constitutional law courses, but nobody ever talks about the actual plaintiffs. So it's important, I think, to remember those micro histories, not just the lives of the people involved before, as they were their lives before and after the cases. But what I actually really like about this play is that he talks about what's happening during the cases, how those little details, those phone calls, the memos going back and forth amongst the justices, those sorts of things, how those details actually create this history, these history-making events. So it's really wonderful to have a resource like this to share with them, so thank you. And I wanna thank everybody else for coming at this very early, non-artist-friendly hour. So I hope, those of you who are on the academic side, I hope you all indulge me. I'm gonna, because I wrote a little bit about this case and internment in my book on Asian American objection. So if you don't mind, I'm actually gonna rehearse a little bit, just briefly what I wrote there to set up what I really wanna talk about in terms of the play. So objection is this term that, it's a process that's been taken up in psychoanalysis. It's one theory among several theories about how we sort of come to be conscious people. It basically describes the way we become self-conscious. We come to think of ourselves as a sort of self. By becoming, so we become selves by becoming self-conscious, by becoming other conscious, right? We become who we are because we can define ourselves against what we decide we are not. And it's that deciding that matters here because the important point is that it's a performative act. We carve out parts of ourselves that we don't want to be in us and we designate them abject or other. So in psychoanalysis, the two big ones that we carve how it is being not part of us are things like death, decay, those sorts of things. We say, oh no, no, those things are abject, those are other, right? Possibly female embodiment is another one that is often abjected. So I took that idea from psychoanalysis and I tried to use it as a model for thinking about nationalism and specifically national racialization. How do we decide, and there's scare quotes all over here but I'm not gonna be doing this. So how do we decide what an American is? Well, it's not that, whatever that is. And in US naturalization and citizenship law, for a while it was explicitly not white. The naturalization law would only allow white men to naturalize to citizenship and then after the 14th amendment, it added aliens of African descent and people of African nativity, right? So it was if you could trace your genealogy to a continent or if you were this color, right? So those were the two possibilities for naturalization to citizenship. And there's a whole fun thing if we could do on the prerequisite cases for people of all different colors trying to say, well, I'm not of African nativity but I'm white, right? So there's a lot of Asian Americans or Asian immigrants who try to prove their whiteness, right? Because it's the only way to be legible in the naturalization law. So it took over 100 years. And many lost cases for the court to even grapple with the idea that non-whites could naturalize to citizenship. So 1878 is the first case. That's pretty late, right? In Ray Ayup, but there were many attempts before that where the court simply said, well, obviously not. This Mongolian, because that was the term, is obviously not white. So we're not even gonna take this case up. But they actually had to explain themselves. It took until 1878 that they had to explain what a white person was or why a Mongolian is not white enough to naturalize. And interestingly, it took even longer than that for them to decide to grapple with whether or not a person of Chinese descent born in this country could have birthright citizenship. Are we all done? 10 minutes, okay, yeah. So I'm gonna skip a lot. So the thing is, don't worry. So the thing about abjecture that interests me is that the thing you jettison, the thing that you decide is not me, keeps pushing back, right? Keeps reminding us that we made that decision arbitrarily and that difference between me and not me isn't natural. It didn't pre-exist or deciding that. So you have to keep pushing back and sometimes even violently so. And this is the model of US nationalism that I write about in this book that is constantly this way of sort of pushing out people, if not legally, then symbolically or culturally. That's not what an American is. That's not what an American is, right? And so in that way, I wrote about the internment as this sort of spectacular example of that, right? If we can't legally make these people foreigners, we can make them sort of symbolic foreigners by putting them in jail and it's sort of, there's some weird poetic justice about it that we're actually gonna draw them further into the country to make them more foreign, right? So it's that kind of tortured logic and the language and the opinion of Hirabashi that for me is symptomatic of a kind of panic or abjection response. And as Josh points out, it's still good law. And actually, I don't know if any of you heard this, but earlier this year, Scalia was giving a talk at a law school where he said, if you guys think that that's gonna happen again, you're fooling yourselves. So, and he actually made the point. He says, everybody says that, oh, well, that was a mistake. We're not gonna bother to overturn it, but obviously nobody really believes Kormatsu anymore. And that's when he said, and if you think we don't actually take that as good law, you're fooling yourselves. So what to do? So the problem for Asian Americans, well, one of the problems for Asian Americans is that, as Josh points out really elegantly, that kind of abjection, racial abjection is one of the ways that US nationalism props itself up. So how do you deal with the fact that on some level, your function within the US nation is to be a symbolic other? That US nationalism is structured in a way that actually depends on that dynamic. So in the book, I took up this idea of critical mymesis. It's not my term, it's other people's terms. It's also from psychoanalysis. So the idea that if the only way you can be legible, be recognizable is as that abjected other, then if the only way you can be legible is to be this sort of damaged or damaging stereotype. And the alternative is just sort of non-personhood. Maybe the one thing you can do is to play that part, but do it playfully, right? So be like playing with stereotypes, that sort of thing. It doesn't necessarily cure the problem, but at least it makes you visible and present in the conversation. And maybe once you're in the conversation, you can shift it a little bit. The other thing about play though that interests me is what does that play do for the players? And for people who are part of that abjected class. So it's not just sort of sneaking in, being the stealth sort of stereotype so that you can talk to the dominant culture. But what does it actually do for the people who are in that abject class, who are sort of messing around in this area? So lately I've been interested in this other tactic. That is what happens if we play with not playing the stereotype? That is to be the abject other that keeps pressing back on the integrity of that sort of dominant culture us. So one thing this does is produce, I think, discomfort for the subject. This is why I'm writing about discomfort now. That is, we think that sort of the dominant culture, we don't wanna be confronted with the them, the other that gets too close to us. And this comes up in all sorts of ways in the law, in immigration, obviously, but also accent discrimination cases. Like I just don't wanna be in a workplace where I hear somebody who sounds different from me. Or in different ways, a kind of violent reaction against same-sex marriage or anti-trans people policies, that kind of thing, right? So in one sense, that means paying attention, oh, that doesn't make any sense. So I'm sorry. So I was thinking about what does it mean to sort of get, sort of actually embrace that abject status, not as a stereotype, not to play the legible dominant culture recognized, sort of approved stereotype, but to actually just be that abject other and then get really close to the dominant and stay there, right? And I'm really interested in that kind of, that sustained interaction. So I actually was gonna talk, but I don't have time and it's fine, about there's a whole project by a bunch of Asian American lawyers and judges who started out as a hobby where they would just re-enact trials, like the Hirabayashi trial, like the Kormatsu trial, like the Vincent, they refer to Vincent Chen as their greatest hit. And I'm really interested in this idea and they're not actors, they're not professionals, they're very enthusiastic, but I was really interested, like what is the pleasure in inhabiting, and inhabitation is an interesting word, right? For conference on home, to take up these really horrible stories of Asian American abjection and play them. And when you interview these guys, they talk about how much fun it is, right? And so I'm sort of interested in the pleasure of inhabiting those things and sort of taking them up in a bodily way. However, what Makoto's doing is, of course, totally different. It's a staged play with, thank God, real actors. So my argument there is that these performances sort of literally body forth the discomfort that sort of proximal difference or abjection engenders and in so doing enact this sort of paradoxically a reparative performance practice that allows us to grapple with and to see in new ways the sort of violent performativity of law through the device of theatricalization. So I'm gonna, sorry, skip ahead, I know I'm running out of time. So I wanna suggest that these performances like this offer an opportunity for us to grapple with the really difficult and painful discomfort of abjection and find an ambivalent pleasure in doing so. And so I wanna close by bringing it back to Makoto's performance as a way of opening up the conversation because we're running out of time. So I think there's something about willingly putting the body in the place of the abject that is taking it up and taking it on. And I think there's something in this that's something related to what May was talking about and Derrida's forgiving the unforgivable. Because I think Derrida doesn't talk a lot about this, but my sense is that in order to be able to forgive the unforgivable, which is, as he says, it's like this paradoxical, impossible thing that you have to do anyway. What it means, it requires, I think, in some way an investment of the body that you have to actually be willing to inhabit the body that is both injured and then gives forgiveness. It's not an abstract thing. It's not a mental thing. It's not something you can only do in the space of a legal opinion that's written down. There's something about the actual inhabitation of that act that is different and effective, more effective, I would say, than law. So I ended with a question, which is what does abjection, injury, and maybe forgiveness feel like? And I think that's something that you guys can tell us that lawyers and Supreme Court judges cannot. So I'd love to hear what you guys think about the play and what you guys are working on, all that kind of stuff. So. So for really a conversation for each month to respond to what it is. What is our vision for what we can do through performance, through Asian-American theater, right? And so it's like, why is it historical? Why is it important to re-perform? And it's particularly, specifically to me now, and what's really loud for me is the things that we didn't mention, like detainment camps, like refugee camps, particularly Palestinian, like, you know, the ways in which we artifact your feeding in histories right now. And so for me, the question of how do we forgive is only about past, right? It has to be about how do we build solidarities that prevent us from repeating these histories as an act of forgiveness, you know? So as even as we are gathered, as a conference of Asian-American, you know, kind of prime representation right in theater, gathering, how do we make sure that we're not rising or isolating or disconnecting ourselves from these other concurrent realities that we shouldn't, in fact, be using our own histories to connect to and illuminate and change and that perhaps is that way, forgiveness is possible, right? Is that way, forgiveness is something that we do for ourselves and for each other as people who come in the U.S. and will be confined, comes Jonathan Mann, the director and activist from London's, I know the time's very short, but I think that as an activist, I've been able to get a Black British-acted director, etc., about 15 years ago, come to our British stages and TV, I don't know if there's more on that. Subsequently, the LGBT community are putting new things, etc., to be used soon and now, you know, two years later, in that place, we've changed. So I think your comments about press and the leaders of society, they, sometimes you can press them and things kind of change. I'm trying to press the cap to live in the press and the leaders for Asians in the U.K. and these leaders aren't pressing me, so it's just fascinating that these are the reasons for here, and if you'd like the representation to see what people have left in color, the second point about it happening again, in the U.K. there's been a series of yellow-colored things about cultural revolution, Iowa Way, Tiananmen Square, and the fact that it could happen again to Asians in China, whatever, if it happened to me. Thank you. Thank you. I'm terribly sorry, I think we have to continue. I could go on for two more hours, and then I hope it'll be very short in time, and thank you all very, very, very much. Two conferences in Los Angeles. And we've had two conferences in Los Angeles, we've had two festivals in New York, we had a conference in Minneapolis, and being here in Philadelphia, a new location for us is really very important because a very huge impetus for the formation of Kata was to be able to know Asian American artists from around the country, to be able to get to know their work, their communities, their environments, their homes, because this kind of community building is very important for our efforts for Asian Americans to be a very vibrant, significant, important part of American culture. And we also use that as opportunities to meet neighbors so that we can form partnerships and alliances, and we wanna thank our allies here. I'm sure that they have been thanked before, but I just wanna mention them again, Interact, Painted Bride, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Fringe Arts, Chinese Christian Church, and Underground Arts. So, Tim, I would love it if you could join me up here in Gale, of course, as our host. Yeah, they don't wanna move. Okay, fine. So, because it's really kind of a wonderful announcement that we have, which is something that gives all of us, the Kata Board, a great pleasure in pride to announce our next great partnership, which is going to be for the fifth National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival. Plan for the fall of 2016. May we go to the video, please? Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Roush. I'm the Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And I'm Christopher Isiba, Associate Artistic Director. We have a commitment here at OSF to be inclusive of the many voices that make up the American theater. We are very proud to welcome audiences from all over the country to come and see our 11-play repertory. And that is why we are so excited, so energized to be hosting the fifth National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival in 2016. I hope you'll join Kata and OSF in coming to Ashton, Oregon, be part of the national conversation and raising the visibility of the Asian and Pacific Islander voice. Can't wait to see you to share our plays with you, our town with you, our theater with you, here in the beautiful hills of Southern Oregon. See you in 2016. We have here with us today Sharif Ajoka, who is the fair experience manager at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Could you please come up so we can all thank you. Hi. In the interest of time, I'm gonna be very brief, but I should say that I joined OSF in 2011. And I'm originally from Los Angeles. And before I actually went up to Oregon, there was this great conference happening. And I thought, wow, I should just go down there and meet a lot of theater practitioners to prepare for my job. So the fact that I'm standing here now three years later and having any role in hosting the next conference is really humbling. So it's my great pleasure to invite all of you to join us in 2016. Tim and Leslie Snehal, Kata, everyone, we are going to plan a very fantastic experience. And all I can say is go big or go home. And we're really excited. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you to everybody. I think we're gonna be going to whatever... Do you need to make an announcement? Excuse me. Thank you all so much. I hope you're enjoying your conference today. I do have a couple of housekeeping announcements. Thanks, Gail. I love you too. So a couple announcements. Firstly, there's a lunch possibility available here on site on the third floor. It's $10 if you'd like to purchase. You can do so at the front desk. I believe it's a delicious Indian food ordering. Is that correct, Gail? Indonesian food with some vegetarian options as well. So it should be marvelous. So that's on the third floor. Check in at the registration desk to purchase an order. You can also purchase an order for tomorrow if you would like lunch also at Asian Arts Initiative on Saturday. Secondly, the performance of Children on Medea must absolutely run on time. Our performer Sujan Song has another production she's in down in Washington, D.C. and has to catch a train at 3.30 promptly. So yesterday we delayed her show a little bit and it was a little scary for her. So we just request if you're planning on seeing that show, which I encourage you all to do, to just make sure you're arriving about 10 or 15 minutes early so that she's not, we're not running late. Secondly, on the long list, for Fujian sex tapes performance, we've had to limit some of the singing because of the nature of the piece. And I know that several of you expressed interest in attending it earlier in a survey monkey form. If you did so, we're gonna need you to check in at the front desk to confirm that registration and also to choose a new time. The piece runs 45 minutes and it's on the hour at seven, eight, nine and 10, tonight and tomorrow. I've been able to grab several of you but with running into the events, it's a little hard to confirm all these things. So just make sure that you check in at the desk with us to confirm a registration time if you have already preregistered for Fujian. If you're interested in getting on a waiting list, please sign in too, but preference will be given to folks who filled out the survey monkey previously. Next cap size is a one o'clock performance being held here on Asian Arts Initiative by performance artists and dancer, Junglun Kim and Marion Ramirez. It's incredibly limited seating so we can only accommodate 10 of our conference attendees. So if you haven't signed up for a slot and you're interested in it, you must put your name down on the list. I think there's one space left on today's performance and a couple tomorrow. So I strongly encourage you to check it out. It's dedicated to the Korean school children who died in the cap sizing of the ferry last spring. Next on the performance is what no ping pong balls is unfortunately mislisted on Sunday at eight p.m. in your printed programs. It's correct on the website, but it's a two p.m. performance, Sunday at two. So I know many of you are confirming with the printed programs. Do make sure to make that correction. It's Sunday at two p.m., a matinee, not eight. Next, I think that announcement's been made. Oh yeah, so regarding opportunities to have more conversation around these amazing themes and topics, you all are just starting to dip your toes into. The third floor is fully open for you to convene, hang out, confer with each other and prompt you in a more prompted context. I please encourage you to go up there. There's an elevator on the first floor. You can also schlep up the steps if you like. It's a really large space, so there's plenty of room for folks to have conversations up there. So please do make use of that. If you're not, so let's see, a quick orientation into the building space. You're in our theater and at the hall and the front is the gallery and up the steps is the second level where the rest of the conference itineraries are being held. So studios B and C are on that floor and we have a greeter up there to help direct you. Speaking of that, our next panels, based in this location here is 2020 Evolving Asian American Theater and studio C is our new play reading of Alameda and in studio B is a panel discussion and workshop titled Rainbow Connection.