 Welcome to Education Matters on Think Tech Hawaii, and I'm your host today, Carol Mon-Lee. Our show is called Why Asian American Studies Matter, and we're going to talk about recognizing the importance of the study of the Asian American experience and how some universities are responding. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can tweet us at Think Tech H.I. or call us at 374-2014. Dr. Leanne Day returns home to Hawaii from her first year in a postdoc program at Brandeis University in Boston, where she is currently the Florence K. Fellow in Asian American Pacific Islander Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. She's been teaching courses in Asian American Pacific Islander Studies and will be returning to Brandeis in the fall. Few universities have Asian American programs. Hi. How are you? Good. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. We'll tell the audience I've known you for many, many, many years. Oh, yes. So tell us, you just finished your PhD last year. And you have many areas of interest, but in particular this topic is important. Asian American studies matter. Why is that the case, and why is it important now? So I think it's sort of useful to kind of give a context of how I came about this field. I grew up in Hawaii. I never really thought about it. I didn't sort of consider what it meant to have, you know, an Asian immigrant experience or sort of what the descendants in Hawaii looks like until I went away to the mainland and I went to college. And I took my first intro to Asian American Pacific Islander Studies with a professor who's now at UH in the history department, Dr. Rosa. And it completely opened my eyes up to this whole set of experiences and the ways that individuals narrate those experiences through memoir, through poetry, through fiction. And that sort of started my interest in thinking particularly about why Hawaii is a different formation than the continental U.S., right? And yet this course was offered on the mainland. It was offered. Which school was this? This was actually an Arizona State University. Uh-huh. And they're not that many Asian Americans. They're not that many Asian Americans, but it has, it does have a higher Pacific Islander population. And so sort of thinking about what it means to be situated in Hawaii, in the Pacific, in the history of U.S. Empire, and the history of indigenous genocide, whether it's physical or cultural. And then thinking about the sort of influx of Asian migrant laborer's sugar plantations. So how that sort of compares to the mainland in ways that we can really think about why these issues matter today, especially when it seems like, you know, we're sort of in fourth generation, fifth generation. So why do these things matter? And sort of my answer is two reasons, like, right now under our administration, we're sort of dealing with a lot of, I mean, xenophobia, homeophobia, racial... Racism. Racism. I mean, just every sort of slew under that gamut. But it's really important to recognize that a lot of this comes out of exclusionary racialized immigration laws that came with Chinese migrants, right? Exclusion Act. Exclusion Act. I mean, that's the first... What year was that? The Exclusion Act. 18 something, I think. Wait, I should know this. It was a long time ago. Wait, wait. I do know this. 18. Ooh, I should know this. Well, anyway. So the Exclusion Act... Right. What did it do? So it prevented all Chinese migrants from immigrating to Hawaii, or sorry, to Hawaii and the U.S. The U.S. Yeah. It's quite amazing when you articulate that now that we actually had a law on the books that said no Chinese could immigrate to the United States or Hawaii. Right. Right. And then the subsequent ones, right? So then they added Japanese immigrants. So suddenly Japanese immigrants also became excluded, right? It continues layering on. So if you think about that history, then you kind of understand where we are, we're thinking about like the Muslim ban, for example, or thinking about deportations of undocumented individuals, right? It all stems from the beginning, and you would know this because you're a legal scholar, where it comes from that exclusionary legislation. And so I think that that's one way we can think about where we are today and how we understand U.S. racial formation. Right. And now you're saying right now there's more of an interest because of course the current political climate. Right. In the past, you studied this course with Professor Rosa, and that was what, about 10 years ago. And did you major in that field, or was there even a major in that field? So I spent a year at ASU, and then I went back to Scripps College, where they have an Asian-American program that's through the five colleges. But I didn't really want to follow that because I was so interested in what the particularities of Hawaii and sort of like a local Asian dynamic was or is. So I ended up just doing English and focusing my senior thesis on Asian-American literature produced in Hawaii and thinking about that context. I see. Yeah. Now, one of our topics today is the fact that universities don't offer a lot of courses or even degrees or specialties in this area. And why has that been? So, okay, so it's sort of really interesting because University of Hawaii at Manoa obviously has a great ethnic studies department, has indigenous studies, has Asian-American studies, Pacific Islander studies. And the West Coast, primarily California, Washington and Oregon, also have strong programs. But what I realized when I went to Brandeis is that the East Coast is severely lacking in these sort of field ethnic studies in general. Usually actually I have a statistic which is sort of interesting, which is that Penn and Cornell are the only major schools on the East Coast that have actual Asian-American studies programs. And yet there's a pretty sizable, almost 30% of the American studies programs. 30%, 20% of the student population is Asian-American at these schools. At those schools and not only that, not only just the student population but the academics, the instructional staff, so many Asian professors and scientists and researchers. And yet the studies have been very limited in terms of a specific course of a curriculum. And so what sort of happens is usually there might be like a specialty course in the English department or in the sociology department like Asian-Americans and social work or something or mental health. But they're not a long-term program so that students who are there at that moment can take that course but then they don't get anything else after it. And what's really exciting though is Dartmouth just this year implemented a certificate program in Asian-American studies, which is really exciting. So Brandeis is trying to build off a lot of that momentum that's sort of happening on the East Coast to get a certificate program and then a minor. So is that why you went to Brandeis to do your postdoc? You just finished your PhD at University of Washington. And so what were the opportunities at Brandeis that led you to go select Brandeis for your study? Because the position was specifically both thinking about Asian-American and Pacific Islander and thinking about how those two intersect, how you can think about indigenous studies in the Pacific and think about Asian-American experiences. And I felt like the program, I mean I belong to the Women's Gender Sexuality Studies program but there is no Asian-American Pacific Islander program like I am the program. You are the program. So there's nobody else teaching a course in Asian-American culture, experiences, studies. You were the only person. Now of course even in my day back in the East Coast we had courses in Chinese art, Japanese art but very dedicated to the East Asian studies or South Asian studies. Exactly. The core culture as opposed to the blend of the Asian-American experience or the diasporic experience. Yes. So there are a few courses, like one of my mentors at Brandeis teaches South Asian-American literature but we're talking about Asian-American literature. So usually typically like Indian-American literature in relationship to Indian diaspora. So it's sort of those types of courses but they need to be housed in an actual program. So students A, have a reason for taking them besides personal interest, right, so it fits a program, it fits a minor and it also shows the university's support of like why this matters. So how many courses are there now? You're teaching, how many courses in Asian-American studies? I taught one in the fall and one in the spring, teaching one in the fall. And that's all that Brandeis is offering right now. Yes. So is there a plan to expand that program, to include maybe even a specialty or certificate? Right, right. So it's really great because in 2015 the students at Brandeis organized and petitioned the dean and demanding that there be an Asian-American studies program. So this is all student driven. Students demanding this from the administration which I think is really indicative of how much it matters. Can you, is there a percentage of, do you know what the percentage of Asian-American students were involved either in this, in this request or population at Brandeis? The population at Brandeis is 13 percent. Of Asian-Americans. And did that correlate with the people who were asking for the courses? Yes, yes. So I mean there was a core group, right, who, you know, documented the demands and led protests. And so essentially what happened is that led to the hire of just, I believe he was a graduate student at the time. So he taught the first Asian-American experience class and that was the year before I came. And then they led to the founding of a postdoc position for me. And then now we're working to try and sort of advocate for a long-term position and to build a program actually at Brandeis. And so what would that program look like for Brandeis? Like are you using another school's program? I know that Princeton has something similar. Yes, Princeton has something similar. And then I've actually talked to a colleague at Wellesley and they built a program as well. So I think sort of the ideal is to get cross listings from courses that already exist. So whether it's, you know, modern Chinese art or if there's something on public health and immigrant communities. Yeah, something like that that could be cross-listed. That's sort of the plan. So work with what we have and then build. Yeah. Right. So do you see any particular challenges to this actually happening in the next? Two to five years. Yes. What are those? I think it's hard right now because I've had great enrollment in my classes, but it's hard because they're taking it without, it's just an elective for them. So it doesn't count to a minor. It doesn't count to a major. And these students are so motivated. I mean, they're double majors, minors, they're leading student clubs. So this is really time that they're taking out of their own schedule to come to my class. And so I think that's hard because the reward for the student has to be completely, personally motivated. The personal stakes are so high that they're going to take an elective that doesn't count toward any. But it's also a rigorous class because of course I'm assigning a lot and wanting them to engage in the material. What kind of material do you use? Everything. So I taught a survey course, so an intro. And so that's, you know, a historically based course. So I use a lot of historiographies, but I supplemented with memoirs. Like whose memoirs? Carlos Boulosan, America's in the Heart, Douted as the first Filipino-American memoir and Asian-American memoir. I also taught Mary Pack Lee's Quiet Odyssey, which is the story of a Korean-American woman, which is very rare for the early migration period. And then I loved teaching novels because I'm still an English scholar. So I taught Nono Boy by John Okada, which is about the Nono Boys and the loyalty questionnaire during World War II. And then I try and move it into a little more contemporary. So I taught everything I never told you by Celestine. And then this last semester, I was trying to teach more Hawaii-based text. So we did things from bamboo ridge press, like Darrell Lum, Eric Chalk, Nora Obja Keller, and then even when I taught The Descendants. Oh, yes. Yes. And we watched the movie, too, as part of the class. It's a famous George Clooney movie filmed here in Hawaii. Yes, with his tan that they had to add to his skin to darken him. So what's the response from your students, that kind of a class? Not to sound, you know. So one, they've never learned that history. They've never learned the history of exclusionary immigration ever, right? They didn't understand what the loyalty oath was for World War II, even though there's discussion now of internment camps. So the range of knowledge that they began to see in the patterns you can see in how the US responds to racialized migration, right? So K versus Chinese, then it's Korea. The Japanese, then it's South Asian, right? So the production of whiteness through these exclusionary laws really became clear to them. So that's sort of the historical side. And then I felt like they were really making political connections to why this matters to know this. And then on sort of like a more entertaining side, actually being exposed to experiences that they related to, whether they are fictional accounts or memoirs, the students found really rewarding that their experience has mattered, or their parents' immigrant stories had another voice somewhere else, right? So they count. They matter. Right, they matter. Well, on that note, thank you so much, Leigh Ann. We're going to go to a short break. This is Carol Monly on Education Matters with my guest, Dr. Leigh Ann Day. And we're talking about why Asian-American studies matter. And we'll be right back. Thank you. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 AM. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii. Not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea, a law. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists, both from here and the mainland, on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Welcome back. This is Carol Monly on Education Matters with my guest, Dr. Leigh Ann Day. And we're talking about the why Asian-American studies matter. So we spent the first half talking about your actual experiences past year at Brandeis, what you've been teaching, what other universities are doing, and where the movement is toward increasing that. Let's talk a little bit about some of your past work. I know that we had mentioned The Descendants, the movie The Descendants made here in Hawaii. And I understand one of your chapters in your PhD dissertation was about that. Yes. So actually, the dissertation chapter is on the novel itself by Cali Hart-Hemmings, Kanaka writer here. And so what my dissertation also tries to do is it pairs historical events of US Empire in the 19th and 20th century. So for example, in The Descendants chapter, I talk about the Mahele, 1848 Mahele. I talk about the privatization of land, the division of land as a consequence of US Empire, and how that sort of historical trajectory of land dispossession, indigenous dispossession, plays out in a contemporary novel. So it's not a novel that's written in 1852 about a Culliano. It's not historical. It's not that, right? It's a contemporary novel that's reimagining what that history is and putting it into a contemporary context. So I read The Descendants the novel as this reflection of that dispossession of land. So even though Matt King feels very conflicted about, oh, I have the lead character. I am the ancestor. I'm the descendant of Hawaiian royalty. What do I do with this land that I've inherited? And he struggles over this, right? And this is, sorry, spoil alert, right? He decides to keep the land, but he does it under the guise of wanting to maintain ownership for his own family and almost as this sort of retaliation against his wife's affair. And so I read that as the ways in which US Empire continues to produce even the ways that we think are fictitious. So when you create a fictional novel, you can write about anything, right? You don't have to think about US Empire or you don't have to think about the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. But I'm saying that actually it still persists, right? So it's the genre of the novel, which is a Western form of writing. And the sort of legacy of US Empire ideologies are so strong that they constrain what we can imagine in fiction, which is horrifying if you're an English scholar, right? Because it says that the novel still is produced by these colonial operaticists of thinking. Right. And I think that there's a way to read the novel where it resists in those moments. But to link literature and the history of colonial dispossession is what I'm trying to do. So what was the broader topic for your dissertation? This is just one chapter. This is one chapter. So I look at various moments. So another one is I look at the 1865 act to separate those suspected with leprosy to Molokai, to incarcerate, right? And I pair that with a contemporary novel that reimagines what that looked like for a Kanaka Maoli female. I see. So have you published your dissertation? Not yet. OK. So I'm working on turning it into a book manuscript. And what about chapters of it? I see some of the intimate relations, land and love and the descendants. That was published in Critical Insights, Multicultural Identities. Yeah. So it's a collection of essays that are specifically geared towards teaching undergraduates, sort of like literary analysis and multicultural sort of ways of reading. And so in that one, I actually look at the movie and I look at the soundtrack, which uses Gabi Paha Nui throughout. But I link it to sort of how the director, Alexander Payne, used the selection of Hawaiian songs to sort of mimic what's happening in the narrative and what happens when you look at the soundtrack and the film with the novel and the narrative itself. Because we talked earlier that you have been teaching a course on pop culture. Yes. And this is really frustrating. I love pop culture. So tell us about that course you taught this past year at Brandeis. How did that relate to the Asian-American experience or beyond? So it was actually because the students that were working on the student task force were like, you know, it would be really great would be a pop culture class because we have Fresh Off the Boat, which is the ABC TV show. We have Crazy Rich Asians coming out. There seems to be a lot of talk about what representation looks like. And a lot of comedians. We were talking about a lot of comedians who are Asian-American. Alley Wong. And then we got Margaret Cho. Margaret Cho as well. Joe Court. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I even know a few of these. You do. Yeah. And also, there are all those issues of a yellow face casting. Yes, representation. Representation matters. So the course was framed around those ideas. And what sort of came out of it that I hadn't expected is that a lot of the students who didn't take my first class were sort of lacking in some of the historical context for why you have the Asian nerd character, like from the Goonies. Where does that come out of? Or why do you have? The glasses and the engineer. Yes, yes. I make everything like, where does that? Because it all stems from the model minority production. Like, ah, they are good at science. They are good at math. So we sort of broke apart these archetypes and saw how they both developed. They get perpetuated. They get perpetuated. Yeah. And so we're most excited to see when we are reading things produced by Eddie Wong when we read his memoir and we watched the pilot fresh off the boat and we compared it with his. In 2014, he broke with the show, claiming that it didn't represent his experiences and that they had turned it into sort of a palatable sitcom for the broad white American family. And so having students be able to engage with that level of cultural criticism, like see the original text, see it being depicted on a TV show, and then hearing what the author himself thought of it. And what do you think of it? Do you think it's sold out, basically? I mean, I think a memoir is very different than a sitcom. A family sitcom, a 30 minute sitcom, is a very particular genre, right? Right. You have to relate to some component of it. And it has to have a certain mass appeal to get on TV and an audience and stay on. Right. So I think they're different. I think it's great to have Fresh Off the Boat, especially because it took 20 years between Margaret Cho's All-American Girl to Fresh Off the Boat to actually have a regular show. Yes, a regular show. So I think there's great steps there. I think that when you read the memoir, you understand what's backing. And I think that's a larger problem of Hollywood and broadcast television. I don't think it's something one show can fix, or something like that. Well, I know you're also studying. You also have very many other areas of interest. And let's talk about some of those. And I'm going to let's see. Besides American literature, because you're an English major, let's talk about some of your Pacific studies and literature interests, because that's kind of relates to this in general, the Asian-American experience. So are there many specific programs in Pacific Island studies? No. Fewer than in Asian? Fewer, yes. But actually, the University of Washington, my alma mater, just instituted after literally 40 years of constantly advocating for this. But they just instituted a Pacific Oceanic Studies certificate and minor within ethnic studies. So it's really, really exciting. And they're the only one besides UH Manoa that has that. Although, I've heard that University of Utah is also working on one. But what I've done at Brande is actually to think about Pacific studies, because the population is like 0.1%. 0.1%, right, very small. So it's very, very small. But what it does is actually screen this amazing documentary by Ciara Lacey out of state, which she premiered, I think, a year and a half ago at the Hawaii Film Festival. But it's about incarcerated kanaka modeling men who are sent to privatized prisons in Arizona, where they actually learn. But it's where they learn Hawaiian language and dance. And they come back to Hawaii and have to figure out where is home and how do you sort of integrate, how do you navigate, how does culture help you through these processes. So I screened that at Brandeis. And then we actually had a Skype Q&A with Ciara herself to talk about these issues. Is there a big interest in that course? So it's not a sorry, it's not a course. It was just an event. Oh, the movie. Yes, you should have showed the movie. Yes. But as part of your course? It was extra credit for my course. Extra credit, I see. I was the attendance. Just curious. It was good. I think a lot of people were interested in sort of the ways it intersects with thinking about mass incarceration and thinking through masculinity. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a Pacific identity that's being worked through, but it becomes this really useful vehicle to think through. Like, why cultural performance? Why Olalahoa, why learning the language matters and what it does? So that's sort of one example of how I try and bring Pacific studies into what I'm doing at Brandeis. And I think it's, honestly, it's even useful just to show a map of the Pacific and name how many different islands there are because the East Coast is like, what? Wait, there's different forms of Oceania, right? It's not all Polynesia. There's Micronesia. There's Melanesia. There's like all of these islands. So you're right. It's too far away for them. Totally. But it's so useful to start that conversation because then they start to think about like, oh, but what about native genocide on the continent? Like who is represented here, even though it seems longer ago, right? And you're also interested in gender studies? Yes. And how does that fit into all of the bigger picture? I just don't think you can think like race and class without gender and sexuality, right? It's an intersectional approach. And that there's something, whether you're thinking about the concept of marriage or masculinity and indigenous identity that comes through the way gender is organized under a heteropatriarchal system. So how do you compare then the Asian-American gender issues versus the Pacific Islander gender issues? Do you do anything like that, like kind of a comparative? Not a direct comparison. I'm more sort of thinking through different locations where you can see maybe that happening through gender on the plantations or like a plantation narrative and then thinking through. The plantation narrative in Hawaii. In Hawaii. And where it's primarily Asian-Americans as opposed to Pacific Islanders. Yes. So then taking up, me taking up like Hanani K. Trask's poetry and thinking through the construction of femininity and sort of how these both occur in the same geographical space but in very different ideological planes. So how do you read them together? So how do you think through gender? So but it's not direct in the sense like parallel. Well, Leanne, this has gone by so fast. We only have a minute left. OK. So what I'd like you to do is to look into Camera 4 and to give our audience your thoughts on the future of Asian-American studies and why it's so important. I think to really understand US racial formation or the construction of race in the US, you have to think through both African-American studies and Asian-American studies. And so go see Crazy Rich Asians. Go check out. There's so many authors, right? Look at The Descendants again. Watch The Descendants again and think about especially if you're from Hawaii, how is Hawaii being constructed and how are Asian-Americans being constructed in this narrative? And I think one thing that I just want to say that might be useful is that a lot of my international students talk about how they didn't become Asian-American until they came to the US, right? So they were Japanese, Korean, Chinese. And then until they came to the US, then they're like, oh, I'm an Asian-American. What is an Asian-American? And what does that mean politically? That's my thing to think about. Well, thank you so much, Leanne. It's been a really interesting topic. And we hope you come back. Yes. Come back to Hawaii. Longer term. OK. Thank you. Thank you. That brings us to the end of our show. We've enjoyed bringing it to you. I'm your host, Carol Mon-Lee. And we've been talking about why Asian-American studies matter with my guest, Dr. Leanne Day. If you want to see this show again, go to thinktechhawaii.com or youtube.com slash Think Tech Hawaii, where there will be a link to this show and many more, just like this one. Think Tech is a 501c3 Hawaii nonprofit digital media company dedicated to raising public awareness about issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. Thank you so much to our studio staff and to all the people who watch, care, and contribute to our Think Tech Hawaii productions. We'll see you on our next show, aloha.