"What Type of Asian Are You?" (And Other Problems)

This is part three in a series of posts on Asian Americans, inspired by and in concert with a charity event being put on by the Columbia student group, Asian American Alliance. Click here to read the first and second posts in the series: "Who is an Asian American?" and "'Will All The Asian Americans Please Stand Up?': The Politics of Self-Identification" and make sure to join in the conversation!

So, we've found our Asian Americans. They are on board to identify as people that are politically and culturally distinct, but who want to organize and represent themselves as a group. Where do we go from here?

Take a moment, first, to envision who you view as an "Asian American" based on just the term alone. What does this person look and sound like? Where are they located? What type of job are they doing?

"Will All the Asian Americans Please Stand Up?": The Politics of Self-Identification

This is part two in a series of posts on Asian Americans, inspired by and in concert with CultureSHOCK, a charity event being put on by the Columbia student group, Asian American Alliance. Click here to read the first post in the series: "Who is an Asian American?" and make sure to join in the conversation!

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of self-identification for Asian Americans - a topic that can be the fly in the butter for many individuals, but also for many groups trying to organize around this identity pool. Why is it such a challenge? Let me give a personal example.

In the United States, I am highlighted by my difference. I am a Bengali woman (or, more often, the generic "Indian" woman). But when I interact with my family in Bangladesh or otherwise abroad, I am categorized as an American. But what is an American? In the US, non-white peoples are already coded as "less American" or otherwise foreign, so it can feel very strange to have to pick ethnicity or nationality as one's primary identity.

As Asian Americans, are we more of one than the other? Do we identify most with our ethnic group, with our nationality, with our politics, or with something else entirely? We carry within us unique experiences that can relate to any one of those questions. The task is to integrate them and find where they intersect as we conceive of ourselves as whole people.

Tomorrow: representation of these complicated Asian American folk.

Who Is An Asian American?

This weekend, Asian American Alliance (a campus group that I am a part of) is putting on their annual charity culture show, called CultureSHOCK. It's going to be an electrifying event with a great lineup including Hari Kondabolu, Kelly Tsai, Brown Star, and many other Asian American performers and designers as part of our fashion show. All the proceeds will go to supporting CAAAV, the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. As with all of our work, we'll be working to highlight the broad variety of cultures and politics that exist in the Asian American community. Simple, you say? I think not.

Throughout the planning of this event, we've tried to encompass as much material as is possible to put into one show about Asian Americans - and it raises a lot of intense questions. Who gets to perform? What type of representation do we want to lay out there? How political do we get and how do we get that political message through the jovial/de-politicized atmosphere of a cultural showcase? And then there's the nagging question that undergirds our club's entire existence. The one that the Facebook event for CultureSHOCK puts with a little more vulgarity than I will in this post: "what the f*** is an Asian American?"

While the show will give you some ideas in its jampacked all-star lineup, I want to put down some answers this week in plain text form. Let's begin:

Who is an Asian American?