ASIANS, FROM THE BEGINNING OF our settlement here, have had to write ourselves onto the script of a nation that has, for the most part, excluded our collective histories and occluded our individual voices. Because no one ever “gave America to us,” freely, we have had to collectively find it, rock by rock, wave by wave, one migrant at a time stumbling across the barbed wire of Arizona sands or steadfastly towing our bodies to reach the darkened shore of Rockaway Beach, Queens, or the foggy shores of San Francisco Bay. Yet after we found it, we had to build a city—no, rather a barrio or an enclave upon the rock.
Author: Russell Leong
Prema Ann Kurien: An Interview with CUNY FORUM
Following is an excerpt:
This interview was conducted via e-mail by Russell C. Leong in March 2015 for CUNY FORUM.
Sociology, Religion, and Migration
Leong: You have stated that sociologists of religion rather than sociologists of immigration, have different approaches to the role of religion in shaping migration patterns. How do you situate yourself as a sociologist who studies both religion and immigration?
Kurien: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to discuss my work. I started out as a sociologist of immigration with no training in the sociology of religion. Religion was not on my radar at all, and I stumbled onto the importance of religion in shaping patterns of migration by accident during my dissertation research. I have since found it to be central to all my projects, even ones where I had decided not to focus on religion! I think this makes me different from most other sociologists of immigration who generally do not include religion in their analyses. I still see myself as a sociologist of immigration first, but someone who understands how religion can interact with migration and settlement processes through a variety of direct and indirect mechanisms. My interest in how religion can impact the lives of migrants and their children in indirect ways distinguishes me from most sociologists of religion, who tend to focus on religious institutions or on people’s religious beliefs and practices.
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Linking Asian Pacific Latitudes
IN HIS EDITORIAL DISCUSSING the “knowledge economy,” Pico Iyer states that we “overestimate how much we understand the world” in relation to historical and contemporary events. Likewise, in our understanding of Asian and Asian American Studies, we produce knowledge, but we may not always understand the complex shifts and currents of scholarship in relation to other stories and voices of the community, and what they imply. For example, in this issue, Jess Delegencia links his experience as a student at UC Berkeley with the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, the People Power Movement in the Philippines, and the Los Angeles Uprisings with the forming of his own identity in the U.S. and South Africa. New Pacific connections also reveal themselves in this issue: indigenous writer Syaman Rapongan, together with scholar Hsinya Huang, offer an oceanic perspective to challenge current global/continental ways of positioning the world.
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Creating Forums: ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES TODAY
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS SEPARATE Younghill Kang’s depiction of Korean immigrants in 1920s New York and Jennifer Hayashida’s observations on the practice of Asian American scholarship today. Yet the words of these two writers bridge the underlying struggles — and dreams — of the immigrant journey and of the historical experience of Asians in New York and the Eastern seaboard from the eighteenth century onwards.
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A Third Literature of the Americas: with Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Kathleen López, Maan Lin, Yibing Huang & Wen Jin
Literature changes as it travels, creating new languages, new ideas, and new critics. Literature may even create a “third space” for telling stories differently than before. Thus, as Amitav Ghosh has stated, “stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose.”