News & Events

Sponsored by the Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University in collaboration with The College Themester. Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program.

On November 13th and 14th, the Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) will be hosting a two-day conference on Black rock on the Indiana University-Bloomington campus.The conference and related activities are open to local and regional musicians, scholars, students, and the general public for a nominal fee.

Reclaiming the Right to Rock: Black Experiences in Rock Music will bring together Black rock musicians from different generations and regions with music critics and scholars to discuss the socio-political history, musical developments, and the future of Black rock.

This is an informal roundtable lunch discussion that allows students and community members to talk about specific concerns that affect Asian Americans. In observance of "National Adoption Month Awareness," Ms. Thomas will share her experience as an abandoned biracial child in South Korea where she had lived in an orphanage until an African American family adopted her into the United States at five. Ms. Thomas is a blues guitarist and vocalist who began studying organ at the age of six and as fate would have it, she was given her first music lessons and introduction to the organ by the great Jimmy Smith.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Ms. Thomas started writing songs by the time she was nine after being inspired by David Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted". Ms. Thomas' first group was a female band called "School Boy Crush" of course named after the AWB song, two all female rock groups by the name of "Software" and "PMS". She formed Crank, which was a 3 piece hard rock band that shared the stage with Ice T and Body Count, Fishbone and Macy Gray.

Ms. Thomas was hired out as a guitarist to several funk and R&B bands, doubling on guitar and bass just this past year in the Grammy winning band A Taste of Honey, taken second place in the 7th annual Jimi Hendrix contest and played in Japan, France and New York at various music festivals and events including the Manhattan Music Center.

Her biggest influences on the guitar were Buddy Guy and Prince. She also looks up to Albert Collins, Jimi Hendrix, Albert King, Rosetta Sharp, T-Bone Walker, Gary Moore, and especially Stevie Ray Vaughn. As fate would play its hand again, a friend introduced Ms. Thomas to Ernie Isley who gave her some critical one on one with her beloved instrument.

A light lunch provided to participants. For more information, please contact acc@indiana.edu.

Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program

Come and learn more about how the Japanese community steadily developed in size and structure between 1900s and 1920s in the Chicago area. Doctoral student in History, Mayumi Hoshino will share what she uncovered in her research over lunch on Nov. 9. Please bring your friends. Monday Table Topics is a monthly discussion and luncheon with graduate students and visiting scholars at Indiana University. The roundtable serves as one of the many informal outlets for scholars to talk about topics that are related to Asian cultures, history, arts, education, politics, government, and business. A light free lunch is hosted by the IU Asian American Studies Program.

Co-hosted by Indiana University and Purdue University, this conference will feature the work of students from both our institutions and from other Big Ten universities, as well as a Roundtable on Teaching, and a Panel on Professionalization.

In partnership with the School of Informatics, the Asian Alumni Association, and the Asian Culture Center, "Crossroads" will also honor Mr. Anurag Mendhekar, this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award. Mr. Mendhekar is the founder and president of Blue Vector Systems, an award-winning company in state-of-the-art software based in San Francisco.

Josephine Lee will deliver the keynote address on Friday, September 25, 5-6 p.m. in Ballantine Hall 105. Professor Lee (English and Performance Studies, University of Minnesota) is President-Elect of the Association for Asian American Studies (the premier national organization in the field) and the Director of the Asian American Studies Consortium of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

"Crossroads" will also present a Poetry and Fiction Reading on Saturday, September 26. Please see full announcement below for more information.

This reading is part of the Graduate Student Conference "Crossroads: Asian America/Asian Diaspora Across Disciplines," presented in partnership with the English Department’s Creative Writing Program at Indiana University.

Debra Kang Dean is the author of Back to Back (1997), a chapbook of poems, and two full-length collections from BOA Editions: News of Home (1998) and Precipitates (2003). Her poems have been featured online at The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily; they have also been published in a number of anthologies, including Unsettling America, Best American Poetry, The New American Poets, Yobo, and Yellow as Tumeric, Fragrant as Cloves. Her personal essays have appeared in New England Review, Tar River Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, and in the anthology Under Western Eyes.

Eugene Gloria earned his BA from San Francisco State University, his MA from Miami University of Ohio, and his MFA from the University of Oregon. He is the author of two books of poems — Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006) and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000), which was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. He has also received a Fulbright Research Grant, a grant from the San Francisco Art Commission, a Poetry Society of America award, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

Samrat Upadhyay is the first Nepali-born fiction writer writing in English to be published in the West, and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. His first book, the short story collection Arresting God in Kathmandu (2000, 2001) has been translated into French and Greek. His stories have been read live on National Public Radio and published widely as well as in Scribner’s Best of the Writing Workshops edited by Sherman Alexie, and Best American Short Stories edited by Amy Tan. Upadhyay’s second book, the novel The Guru of Love (2003) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003, and a finalist for the 2004 Kiriyama Prize. His recent story collection, The Royal Ghosts, won the 2007 Asian American Literary Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award in fiction. It was also a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award.

"Traditional assimilation paradigms argue that immigrants are particularly disadvantaged in feelings of marginality and dislocation. Given these paradigms, we explore how minority and immigrant status are associated with perceptions of support among parents of young children. We use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a nationally representative sample of children in kindergarten in 1998-99. All groups of minority immigrant parents, compared to their native-born white counterparts, report lower levels of perceived social support, and this gap persists even when demographic and socioeconomic characteristics are held constant. Additionally, English language ability, but not years spent in the United States, attenuates the disadvantages that Hispanic immigrant parents face in their perceptions of social support. Finally, Hispanic parents report substantial variation in their perceptions of social support by ethnicity. As social support is an important predictor of parents’ economic stability and children's well-being, these findings have important implications for children of immigrants, an important and increasing demographic group in the United States."

"What do you see?" asks Karen Kandel, the statuesque African American female performer at the center of Ong Keng Sen’s 2006 "Geisha," opening her arms to us in supplication, inviting us to "read" her in relation to the performance’s title and its documentary-collage text, pieced from interviews, films, and essays by and about Japanese professional geisha. Ong’s work does not so much attempt to answer that question, as to prompt us to ask a follow-up: whatever one sees looking at Kandel (or the other onstage performers, Gojo Masanosuke and Kineya Katsumatsu), why do we see it? What are the performative cues that trigger the production of identification? In this paper I suggest that "Geisha" is less a study of a profession, and more an invitation to participate in a collective act of visualization that disrupts traditional racializing, gendering systems of knowledge that produce "the geisha" as natural to some bodies (but not to others), and a meditation on the transnational dynamics of seeing (difference). "