EventsCommon Ground#748

Expanding Asian America

Featuring Dorothy Wang, Al-An deSouza, and Joan Kee, with Margaret Rhee

Thursday, February 16, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Leave a donation ✨🌈

Scholar Dorothy Wang and artist Al-An deSouza join Rail Editor-at-Large Joan Kee for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Margaret Rhee.

In this Talk

Dorothy Wang

A photo of Dorothy Wang on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Dorothy Wang is Professor of American Studies at Williams College, where she spearheaded the founding of Asian American Studies. Her monograph, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, 2013), won the Association for Asian American Studies’ award for best book of literary criticism in 2016 and made The New Yorker’s “The Books We Loved in 2016” list. The only national conference on race and creative writing is named after it. Wang conceived of and co-founded the Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) initiative. She has been an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow.

    Al-An deSouza

    A photo of Al-An deSouza on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Al-An deSouza is an artist working across photo-media, installation, text and performance. They draw upon official and informal archives, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, Krannert Museum, IL; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Mori Museum, Tokyo. deSouza, a professor of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, has published numerous essays and two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought, A Handbook for Change (2018), and Ark of Martyrs (2020), a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness.

    Joan Kee

    A photo of Joan Kee on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Photo by Stuart Comer
    Professor Joan Kee teaches in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and is a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at MoMA. Her forthcoming book, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity, engages with Black and Asian artists and the vibrant worlds they initiate through their works and will be released by the University of California Press this April. Kee’s other books include Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019) and Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2014). An occasional public interest lawyer in Detroit, she is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail.

      The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

      Dao Strom

      A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

      Close

      Home