2021/2022 CONFERENCES & PANELS

4.16.22: Ruins: A Performance and Interactive Literary Workshop with She Who Has No Master(s: AAAS Conference with Lily Hoang, Dao Strom, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Vi Khi Nao, Phuong Vuong @ 1pm - 2:30 pm MT with scholars of Southeast Asian American literature Michele Janette (Professor of English, Kansas State Univ), Aline Lo (Assistant Professor of English, Colorado College), and Mai-Linh Hong (Assistant Professor of Literature, Univ of California, Merced.

She Who Has No Master(s) (SWHNM(s)), as a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora, will direct attention toward considering the ruin and renewal of the color yellow. We propose a workshop that brings together ritual, performance, and history in order to collectively engage in a community of renewal. This workshop model is designed to excavate the collective ruins through yellow renewal and provision of care. It invites and fosters communal engagements through the tutelage of yellow motifs existing in the fabric of  food (candied ginger, jackfruits, bananas, possibly even durian), in the textile of yellow ghosts (incense burning, altaring), in the ambered garment of self-care, in the generative poetry makings, and in the collective photographic and performative musical chair self-portraitures. It intends to hospitably advance the harmonious relationship between panelists and audience. And, it’s a space and workshop devised to nurture one’s relationship of self-care through communal-based nourishment. 

Prior to the Conference, SWHNM(s) will engage in collaborative writing and acts of self-care as prompted by reflections on legacies of what which has been ruinous to the Southeast Asian woman and trans and non-binary individuals. Collaboration is a concerted act of renewal for both the individual, and the collective of individuals. During the conference workshop, SWHNM(s) will first share this collaborative work via brief “performance,” before proceeding to host three different “stations”: the Altar, a radical re-envisioning of the ancestral altar in which we offer and receive nourishment; the Red Envelope Station, where panelists and audience members will receive care packages and offer words of renewal to gift to others; and the Photo Booth, where individuals will engage in collective and collaborative group self-portraiture and reclaim the color “yellow.”

4.9.21:  Ecological Sounds of the Vietnamese Diaspora: AAAS Conference with Diana Khoi Nguyen, Dao Strom, Vi Khi Nao, Nha Thuyen, Hoa Nguyen, Barbara Tuong, Mai C. Doan  @ 10am - 11:30am PST 

As continued and emerging studies reveal, sound plays an instrumental role in the health of our local and global ecologies. In thinking about this year's conference theme, "Unsettling Transpacific Ecologies," it is crucial to examine the transpacific and diaspora boundaries between sound and soundlessness, where being alive, noticed (or watched), acknowledged (or ignored) intersects with one's ability to sound, or be quiet. How are these borders further complicated by markers of race, gender, and class? How loud can we be, and where, and when--and how does our sounding affect how others sound in response, in return (and vice versa)?

Of course, there are myriad ways of sounding: through music, song, poetry, storytelling, noise, dialogue, speech, all of which have visualized components for sounding as well (sheet music, pages, scripts), including the movement of bodies which channel these sounds. Each of these presenters work with the complicated tensions, shifting borderlands, and invisible inequities latent within social bodies (individual, communal, geographical, and historical). This panel is an event for them to generate and share with each other the ecological sounds of our current moment within the diaspora.