Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

This past Saturday, writers, poets, and readers gathered in Dumbo, Brooklyn, for the day-long 3rd Annual Page Turner Asian American Literary Festival, presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (which is celebrating its 20th year). The unseasonable sleet and freezing temperatures couldn’t keep away a turnout of nearly 300 attendees.

Page Turner included literary sessions on the Occupy Wall Street movement, mother-daughter dynamics, a reception with Junot Díaz and Min Jin Lee, and a celebration of Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Jessica Hagedorn, (with a staged reading of her newest work Toxicology). The festival wrapped up with an afterparty DJ’ed by restaurateur Eddie Huang (Baohaus), and playlists handpicked by the likes of hip hop group Das Racist, writer Tao Lin, and music critic Oliver “O-Dub” Wang.

The panel I was able to catch (and no doubt one of the most powerful) focused on immigration -- featuring the CultureStrike campaign and its efforts to engage musicians, writers, filmmakers, and artists around the immigration debate and, more specifically, to advocate for an Arizona boycott. CultureStrike was formed in response to the passage of SB1070, which institutionalized racial profiling by local law enforcement and became an emblem of the inhumane persecution of immigrants and people of color in Arizona.

The session was moderated by Andrew Hsiao (Verso editor) and featured Teju Cole (photographer and author of Open City), Elizabeth Mendez Berry, (music journalist and NYU educator) and Naeem Mohaimen (artist, writer and activist).

           From left to right: Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Teju Cole, and Naeem Mohaimen

Cole and Berry were a part of the inaugural CultureStrike delegation to Arizona, where they learned from on-the-ground advocates how border communities are affected by SB1070 and the immigration enforcement system, which processes a deportee every 37 seconds. They also learned that at least 5,000 people have died in attempts to cross the desert since 1994, while deportations have increased to record numbers under the Obama Administration -- an estimated 400,000 per year. A study conducted by the Mexico government found that 60,000 unaccompanied minors were deported from the US during a 6-month period in 2008, almost a quarter of whom entered the foster system or ended up on the streets.

Cole presented photos he took during the delegation, stating he wants to “connect what’s happening in Arizona to elsewhere in the world … this is a systemic problem, not relegated to any one sector.” The most distressing images included a comb left behind by a man who died in the desert, the local morgue filled with rows of body bags, and a mound of crosses bearing the names of people who perished -- one cross bearing the lipstick imprint of a grieving sister.

Berry, who said “the undocumented are the people who facilitate our lives,” discussed some of the factors and US policies that drive migrants to the US, such as NAFTA’s destruction of Southern Mexico’s agricultural economy. Current US enforcement practices are also bound up in the prison economy, with private prisons collecting profit for each immigrant detainee, and whose board members have been the architects of legislation like SB1070. Copycat policies have also spread to other states like Indiana, Georgia, and most recently Alabama.  Berry feels that “through the arts’ role of ‘imagining,’ we can make the invisible more visible, change the frame, and provoke people who may not ordinarily care about policy.”

Naeem reflected on the harassment of South Asian, Muslim and Arab communities post-9/11, and the need for different immigrant communities to leverage and make connections amongst themselves about parallel experiences, saying, “The community should not separate itself down lines of “good migrant/bad migrant.”

Naeem also cited Fred Korematsu as being one of the first to compare post-9/11 discrimination to that of the Japanese American WWII/internment experience.

Overall, the CultureStrike panel made a strong case for the power of art coupled with activism, and illustrated the importance of engaging writers and other artists not only as cultural commentators, but as politicized educators and advocates in the movement towards a more humane American policy agenda. The merger of art and politics appeared to make an appealing, natural fit within the Page Turner Festival.