An Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Event

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DESCRIPTION:
“California Dreaming brings together works by an impressive intergenerational group of Asian American scholars, artists, performers, and writers.”
—Tina Takemoto, California College of the Arts

Exploring the places of “Asian America” through the migration and circulation of the arts, California Dreaming: Movement and Place in the Asian American Imaginary is a multi-genre collection of works by Asian American artists based in California. Co-editors Christine Bacareza Balance and Lucy Burns will facilitate an extraordinary panel featuring several of the book’s contributors: novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, poet Mai Der Vang, playwright Prince Gomolvilas, and scholars Wendy Cheng, Lan Duong, and Nayan Shah. Highlighting creative processes, they will explore the rendering of California as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking its culture, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world.

Panelist Bios:
Christine Bacareza Balance (co-moderator) is a co-editor of California Dreaming, the author of the award-winning Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, and an associate professor of Asian American Studies at Cornell University.

Lucy Burns (co-moderator) is a co-editor of California Dreaming, author of Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, and an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA.

Wendy Cheng received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC and is an associate professor of American Studies at Scripps College. Her book, The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California, won the 2014 Book Award from the American Sociological Association.

Lan Duong is an associate professor in Cinema & Media Studies at USC. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism and her second book project is titled Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory.

Prince Gomolvilas is a writer, performer, and educator whose plays include Big Hunk o' Burnin' Love, The Theory of Everything, and The Brothers Paranormal. He won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Drama.

Nayan Shah is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at USC. He is the author of Contagious Divides (2001) and Stranger Intimacy (2012), and recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, von Humboldt Foundation, and Freeman Foundation.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland, winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance, Letters to Memory, and Sansei & Sensibility. She is Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Co-sponsored by Asian Pacific American Student Services.