Rethinking Place in Asian American Histories of the United States

Location: Osher Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

Catherine Ceniza Choy will discuss her new book, Asian American Histories of the United States, in which she argues that Asian American experiences are essential to any understanding of US history and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century. She’ll discuss her work on pandemics, medical labor, and the role of the arts in resistance to dehumanization.

This talk is  part of a year-long program of performances, exhibitions, and talks that use Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance. The Angel Island Immigration Station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.”  But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design. 

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Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is author of Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, and co-editor of Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and her B.A. in History from Pomona College. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, she was born and raised in New York City.

Free and in-person; see COVID safety protocols here.

The event will also be live-streamed via Zoom webinar. To attend online, register for the webinar here.

Video of this talk will be posted about one week after the event.