Claire Dwyer, in memoriam

Claire Dwyer, on No. 5 Road

I wanted to share the words by which I opened my presentation on No. 5 Road while at the recent Se faire une place dans la cité conference in Montreal. My collaborator on the project, Claire Dwyer, passed away in the summer, just as I was moving to my new post across the Pacific from where we had done our project in Richmond, British Columbia. When the illness that took her was in its advanced stages, a few colleagues of hers at University College London had contacted me to be part of a small project honouring her for her promotion to Professor. I was not able to come through for that venture. I also thought we’d have more time with her; she even emailed me from the hospital about our project and had the joy to discover that the last letter that she had written last year while I was on the job market was the one that got me my position at Singapore Management University.

And then, she was gone. I did have the words to grieve, and as I told my colleagues at the time, I did not know how I would find them. But Frédéric Dejean and Annick Germaine invited me to Montreal to talk about our project and said that they would say a few words about Claire. It was this conference that thus forced me to stop avoiding my grief and stare it in the face.

These, then, are the words by which I began my talk. Having said them at the conference, I feel it is only right to make them public here:

I want to begin by thanking the conference organizers Frédéric Dejean and Annick Germain for this kind invitation to speak here in Montreal. I have been on an academic job market journey of sorts over the last few years, so it has been difficult to pin down exactly where I have been: Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, and now, of all places, Singapore. It is an honour to be brought in from so far, to a place that is almost entirely run en français. I have not spoken French with any semblance of competence since I learned it in a high school in California fifteen years ago. Apologetically, I will have to speak in English today. I do, however, know what people are saying, not just words, but almost full arguments. The problem is that my incompetence lies in retaining what you say. If you ask me what it was you said, I will have forgotten by the time you have uttered it. This means that I can probably participate in some discussion in French. But I will not dare to speak it myself, unless we have another cocktail tonight.

In this morning’s presentation, I come in the memory of my colleague and dear friend, Professor Claire Dwyer. I understand, when Frédéric first invited me, that Claire was supposed to give the talk that I am now about to give. With some shock, we probably learned around the same time that Claire was too sick by late last year to work, much less travel. It is poetic that the final job reference letter that she wrote for me was for my current position at Singapore Management University. I had the opportunity to tell her this news when she emailed me to discuss — from the hospice, no less — our collaborative project on what is known as ‘the Highway to Heaven,’ the stretch of road in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, British Columbia where there are over twenty religious institutions within three kilometers.

She was also well-loved in Singapore, especially at my university — Singapore Management University — where we are informally forming a small hub of cultural geographers of religion, with our president Lily Kong and my colleague Orlando Woods also there. Lily and I especially have tried to work through our grief together. I recently told her that I did not know how to grieve Claire. How do I even begin to grapple with the person who came all the way from London to Vancouver to mentor this kid in qualitative research methods because our department did not have such a course and then proceeded to work tirelessly to make sure I grew up and got a job that I could hold? I learned how to do research through this project on No. 5 Road. In fact, I even met the woman I married on the Highway to Heaven while doing this project. I do not know how to grieve Claire, and I hesitate from saying that this presentation in her memory is my public expression of grief because I do not know if that would cheapen it. But I am spending all of this time at the front of my presentation commemorating her because it was she who was supposed to give this talk. I hope her spirit is here. It would give me some confidence. In comfort, Lily told me that this is why we must hold our loved ones closer to us now, always.

Still, three months after the news, I am now here, on our behalf. In fact, the last time I gave this presentation, it was also in Montreal, in St Joseph’s Oratory. I find that it is poetic that I get to revisit Montreal with this work, holding Claire in my heart. I certainly hope that my performance will not be as disappointing as the last time.

Memory eternal, Claire. With the saints, grant her rest, O Christ. Memory eternal.

American Studies Association 2019: Third World Studies, Not Ethnic Studies: A Conversation with Gary Okihiro

This last weekend, I was in Honolulu for the 2019 annual meeting of the American Studies Association. The roundtable panel that I organized was titled ‘Third World Studies, Not Ethnic Studies: A Conversation with Gary Okihiro.’ Its place in the program was on Friday, November 8, 2:00pm to 3:45pm, Hawai’i Convention Center, Mtg Rm 319 B. The subtitle in the program was ‘Re-Building Global Solidarity from Asian American Studies and Native Studies,’ but the general will of our roundtable members, including me, was for it to be changed to ‘A Conversation with Gary Okihiro.’ And so it was.

The roundtable revolved around the provocation made by Okihiro in Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation that the educational objectives of the Third World Liberation Front in the late 1960s were stillborn and replaced with an ‘ethnic studies’ hegemony that focused on communities of color, not on the conditions of material domination in the infrastructures of what Okihiro terms the ‘social formation.’ Chairing the panel was the historian Ji-Yeon Yuh from Northwestern University. Karen Ishizuka (Japanese American National Museum) elaborated on street gangs as pre-political preparation for the more radical movements of the 1960s, Doug Kiel (Northwestern University) engaged Okihiro’s engagements with what the indigenous scholar George Manuel calls the ‘Fourth World,’ Daryl Maeda (University of Colorado-Boulder) talked about the institutional challenges of Third World Studies as opposed to ethnic studies, and yours truly addressed the methodological contributions of talking about the social formation as opposed to the myopic social scientific gaze on communities.

We had a very lively discussion that broke down concepts of the ‘academy,’ the ‘university,’ the ‘community,’ and the ‘streets.’ But perhaps the consensus was that the best part was that Angel Trazo, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, drew our panel. Here is her tweet:

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Workshop-Conference: Se faire une place dans la cité (16-18 October 2019)

I am so excited to be preparing to fly to Montréal to be part of the workshop-conference ‘Se faire une place dans la cité‘ from 16-18 October 2019. Frédéric Dejean and Annick Germain have been discussing it for over a year with me, and it’s finally happening, along with a stellar line-up of keynotes by Lori Beaman and Jean-Paul Williame.

I’ll be part of two sessions on 17 October. The morning one is titled ‘Urbanisme, dynamiques spatiales et religions,’ while the afternoon will be ‘Les groupes religieux au service d’une ville inclusive ?’ My understanding is that I’ll speak for about twenty minutes on the research on which I collaborated with the late Claire Dwyer on No. 5 Road in the morning, then on the parts of my book project on Cantonese Protestants in Vancouver in the afternoon.

What is intriguing about this conference is that the presentations seem to be a prelude to a larger conversation that will happen in three-hour blocks. I understand from Frédéric that the delightful challenge for us academics will be to speak practically to planning practitioners. I relish this opportunity — as I told my dean, it’s a bit of a rapprochement — and in doing so, I’ll have to brush up on my high-school French. Frédéric tells me that everyone’s PowerPoint will be mercifully in English. I do not know if I will be brave enough to speak a language I haven’t spoken in years on my colleagues’ home turf.

Many thanks to Frédéric and Annick for organizing, as well as their very competent organizers Louis Raymond and Vincent Létourneau for handling the logistics.

Book Review: Joining the Choir: Religious Membership and Social Trust Among Transnational Ghanaians, by Nicolette Manglos-Weber (in Sociology of Religion)

I’m very pleased to receive word that my book review of the sociologist Nicolette Manglos-Weber’s Joining the Choir: Religious Membership and Social Trust Among Transnational Ghanaians (Oxford University Press) is out in the most recent issue of Sociology of Religion. It was a real pleasure to read, especially since it concerned Ghanaians in the city of Chicago, where I was living when I wrote the review.

Many thanks to Grace Yukich for asking me to do this review, and of course to Nicolette Manglos-Weber for writing such a fun book. By way of a more personal recommendation, friends came over around the time I was moving to look for interesting books to pilfer from my collection and thus lighten my load. Joining the Choir was instantly taken from me by a sister and brother in my own church choir — it is not only the Ghanaians who use this terminology among transnational religious communities in Chicago (mine is ‘transnational’ with Kyiv) — though in the throes of packing, it slipped my mind. A few weeks later, I was at these friends’ house and saw the book. Isn’t this mine? I said, and no one could be sure. But it had been read, so they were sure it was theirs now.

Worldview: ‘Extradition Bill Withdrawn in Hong Kong, But Protests Continue’

I was on Worldview on WBEZ 91.5 FM in Chicago yet again for an interview about the ongoing Hong Kong protests, after the Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s announcement that she is planning to withdraw the controversial extradition bill. This is my second recent interview this month with them; I was on last week as well to speak about the mass arrests of leaders in a ‘leaderless protest.’

I was pleased with how this interview went, though the truth of the matter is that Mondays are my most serious workday, and my greatest hope when I arrived to speak with Jerome McDonnell was that I would at least be coherent. The questions were, as usual, very good, covering a range of topics from the appeals to the American government for support, Joshua Wong’s visit to Germany, the drama around the announcement about the bill’s imminent withdrawal in Legislative Council, and the possible futures of the protests. Jerome’s questions even got me to pull back deep into the heart of the research that consumed me from my undergraduate days and has percolated into the graduate work that fuels my career: the identity politics of the ‘Hong Kong person’ from the 1970s to the present. We also got to speak about protest music; my only regret is that I did not mention the new song being sung as an anthem titled ‘Glory to Hong Kong.’

I see these interviews as the community engagement portion of my scholarly work. As I told Jerome, the task of scholarship is to describe, not prescribe, so all that I am doing here is to see, to sort, and to say what I see and am sorting. It is an offering, then, for ongoing conversation on these momentous events in Hong Kong. I am thankful to Jerome and the team at Worldview, especially the producer Julian Hayda, for bringing me in yet again, and I hope that I was coherent enough in my description of the problems and prospects at hand to encourage further discussion among the publics who listened and will listen to this segment.

Vancouver Sun: ‘Douglas Todd: Hong Kong protesters turn 1970s hymn into anthem’

I’m very pleased to have been interviewed as part of the journalist Douglas Todd’s piece ‘Hong Kong protesters turn 1970s hymn into anthem.’ My main role in this article is to sketch how the protests in Hong Kong have been using the Jesus Movement chorus ‘Sing Hallelujah to the Lord,’ which I also did with my colleague Melissa Borja on her Anxious Bench group blog on Patheos, and how Christians may or may not be part of the protests in personal and institutional ways.

I like how Todd positions my comments as the lead-in to the story that he really wants to talk about, which is the hundred or so pro-China protesters who picketed the evangelical Tenth Church Vancouver during a Hong Kong prayer rally organized by an inter-denominational and ecumenical group of clergy. Interviewing one of the clergy leaders Samuel Chiu, Todd sketches a broader picture of Chinese Christians in North America — and indeed, Chinese communities in a more secular sense — that are internally divided in terms of transnational politics.

In addition to the Hong Kong interest, this is a developing and interesting story in Vancouver. I’ve written about the senior pastor Ken Shigematsu before as a ‘different kind of evangelical‘ who emphasizes an Asian Canadian sense of social justice and contemplative spirituality, and I’ve also put an article on Tenth into the Brazilian journal Relegens Thréskeia. On this particular issue, Shigematsu has commented on the church’s solidarity with ‘justice issues’ in a non-partisan way, and Fr Richard Soo SJ — the Eastern Catholic priest who brought me into the Greek-Catholic church that has formed so much of my recent musings on the postsecular even while I continue to write, research, and teach on publics on the Pacific Rim — has written an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun about how religious solidarity with Hong Kong is not the practice of partisan politics.

I’m thankful to Douglas Todd for reaching out to me. Our first real conversation took place around my doctoral work on Cantonese Protestants, with a focus on the Vancouver case and their politics around sexuality. Since then, his stories have also engaged my work on the ‘Highway to Heaven‘ in the suburb of Richmond, the everyday lives of transnational Asian youth in Vancouver, and the wider implications of my work for the state of multicultural Canada. There was also a fun piece on the relationship between Christmas and ‘Chinese culture.’ I hope to return the favour for him writing about me — and more importantly, doing so with a constructive and critical eye in not so much giving me a megaphone, but really pushing me to figure out what responsibility I have to publics in Richmond, Metro Vancouver, and Canada that I study — by writing about how he has done the same, as I suggested in that dissertation of mine, for Chinese Christian communities in Vancouver.

Worldview WBEZ 91.5 FM Chicago: ‘Prominent Activists Arrested in Hong Kong’

I am so pleased that my friends on the show Worldview on WBEZ 91.5 FM Chicago had me back on to discuss the Hong Kong protests and the recent mass arrests there. The host Jerome McDonnell wanted to discuss a number of issues with me, including the significance of the date August 31 to the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the (non)ideological stances of the protesters and the issues of (non)representation in a leaderless movement, the ramifications of ‘one country, two systems’ for the question of rule of law, and the future of the protests. My reflection on working through each of these themes is that it was not unlike giving an undergraduate lecture. There were quite a few technical terms that I found myself having to define as I was speaking, including ‘black hand’ and ‘white terror.’

As usual, my interpretations represent no one except for me, and in the context of a rapidly developing story, that ‘me’ is but a snapshot in time. The tentative arguments I make are, if you will, the work of a scholarly observer, and as I’ve clarified numerous times in the past, I have never claimed to be a ‘Hong Kong person.’ I also note that analytical commentary on protests is not the same as participating in them, and my comments are descriptive, not prescriptive. Just as I did as the lead editor of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Palgrave, 2016), my aim is to offer analysis based on what we know to be facts, not invented opinions. Needless to say, scholars like me also have minds of our own, so as is always the case, our views do not represent anyone except for ourselves. This understanding is the basis for the academic freedom that enables the dialogue and conversation that helps us to understand the world, instead of imposing on it models, theories, and conjectures that lead more to confusion than clarity. It also means that all errors of judgment are strictly my own and that acknowledging them is how we come together to grow in knowledge.

My previous interviews on Worldview on Hong Kong can be found on their site as well. These include reflections on the third anniversary of the Umbrella Movement in 2017, the trial of the Occupy 9, the legacy of Tiananmen on its thirtieth anniversary, the anti-extradition amendment bill demonstrations in the context of Hong Kong as a city of protests, and the suspension of that bill, with some comments in the last one that date it to what we knew in the news then, as opposed to what we are learning now from Reuters. As always, I am thankful to my friends on Worldview for covering international news with such a critical eye and attentiveness to local specificities, and with everyone else who has followed their own trials and tribulations in the world of public radio, I sincerely hope that their show can be saved.

COR 3001: Big Questions: Happiness and Suffering (Core Curriculum, Singapore Management University)

I am very excited to be teaching the Big Questions course that is being rolled out with the newly revised Core Curriculum at Singapore Management University. Each year, the ‘Big Questions’ rotate themes. This year, it’s Happiness and Suffering. I’m told that next year will focus on ‘global and local.’

Some people have asked me how a geographer like me can teach such a philosophical course. I often respond with an answer that I once heard from a prominent feminist geographer as to what geographers do, that our readings are quite ‘intellectually promiscuous.’ Our discipline focuses on the examination of space, what it even is and how that interacts with human agents and non-human actors, so there is an element of theory that is shot through all of our work. I see teaching something like ‘happiness and suffering’ as an opportunity to move from the theoretical to the philosophical, to be invested not only in the applicability of ideas about space but also to test whether how we think about the basic concepts of feelings, affect, interiority, the self, and so on are even sound, even as we are interested in how they come to be deployed in space.

It is in this sense that I’ve articulated my sections of the course to be focused on the philosophical, psychoanalytical, and postsecular dimensions of happiness and suffering. There is a field within academia called happiness studies that I understand to try to measure what happiness is, while alleviating suffering. What I want to do is to locate such discussions in a broader theoretical conversation about the structures of feeling and what Charles Taylor calls a secular age. In some ways, teaching the course in this way is, like all of my other colleagues who are trying out pedagogical pathways into this topic this year, a grand experiment to see whether these ideas will interest students who are faced with a real world in which they’ll have to work and build lives.

Teaching begins soon, so I must sign off on this update and keep up with my preparations. I’m very excited to meet my students.

My final post on Patheos

Today, I wrote my final post on Patheos. As I told the Catholic channel editor Rebecca Bratten Weiss when I resigned a few weeks ago, I am leaving on very good terms. The community of writers on the Catholic channel has been a dream to work with, and I hope that the friendships I’ve made there will last a lifetime and maybe even spin off into new projects. I’ve written my heart out there, literally, in keeping with the words of the original channel editor who brought me there in the first place, the philosopher of education Sam Rocha.

Writing for Patheos has been the fulfillment of an aspiration of mine since I was in graduate school. Then, a few of us started a blog called A Christian Thing hoping to write about how we negotiated the secular academy as persons of faith. We aspired to be a group blog not unlike the Catholic portal Vox Nova, which challenged the neoconservative lines that had become standard in American Catholicism with fresh new voices. We also looked to the conversations that were happening on Patheos, a portal of blogs that seemed to break new ground in allowing persons across religious and theological traditions to write deeply about their faiths, even if it sometimes made for some personal discomfort. As a postdoctoral fellow, I studied with James Wellman at the University of Washington, who also wrote on American religion on his Patheos Progressive Christian blog.

I always wanted to be part of the Catholic channel, though I haven’t always been Catholic. It was suggested to me before I was received into the Greek-Catholic Church of Kyiv that I might consider writing for the Evangelical or Progressive Christian channels, as my practice of Anglicanism might be amenable to both. The trouble was that there are, broadly speaking, three streams of practice in the Anglican Communion — evangelical, broad church, and Anglo-Catholic — and despite getting along with people in all three, my convictions, mostly shaped by my scholarly involvement in the critical revision of the secularization thesis afforded by John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad, tended to be more Catholic, in the sense of attempting to tap directly into how the world is constituted and sustained by the supernatural. A Catholic sensibility presumes that the path to such connection is primarily personal, through the person who at the end of the day is, in a variation of what the ancient monastic Macarius the Great put it in his meditations on the visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, a face faced by others. It is the interrelation with a world that is primarily spiritual that is what is universal in the sense of Catholicism, a sublime connectedness with the divine that is common to all humanity and throughout all creation. After my formal reception into the Kyivan Church, I was also received onto the blog, with the name Eastern Catholic Person.

It would be a mistake to think that the blog title made me a sort of representation of Eastern Catholicism. On Patheos alone, there are at least three Eastern Catholic blogs other than mine, such as Henry Karlson’s Little Bit of Nothing, Chase Padusniak’s Japplers and Janglers, and Pete Vere’s Orthodoxy in Communion with Rome, as well as the Pezzulos’ writing on Steel Magnificat about their own forays through Byzantine churches. The name of the blog was much more about being a person who has now found myself in an Eastern Catholic church, much to my own surprise. It took three years to blog through that story and to admit that I really have found my way home.

The reason for my resignation is simple: with a new permanent academic position, I simply cannot do everything. As it is, the blog is going dormant today, the exact date of its third anniversary. It is poetic that when Rocha brought me on, he said he’d give me three years to narrate myself. It is now exactly three years, and I’m done with the narration, there at least.

I am beyond grateful to my channel editor Rebecca Bratten Weiss for being such a stellar editor and for making my transition so smooth. My heart is very full, and in this last week there, I’ve written three summary posts that sum up the themes that have threaded through my writing there: an Asian American racial politics drawn from my upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area, the unraveling of what I have called the ‘private consensus’ as I have become more engaged with the theoretical practice of psychoanalysis, and my mystagogy as an Asian American evangelical who entered the Kyivan Church while engaging with Hong Kong protests and black feminism. The posts there, as is all my writing online, remain copyrighted, and the rights to them remain mine for future revision, re-publication, and development. I think I might do that eventually. But now I have to focus on my new position, and I depart from Patheos, a portal for which I have always dreamed of writing, with gratitude and a very full heart.

Summer 2019 update

photo by wife

The 2018-2019 school year has wrapped up, and summer is upon us. It’s been quite a year for me. I have a number of things coming through the pipeline, some articles, some book chapters, even a manuscript for a monograph that I’ve been crafting on Cantonese Protestants and postsecular civil societies on the Pacific Rim.

Some stuff has been happening already. A chapter of mine on cultural geography came out in the volume Theorizing ‘Religion’ in Antiquity, edited by Nickolas Roubekas, in which I continue my unlikely defence from my piece on ‘grounded theologies‘ of the legacy of Mircea Eliade as a historian of religion who is a central figure (at least as I argue) in geographies of religion. I gave a colloquium talk at Calvin College’s Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies on an article I’ve been crafting on Chinese American megachurches in the Silicon Valley. My critical reflective piece on the concepts ‘uniatism’ and the ‘model minority’ that the magazine Patriyarkhat invited me to write has come out, first in Ukrainian translation in the print version in December 2018, then online in English, and now also with footnotes and extended clarifications in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. I’ve attended four conferences — the American Academy of Religion in November 2018, a very interesting conference on Christian social activism and Chinese societies at Purdue’s Center for Religion and Chinese Society, the American Association of Geographers in April 2018 where I organized and presented an exegesis of Paulo Freire in a session on pedagogy and religion in geography, and the Association for Asian American Studies in that same month, during which I had the honour of organizing an all-star, standing-room-only panel on the historian Gary Okihiro’s provocation ‘Asians did not go to America; America went to Asia.’ We are going to continue the intervention with Okihiro’s work at the American Studies Association later this November in Honolulu, with another panel titled Third World Studies, Not Ethnic Studies, as a conversation around Okihiro’s longstanding argument that the internationalist sensibilities that gave rise to anti-colonial critiques of racial formations caved to liberal nationalist frameworks that led to the siloing of identity in the academy.

As I wrapped up my third and final year as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, I expanded the scope of my teaching. My course offerings this year ranged the full gamut of my repertoire in Asian American studies: Asian American history, Chinese American studies, Asian American religion, Asian American social movements, Global Chinatowns, and Asian American geographies. But this year especially, I have been drawn more directly into the formal individual supervision of students. In the past, I had taught some directed studies courses, as well as supervised research, on topics closer to my own research interests on Asian American Christianities and their relationship to Asian American studies. But this year, there has been a wide much range of independent studies topics, including Korean dance and ‘the invention of tradition,’ sonic orientalism in popular movie soundtracks, Global China and feminism, research methods in Chicago’s Chinese churches and trans-Pacific theologies, indigeneity and orientalism on the Pacific, the postsecular Pacific, and psychoanalysis and the Pacific. I also had the privilege of supervising my first thesis student Irina Huang, an undergraduate senior in American studies, who wrote a theoretically rigorous piece woven in with personal creative nonfiction essays on how obsessive-compulsive disorder functions in the normative public sphere as a ‘model minority’ of mental illness.

I continue to be active in my public engagements as well. The journalist Douglas Quan interviewed me for a very interesting piece last October on Richmond’s ‘cultural diversity policy.’ I have also been invited by Worldview on WBEZ 91.5 FM in Chicago four times over the last school year to offer scholarly analyses of Hong Kong, its tradition and practice of protests, and the recent blow-ups about the incarceration of some figures from the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement occupations in 2014 as well as the controversial extradition law.

In terms of service, one role that I have taken on over the last year is to be program co-chair of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Reading through the abstracts and thinking about organizing the program has given me new insight into what we do as social scientists of religion. I am glad to be working with our president Elaine Howard Ecklund and my co-chair Ryon Cobb as we expand the diversity of our organization, especially for the conference in St Louis this year in October.

Finally, my biggest and most exciting announcement is that I have just started work as Assistant Professor in Humanities (Education) at Singapore Management University. In addition to teaching courses in the School of Social Sciences, my major role there is to offer the Core Curriculum, a program that seeks to engage students across the school with the big concepts that are fused throughout our contemporary world. This year, the theme will be Happiness and Suffering, which I will teach, along with my colleagues, as a philosophical, psychoanalytical, and postsecular exploration of these affects, emotions, and orientations to the world. As an academic, my work is to write and to probe the complex phenomena common to our shared inhabitation of the earth, so it obviously goes without saying that my published views anywhere are in no way to be associated with my employers, as if academics could fully agree on anything anyway. Indeed, my convictions about all academic work — whether under the pillar of research, teaching, service, or community engagement — is that it should all be a springboard into a larger discussion in which all participants are strengthened through engagement, never the final word on any topic. I am thrilled to ‘let my work grow up,’ as I heard one senior academic once describe to a junior colleague, in this intellectual community, and I look forward to spirited engagements and enthusiastic conversation here.