AAR 2018: ‘Orthodoxy in solidarity with the Umbrella Movement: the backdrop of Chinese politics for evangelical and Eastern Catholic cooperation in Vancouver’

The American Academy of Religion is meeting in Denver this year. It is shaping up to be a productive time for me, with meetings dotting my schedule across committees and other professional chats. I find that these discussions are a big part of the joy of going to a conference like this, especially because everybody is here. I started coming to this conference when I was still in graduate school as a geographer. I think I still am one of the fewer geographers here, but I feel like I’ve gotten over the initial hangup of not knowing how to engage religious studies from my disciplinary background. Perhaps it is a sign of integration.

Apart from being on the steering committee of the Chinese Christianities Seminar, I also presented a paper in its Saturday session on ‘Crossing Ecclesial Boundaries’ in the Convention Center, Room 204, in the 1 pm session. Here was the abstract:

Eastern Catholic Church Richmond, a small temple in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in British Columbia, has an outsized reputation in both the global Ukrainian public and local Chinese Protestant networks as a ‘Chinese mission’ worshipping in a Byzantine tradition in communion with the See of Rome. Empirically, this church’s multiculturalism, and its smallness of numbers, reveals such claims to be exaggerated. In this paper, I explore how the temple gained this reputation by tracing the participation of its pastor Fr Richard Soo SJ in solidarity events with the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, during which Chinese Protestants in Vancouver came into contact with the church. My central argument is that what enables that theological boundary-crossing is the imaginative backdrop of Chinese politics, a transnational imaginary through which conversations about social justice in Vancouver can be discussed with some distance. In this sense, the ‘Chineseness’ of the temple is not about its ethnic identification, but its political practices. This paper contributes to the study of Chinese Christianities by proposing that ‘Chineseness’ is not about ethnicity, but about the political locus of China as a material and imagined site in which Christians across ecclesial boundaries collaborate to stage civic interventions.

It was an interesting experience presenting a paper where I myself am the key informant, and we had an intriguing discussion across all the papers about the phenomenon of ‘conversion’ in Chinese Christianities. I feel that the field is growing fruitfully. It has been an honour to be part of it.

October 2018: full website update

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Photo credit: Julian Hayda

It has been too long since I have updated this website — two years, in fact. Since that time, much has happened. I am still Visiting Assistant Professor in the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, still churning out the scholarly publications and presentations. In the haze of all of that work, I have forgotten to update this website and all of its parts to be synchronized with what I have been doing and what I have accomplished. To compensate for that forgetfulness, I have acquired my own domain name and fully updated the site.

My hope is that I will continue to be able to update this site with what I am doing in my scholarly life, as well as with calls for papers and other interesting news that should be circulated. Links in the pages on publications, presentations, teaching, service, and community engagement have been posted to the announcements of their occurrences, with apologies for not being able to reflect on them as deeply as I have done in the past. I hope to be better about this in the future.

Finally, the sections about who I am and what I do have been fully updated. Needless to say, they are fully copyrighted, so I am not very concerned about revealing a bit of what is happening in the workshop. I offer it therefore for perusal with the hope of generating some critical conversation as I continue to work on executing it.

Ching Feng: ‘A Tale of Three Bishops: Mapping the Ideologies of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Asian Values’ in the Global Anglican Realignment in Vancouver

Having recently received copies of the full journal issue of Ching Feng: A Journal of Christianity and Chinese Religion and Culture (vol. 15, issues 1-2) where I published ‘A Tale of Three Bishops: Mapping the Ideologies of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Asian Values’ in the Global Anglican Realignment in Vancouver,’ I read it again. In all sincerity, I think I liked it.

With that liking comes the courage to share. Perhaps the scariest thing for a scholar is to be evaluated by the communities that first gave us life, but we also must not, I am reminded, take from the community without giving back by making the scholarship part of the commons for all of us to enjoy. I must share it and did so on my Facebook, and again here on this website, which has not been updated for some time. I have in fact promised it to a number of people who have been interested in it, some of whom are even named in the piece because they were either interviewed for it during my doctoral work as far back as 2011 and 2012 or because they are named in documents and books. That amount of persons is too many to count, and while I could have sent them all an email copy, I figure that if there was ever a time to use social media and a blog to spread it, it is now. I will not tag them so as not to single them out, but I look forward to their responses when they read it. Perhaps they will even reply to my social media posts, or they might seek me out via email at jkhtse (at) northwestern (dot) edu.

‘A Tale of Three Bishops’ is my attempt to parse out the Anglican realignment in Vancouver since the late 1990s. I argue that with all the talk about Anglicans splitting over sexuality issues, what is more salient in the Vancouver case is ideologies of the ‘global city’ and the concepts of ‘Chineseness’ that spin out of that urban economic fantasy. I think this is the most fair way to describe a fracture in which folks on all sides have their own stories to tell about a side they don’t like. I try to portray each of them in their own words, as the only stake I now have in this Communion is an ecumenical one, as an ecclesial outsider from the vantage point of my Eastern Catholic church and in my professional work as an Asian American geographer of postsecular Pacific publics. I hope that this work presents a modest but worthwhile contribution to the fields of Global Christian studies, Chinese Christianities, and the integral part that the Anglican Communion continues to play in the work of what the theologian Paul Murray calls ‘receptive ecumenism.’

I am thankful to everyone who went on the record for this when it was part of the doctoral dissertation and now is much expanded from the three pages in the doctorate to the published peer-reviewed article it is now. As I say in the piece, I consider myself friends with folks on all three sides, and I hope that our friendship is magnified, not diminished, by the publication of this piece. Indeed, a memorable line from one of the reviewers said that I was able to resist the temptation to editorialize and speak in the terms of conspiracy, preferring instead to write from the perspective of the participants themselves. While I am honoured by that affirmation, all errors of judgment are of course my own, and my gratefulness belies an openness to criticism, correction, and ongoing conversation with communities and persons whom I have loved for very long and continue to love with a full heart.

Vancouver Sun/The Search: Chinese evangelicals for Trump

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Photo: Nick Procaylo/Vancouver Sun

Well, friends, it’s hit the fan. The Vancouver Sun‘s religion and diversity columnist Douglas Todd has published a piece of mine titled ‘Law and order, stability and prosperity: Chinese evangelical Trumplicans in Metro Vancouver’ – or as they shortened it, ‘Chinese Christians for Trump’ – on his blog, The Search. The photo is one that they’ve had on file for about three years; it was taken by photographer Nick Procaylo at Richmond Public Market when Todd wrote a story about my doctoral work on Cantonese-speaking Protestants engaging Vancouver as a civil society. The post is about a certain ideology associated with voting for the United States’s Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that is circulating among – of all places – Chinese evangelicals in Vancouver.

The comments are still rolling in, and as I suspected, this little 700-word discussion piece is not only causing a discussion, but I’m probably going to get into a little bit of trouble for it too – not legally, financially, or materially, but ideologically. I used to be afraid of such trouble, but then I started reading Slavoj Žižek, and now I know that whatever trouble I get into, I will never be in as much trouble as him.

In fact, the takeaway quote from my piece is from Žižek’s recent book Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (p. 19, if you must know). Žižek has gotten into so much trouble for using the late long-time Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew’s catch-phrase ‘capitalism with Asian values’ to describe a more efficient, if not totalitarian capitalism that is uncoupled from a democratic civic polity, and qualify it as he might to say that it has nothing to do with ‘Asian people,’ he’s caught quite a bit of flak for it.

Some wish that I had qualified which Chinese evangelicals I was talking about when I attributed the support of Chinese evangelical Trumplicans to ‘capitalism with Asian values.’ The trouble, of course, is that I did:

  • ‘I don’t have the quantitative survey instruments to determine exactly how many Trumplicans there are among Chinese evangelicals in Metro Vancouver, but I’m pretty sure that most of them (an estimated 16% of the 400,000 or so Chinese Canadians counted in Metro Vancouver) can’t vote in the United States.’
  • ‘But what I don’t have in terms of statistics, I do have in social media posts.’
  • ‘I am told by both this woman and a financial planner in Richmond – and others still, for that matter…’
  • ‘Of course, such comments indicate that these Chinese evangelicals come from a particular class of people with wealth to protect (raising questions, of course, about whether there’s room in the religion for Chinese people who don’t have wealth to protect). But for this particular class of ethnic Chinese migrants, stability was why they moved to Canada in the first place. (They wanted to get) away from, say, the possible political upheavals of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, or the strangely personal dialectical politics of the market socialist mainland.’

In other words, the contingent of Chinese evangelicals propagating this pro-Trump material is by and large a wealthy class of persons that fled from Hong Kong or China in order to protect the stability of their capital from specific geopolitical processes. What I am saying is that these networks of ideological propagation are specifically Chinese evangelical because they tend to be run by such persons in association with an evangelical Protestant ideology (but often dissociated from the church, because they’d never want the church to get involved in politics).

Because I researched Cantonese-speaking Protestant engagements with Vancouver’s civil society, I have been part of the public that these ideological informational networks address for quite some time. An interesting turn over the course of my research has been a slow transfer of this material from email lists to social media platforms, especially Facebook. It is surprising how much of this material is sourced from conservative United States sites; I wrote about Trump, but I could have gone much deeper into their opposition to Black Lives Matter and their sharing of material meant to defame Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

When Douglas Todd and I spoke with each other about this phenomenon, it became clear that this was a fascinating turn for a network of people that had historically participated in Vancouver‘s civil society and were generally concerned about Canadian politics. Indeed, I have written and spoken quite a bit before about how I think that all of this participation on the Right is an investment on the part of Cantonese evangelicals into becoming Canadian. But what was striking to Todd and me was that the concern from this population was really about Trump in an election in which they could not participate in any meaningful material way.

Todd suggested that I write a short piece exploring this ideological phenomenon. What you see on his blog is what he got.

I’d like to thank Douglas Todd for this opportunity. I also want to thank my friends in Metro Vancouver for helping me keep my ear to the ground. Last but not least, I want to thank the various Chinese evangelical Trumplicans who have voiced their ideological takes on Facebook; it is because of them that this piece was written.

2016 Conference on Critical Geography: Situated Solidarities

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I’m taking the Greyhound home right now after attending a very interesting Conference on Critical Geography at the University of Kentucky in Lexington just this last weekend on October 14-16. I submitted an abstract at the last possible moment when I saw that my friend and interlocutor in geographies of religion Anna Secor had shared it from her home department. This made the preferred transportation method from Chicago to Lexington the Greyhound, which unfortunately meant that I missed Paul Routledge’s (Leeds) brilliant keynote, as well as this morning’s pancake breakfast (a tradition of these Critical Geography conferences). However, I have appreciated the University of Kentucky’s generous hospitality, especially the wine and generous helpings of Mediterranean food to which I arrived late on Friday night.

Secor chaired our morning session yesterday on Activist Imaginaries. The abstract that I submitted focused on a key problematic of my second project on contemporary occupy movements and ‘capitalism with Asian values,’ and because it is so provisional, I won’t post it at this time. Indeed, Anna circulated an email shortly before the conference to encourage us to bring to the table a problem with which we have been struggling in our current research. The talk didn’t have to be a polished academic talk; it was a five-minute introduction to our work. I jumped at the opportunity to talk about how the global Left seems to have labeled two of the social and political movements that took place in 2014 in which I am interested – the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine (which started in 2013) and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong – as reactionary and regressive in their politics. The question that I asked was: can social movements labeled as ‘reactionary’ and ‘regressive’ still be part of the ideological constellation of the Left?

The conversation that we had throughout the day suggested to me indirectly that this was a bit of an elephant in the room. In fact, we did not get around to discussing my question explicitly in the panel. I learned instead that – to the express dismay of some of the more senior scholars at the conference – what is really meant by critical geography at this moment is the attempt to theorize affect – the way that material and bodily masses react to an external stimulus – as political. Affect, as I have been learning from my friends and colleagues in feminist geography, has to be defined this way because it is not the same as emotion, which is the way that the consciousness of your feelings leads to action in space.

Of course, what all this talk about affect means, as one person put it, is that it’s a bit like Marxism without Marx, materialism without material.

But in the discussion about the possibility of affective politics, I heard quite clearly a debate about the Right. Scholars on the Left (especially those associated with Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School of cultural studies) have long shown that the Right has been very good about using affect to make people react politically. If it was the moral panic of the 1970s (as Stuart Hall had it in Policing the Crisis), it’s (as Secor put it in her five minutes) now as much pictures of refugees as the Trump phenomenon. The question, as Paul Routledge raised in his keynote, is whether these affective phenomena can be mobilized; though I missed the talk, what was reiterated throughout the day was Routledge’s prescription to mobilize anger. In one telling quote from a critical geography conference that happened in Palestine, Palestinian scholars and activists were remembered saying to fellow attendees who cried for their plight, We don’t want your tears! We want your anger!

What this affect means, of course, is that the boundaries between Right and Left in terms of political modes are being erased, which I noticed made some people at the conference decidedly nervous about the implications of politicizing affect. One would, of course, hate to be a conservative in critical geography!

But of course, all that’s to say that I came away with tools to continue to probe my question, and for that, I am thankful, although since I’m known as one of the ‘religion guys’ in geography, I’d hate to become known as a ‘conservative guy’ too.

I also decided to take advantage of my time in Lexington to do some other fun things. I discovered, for example, that my friend, the Rev David Moe, had recently moved to Lexington to be the youth pastor at the local Korean Presbyterian Church while studying at Asbury Theological Seminary just up the road. David and his wife Prissila took me out for Korean food, and over coffee afterward, we spent about three hours discussing Asian American liberation theology. I also found out that the Catholic Newman Center at the University of Kentucky houses a fairly diverse parish community called Holy Spirit Parish, and their assistant priest is a very gentle and thoughtful Sri Lankan priest, flanked by a delightful deacon who can really preach and whose participation in the liturgy helped me to see that the Latin Church still does indeed have a use for deacons going between the people and the altar. Finally, I found a place for Kentucky barbecue and bourbon, where I got to zone out after a long day of processing all these thoughts.

I am grateful to Anna Secor for bringing me onto this panel, where more interlocutors in critical geography have been brought into my life. I also want to extend a special thanks to Laçin Tutalar, a PhD candidate in human geography who is doing very exciting work on the soundscapes of Istanbul, for doing so much of the logistical work to make my stay at the University of Kentucky very pleasant – from organizing lodging to making coffee for those of us staying in the residences yesterday morning.

BOOK: Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Palgrave, 2016)

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As the lead editor of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement – a collection of essays that takes as its theological cue the 79-day protest occupations in Hong Kong in 2014 – I am happy to formally announce on this blog that I have received a hard copy of the book. The text has been available as an e-book since July, and I am now glad to see that a physical version is now available.

I think it’s incumbent on me as the lead editor to say something about how we put together this book, what the book is about, where this book sits in relation to my larger research agenda, and what the book’s limitations are in the ever-shifting situation in Hong Kong at present.

The book had its genesis in a forum that occurred during the Umbrella Movement on Syndicate Theology. In 2014, I was recruited by Syndicate‘s managing editor Christian Amondson to edit its Theology and Social Theory section – a task that included editing fora on Gil Anidjar’s Blood, Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern, and John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order before the site’s format was radically revised – and my first initiative as this section’s editor was to put together a forum on the Umbrella Movement, which I modeled after another quite successful series of essays on Syndicate titled Ferguson and Theology. For this forum, I recruited some of my colleagues in Hong Kong such as Kung Lap Yan, Rose Wu, and Sam Tsang (there were others in the mix as well, but because it was a volatile time in Hong Kong, these three were the only ones who could find the time to write), and I also wrote an original essay for the series critiquing the way that theology in Hong Kong had been done up until the Umbrella Movement and what changes the movement might contribute to the task of grounding theological reflection in the actual material and ideological conditions of Hong Kong as a city with a rich and conflicted history of colonization.

As this Syndicate series wrapped up, Jonathan Tan approached me with an idea that had come out of a conversation with Kwok Pui-lan (who wrote our foreword) to write a book on the Umbrella Movement that would be in English for readers who might not have any knowledge of Hong Kong but could also benefit them in the task of contemporary theological reflection. I drafted and submitted a proposal to the series editors for Palgrave MacMillan’s Christianity in the Asian Diaspora series, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Joe Cheah, as well as a request to Christian Amondson to publish the Syndicate essays in a substantially revised form. Tan also brought on Mary Yuen, who substantially revised an essay she had put into AsiaNews.it on Catholic social teaching and the Umbrella Movement.

As all such writing projects go, the task of ‘substantially revising’ quite rapidly turned into ‘original writing’; indeed, Sam Tsang ended up writing a completely different essay from what he had given to me at Syndicate, and the other essays have been expanded and reworked. My own submission to Syndicate has never been republished, although I’m sure one can find the seeds of what I wrote on the forum now in the book.

When I began to receive the submissions, it occurred to me that what makes sense in Hong Kong’s local context may not be intuitive for those who have no knowledge of Hong Kong. At the same time, Tan found himself consumed by another editing project. While the original plan was for him to write an essay situating the Umbrella Movement in the liberation theologies of Asia (indeed, one has glimpses of this in Kwok’s foreword to our volume when she discusses liberation theologies and the ‘multitude’), it fell completely to me to truly lead with a vision for what this volume would be – combing through the essays with a fine toothcomb to make sure they would speak directly to English-speaking readers and thinking about the scholarly discussions to which this volume would contribute. This is to say, of course, that most of the editorial errors in this book should be attributed to me, though I am thankful to Tan for the initial idea to turn this into a book and for recruiting Yuen.

The plan of the book emerged from these editorial challenges. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I is a detailed primer that I single-authored on Hong Kong’s politics and how it can be used for theological reflection, and Part II contains the four theological reflections from Mary Yuen on Catholic social teaching and the occupy movement, Rose Wu on the queer Pentecost that gave rise to an interstitial Hong Kong identity, Kung Lap Yan on the kairos moment of opportunity and danger of the political movement, and Sam Tsang with a stunningly original account of the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and how such an understanding of occupation radically revises the liberation politics of an occupy movement in Hong Kong.

These two parts are sandwiched between two pieces on liberation theology, an introduction and an epilogue, that I took the liberty of single-authoring as lead editor. Thinking through Tan’s original plan to situate the Umbrella Movement in the context of theologies of liberation in Asia, it occurred to me that what was awkward about the Umbrella Movement’s relation with the notion of liberation theology is that it wasn’t a straight-forward application of models advanced in the past; indeed, our authors – disagree as they might about every other aspect of the movement – agree on this one point. My introduction thus outlines the contours of the liberation theology that has gone before and how using the ‘see-judge-act’ analytic lens of theologies of liberation in Hong Kong will yield some surprising results. This transformed the primer that I wrote in Part I into an argument that demands for ‘genuine universal suffrage’ during the Umbrella Movement wasn’t a vacuous ideological slogan but came out of the actual material conditions of Hong Kong. In turn, the epilogue became about the relationship between the concept of conscientizaçao as understood in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and how the Umbrella Movement played out. In other words, my vision as the lead editor was not so much to fit the Umbrella Movement into a model of liberation, but to situate the Umbrella Movement as a contemporary challenge for how to do theology in solidarity with the materially oppressed in both Hong Kong and around the world. Each of the authors contributes to this vision by showing how their vastly different Christian traditions shaped the Umbrella Movement’s theological challenge to reflections on liberation, and my job as the lead editor was to fine-tune these four distinct voices as they made their original arguments to a readership that may not even be familiar with Hong Kong. As I made my way through these tasks, I received constant encouragement from my friend and colleague (and now Patheos Catholic editor) Sam Rocha, a philosopher of education who has thought a lot about liberation theology and who exhorted me to keep in mind the pedagogical aims of the volume.

Leading this editorial work (which included single-authoring about half of the book) forced me to think about what doing all of this work had to do with my larger scholarly agenda. I came to understand working on this volume as a sort of pivot point between my first and second projects and as the culmination of my Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington. The first project (which became my PhD dissertation and on which I am still generating publications) was my attempt at an ideological map of Cantonese-speaking Protestant engagements with Pacific Rim civil societies, especially Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. While the research for this project ended before the Umbrella Movement, it can be said that the lead-up to the protests, the protests themselves, and the aftermath has been fascinating to watch in light of this research, especially because Cantonese Protestants (and Catholics) are key to understanding the Umbrella Movement, both its supporters and detractors. This topical interest has led to a broader thematic inquiry that is becoming my second project, which is on the relationship between the theological underpinnings of some of these contemporary occupy movements and the intriguing ideology of ‘capitalism with Asian values’ (which, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, has very little to do with persons whose bodies are marked as ‘Asian’). Some of my new interests – Asian Americans getting involved with Black Lives Matter, the rhetoric of the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv around ‘Eurasia,’ and protests in Vancouver’s Chinatown that bring together issues of housing and indigeneity – might seem to have only a tangential connection to Hong Kong, but what holds this together are the inquiry into what forms liberation, solidarity, and occupy movements take – which are precisely the concerns of the book. In this way, I’m thankful for the task of leading the editing on this volume, because it pushed me to think about why I do what I do.

This book has been described as ‘timely,’ and I take that as a compliment. However, I of all people am deeply aware of how timeliness can hardly describe any book about Hong Kong because political developments in Hong Kong have always moved quickly. The book was written in 2014, substantially revised and edited in 2015, and touched up in 2016. The last reference to an actual event in Hong Kong is the Fishball Revolution that took place in February 2016. The book came out around the lead-up to the Legislative Council elections of 2016 and doesn’t include much about the emergence of youth political parties such as Demosistõ and Youngspiration. It certainly does not contain any information about the assassination threats made against Eddie Chu Hoi-dick.

My hope, then, is that the ‘timeliness’ of this book is a reference to the themes of the book, that people both inside and outside of Hong Kong want to read the events of contemporary occupy movements closely and judge them theologically before making the next move. That is why what we have offered are reflections and why we are so pleased that Benny Tai’s endorsement of our book also speaks about this book perhaps being able to help with writing Hong Kong’s next chapter. Certainly, we expect criticism for what we have written, but we hope that that process of critique will not be about us, but for the good of Hong Kong as a city that is wrestling with questions of justice and peace. This book is an offering to readers who want to join us in that task of reflection. May our conversation be lively!

CLASS: Comparative Minority Conservatisms (Fall 2016)

During the 2016 Fall Quarter at Northwestern University, I will offer my first course in the Asian American Studies Program on Comparative Minority Conservatisms. In this course, we will compare the circulation of ‘conservative’ ideologies through communities of color. Here’s the course description:

As the 2016 federal elections arrive on our doorstep, much of the popular commentary has revolved around “conservatism,” especially the phenomenon of racial minorities embracing social, economic, and political forms of conservative ideology. But what is “conservatism,” and what are conservatives, especially those who are people of color, trying to conserve? In this course, we will explore the ideological content of various strains of American conservatisms as a way of exploring what ideology itself is and how it operates in communities of color. To do this, we will read texts in the “conservative tradition,” compare them to texts and events produced by minority conservatives, and discuss their relationship with the racial justice tradition of ethnic studies, especially (but not limited to) Asian American studies. In the first part of the course, we will read Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in relation to student activist movements since the 1960s, the communities that they created, and the minority conservatives who challenged them. In the second half, we will read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution to compare “the conservative tradition” with contemporary articulations of minority conservatism. We will also spend some time on the stereotype of the “model minority,” which is why this course will be of special interest to those in Asian American studies. This course should also appeal to students in ethnic studies more broadly, as well as those interested in political philosophy.

When a syllabus is ready, I will post it as an update here. I look forward to teaching this course and hope that many will sign up for this class, especially as we explore together parts of Asian American studies – and ethnic studies more generally – that have not been covered much in the discipline, but (as I see it) is an excellent alternative way of entering into the practice of ethnic studies and racial justice activism. I also see this as very much of interest to students who simply want to understand conservatism and its contortions during the current 2016 federal election in the United States.

See you in the Fall, Northwestern!

UPDATE: Syllabus is here!

Visiting Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies Program, Northwestern University

I am pleased to formally announce on this blog that I have accepted a position at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Asian American Studies Program. I will start there in September, teaching five courses over the year on a quarter system; my contract there is for two years.

I am very excited about this new program at Northwestern because its story mirrors many similar themes in the history of Asian American studies as a discipline. Like many other ethnic studies departments, Asian American studies at Northwestern began with a student strike – including a hunger strike – contesting the university’s commitment to a colorblind liberalism with a radical call to serve communities of color. By 1999, a program was put together, and just last year in 2015, it began offering an undergraduate major in Asian American studies.

My introduction to Asian American studies as a discipline can also be traced back to the influence of one of this program’s core faculty, Carolyn Chen, who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. I met Carolyn through the Asian Pacific Islander and Religion Research Initiative (APARRI) conference that was held at Claremont School of Theology in 2009; it was she who encouraged me to gain broader exposure to Asian American studies by attending the Association of Asian American Studies’ (AAAS) annual meetings. Because of this, I am thankful to have had a brilliant visit to Evanston during the 2015 AAAS meeting when we stayed one block away from Northwestern at the Hilton Orrington, during which I discovered that Evanston is home to all of the familiar Asian American cuisines that have been part of my diet on the West Coast.

I suspect that it is also because of Carolyn that Northwestern’s conception of Asian American studies – far from being antagonistic to religion (as it is in other parts of the discipline, particularly those that take to a very particular bent of materialist analysis) – understands that religion and even conservative ideologies circulate through Asian American communities as much as secularities, liberal democratic philosophies, and radicalisms. Indeed, Carolyn pioneered the course at Northwestern on Asian American religion, a class that I will also teach, with the encouragement of my new colleagues, who have been very kind to me as I make this transition to their academic home.

For me, Asian American studies is fundamentally about the study of the ideologies that constitute Asian America regardless of whether I subscribe to them or not; as I understand it, this is what it means to be committed to the community as an activist scholar committed to racial justice. As the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once said of community education: ‘A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.’ As one of my new colleagues, historian Ji-Yeon Yuh, reminded me in one of our earlier conversations, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was banned during the 1970s dictatorship in the Republic of Korea, which means that it was photocopied and secretly circulated and therefore seriously treasured as a text of liberation during the minjung movement, a theological activism that has come also to influence Asian American theological politics. Put this way, I do not really understand how it is intellectually plausible to sunder materialist and theological analyses in Asian America, and my new colleagues seem quite open to me thinking this way.

I am thus very excited about my upcoming appointment at Northwestern. As I see the course list that I discussed with my colleague Shalini Shankar and with which I’ll be working closely with Ji-Yeon over the next year, it is reflective of what I understand to be the modus operandi of Northwestern’s Asian American Studies Program. In the Fall Quarter, I’ll be teaching a course on Comparative Minority Conservatisms, examining the way that conservative ideologies have circulated through communities of color, especially in light of the 2016 federal elections in the United States. In the Winter Quarter, I’ll be teaching Asian American history (a survey course that introduces themes in Asian American studies) and Chinese American Experience (a course that looks at themes in Chinese American studies, which is the focus of my research in Asian American studies). In the Spring Quarter, I’ll teach Asian American religion (which was Carolyn’s course, although I think I will give it my own spin as well) and Asian American social movements (which will give students a sense of the rich tradition of Asian American radicalism). This course list should show my commitment to teaching through a variety of ideologies circulating through Asian American communities, what those ideologies may have to do with religion and secularity in Asian America, and how understanding these ideologies helps with the cause of racial justice.

I’m very excited about going to Northwestern, and I hope to be blogging from there as well, so I will keep you posted about how things unfold there with both my teaching and how my research on occupy movements and theology in Asia and Asian America my research on occupy movements and theology in Asia and Asian America unfolds.

Bulletin for the Study of Religion: guest lecturing in geographies of religion: interviewing my colleagues’ students, focusing on tangents

I am very thankful to Philip Tite at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion for inviting me to revise and publish two previous posts on this professional blog as part of a Tips for Teaching series in his journal. My article focuses on my experiences guest-lecturing on geographies of religion in both his class and in Steven Hu’s at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Here’s the abstract:

This ‘Teaching Tips’ article focuses on my recent experience of guest-lecturing in colleagues’ classes. Influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my initial guest-teaching revolved around posing an argument about geographies of religion as ‘grounded theologies’ as a problem for students to challenge. However, my recent guest lectures have involved interviewing my colleagues’ students to discover why they find grounded theologies interesting. I show that this new mode of guest-lecturing – also influenced by Freire – has opened up new conversations at a primal ontological level through a wider breadth of topics discussed, including occupy movements, Game of Thrones, Black Nordic Metal, and modern imperialist ideologies. Following Sam Rocha’s folk phenomenology, I suggest that the primal depths that this interview-lecture style of guest lecturing is perhaps worth a try, even though I plan to use the argumentative lecture in the future as well.

I hope that readers of the Bulletin will find it helpful, especially in thinking about how to guest lecture as a pedagogical exercise. I also hope that geographers of religion will also find it useful for thinking through how to teach our discipline to students with a variety of interests. Many thanks, Phil, for generously allowing me to pitch in my two cents!