Sine Hwang Jensen is the Asian American and comparative ethnic studies librarian at UC Berkeley.
What about Asian American literature inspires you?
One of the things I find inspiring about Asian American archives and literature is witnessing the spirit of resistance and resilience. The big hearts of so many different communities and people. The complexity, creativity and depths of emotion and care. It's really incredible to carve a life amidst colonization; war; displacement; intergenerational trauma. There is all of this pain which tends to be the focus of disciplines like ethnic studies. But there is also the resistance, the joy, the everyday love, community love or family love. Those parts really inspire me and provide a balm for my heart in hard times.
I love what you said—making a life amidst all of this pain. How does pain manifest itself in the archives where you work at UC Berkeley, and what does making a life, or everyday love, look like in that context?
One example in the archives is the poetry written by Chinese detainees held on Angel Island in the early 20th century. The poems speak to suffering, but also resistance; anger; humor. By making a life, I mean the ways throughout time that we keep pushing ourselves and our communities forward despite huge barriers and huge opposition—the ways people cultivate hope and solidarity and love for each other in big and small ways. In the archives, you might find everyday correspondence like postcards and letters. It could be between friends, writers, or between a person and their mother, a person and their sibling. You might find community newspapers where people are analyzing or building solidarity and connection across huge geographical and experiential differences. You see all the ways in which these networks of relationships and support, which are often so invisible when we look at movement history or labor history, for example, really provide a network of care that sustains life. That's what I react to when I witness those tender moments between family, chosen or biological; it reminds me of the need for care, community and compassion that we often provide each other and ourselves despite so much hate, oppression, or invisibility. Even the care of witnessing each other’s pain with compassion is so huge sometimes. I often turn to poetry during times of crisis and lately, I’ve also been reading the work of Palestinian poets, for example. There is something about poetry that allows for deep witnessing that I appreciate.
Can you tell us more about the poems on Angel Island and how they traveled to the archives?
So, Him Mark Lai was a scholar, writer, community historian, and archivist. He was instrumental in preserving and translating the Chinese poems written in the Angel Island Immigration Station as well as documenting Chinese American history more broadly. Angel Island was a detention center where, from 1910 to 1940, migrants crossing the Pacific and particularly from Asia were held while they were interrogated about their immigration status. This was during the exclusion era which restricted Asian migration to the United States based on race, starting with Chinese migrants in the 1870s and expanding to all Asians by the early 20th century. The exclusion era legally ended in 1965 but its legacy continues to the present. Some migrants would be detained for years, others for just a few weeks, while they were interrogated to find out whether they were illegally entering the country. It really resonates with the attacks on migrants that are happening today.
One of the things that people did in the barracks while they were detained was write words and poetry into the walls which was seen as graffiti. At first it was written on the walls, then it got painted over. Eventually they started carving it into the walls and even with paint, you could still see the etches. I think they tried to putty it, do everything they could to remove it, but traces were still there. The detention center closed in 1940 and around 1970 there was a plan to demolish the buildings. At that time, a park ranger noticed the poetry and instead of moving forward with the demolition, he reached out to two San Francisco State professors, George Araki and Mak Takahashi, who photographed the walls and sparked a movement to save the buildings. The majority of the poems were written in Chinese but there were also poems in other languages like Punjabi, Japanese, and Korean. Him Mark Lai and a team of other people including poet Genny Lim and librarian and historian Judy Yung worked to translate many of the Chinese poems and started an oral history project interviewing elders who had experienced being detained there. They saw the need to preserve the building as a historical site of Asian American history and of American history in general.
Some of the oral history interviews are preserved at the Ethnic Studies Library. In the 1980s they published a book of these poems called Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. The poems also keep getting re-translated and re-visited over the years. Him Mark Lai was a big part of establishing the Asian American Studies archives at Berkeley too. He was born in San Francisco Chinatown in 1925 and felt a strong inclination to preserve history and write about it. He worked with and founded many community organizations, he would publish stories about Chinese American history in local newspapers and had a longstanding community radio program. At the time, there wasn’t much known about Chinese American history and from what I heard, he would talk to people in Chinatown or see that something was being thrown away and rescue it to be shuttled over to the Ethnic Studies Library. He also worked with the Asian American Studies librarian Wei Chi Poon. That's a story that is part of the origin of the Asian American Studies library and archives.
Were the poems carved in stone?
I don't know the exact material, but I think it was more like wooden planks that created a wall and so it was a little bit easier, maybe, to carve into than stone. And some would have been written on the walls too. But that being said, the detention center remains and the Angel Island Immigration Station has a museum now. So you can actually go see some of the poems on the wall.
Could you tell us more about Wei Chi Poon?
Wei Chi Poon was the Asian American Studies librarian at the Ethnic Studies Library from 1981 until she retired in 2014. She expanded the Asian American Studies archives and collection and made it accessible to researchers internationally. She helped preserve archives, books, magazines and other materials that documented Chinese American and Asian American histories and she put a lot of infrastructure into place at a time when Asian American Studies was still an emerging discipline. She also wrote a book called A Guide for Establishing Asian American Core Collections in 1989 that could be used by mainstream libraries to help build their collections. She retired in 2014, I believe, and sadly, she recently passed away in 2025. She created the foundation at the library that I and so many others still benefit from and build upon to this day.
You sent me a link to the Berkeley Revolution digital exhibit, which tells some of the story of the creation of the Ethnic Studies department. It strikes me how much revolutionary spirit and collectivity is in its history. I’m curious about who all the people are, the different groups of people, who contribute everyday to its making.
It’s vast. I think of the Asian American Studies collection and the Ethnic Studies Library as a living archive and to me, it’s really important that it is part of a broader library that also focuses on communities of color. You mentioned craft; it’s also a praxis that I feel I've been learning over the last 10 years at the library. I'm very aware that the way archives have been shaped is based on colonial record-keeping and state surveillance. It follows the Western approach to history, which until recently has tended to privilege the perspectives and writings of those who are in positions of power. That is a long history in and of itself, but when I think of the living archive and the Ethnic Studies Library, it has a history that is rooted in collective struggle. It's living and breathing in the community itself. What that means to me is that we are all holders and carriers of history. Each person carries a piece of it, and the connections are infinite. It feels really different from traditional archives where a lot of what you may find is from the lens of outside perspectives. The Asian American Studies Library was first formed by students and activists like Lillian Galedo and that tradition continues. People may visit the archive and they'll look at something and they'll say, oh, my gosh, that's my aunt and then they may go talk to their family member about it and maybe decide to bring some magazines or photographs to donate to the library. All of these artifacts created over the years, some fragments make their way to the archive—but the true archive is really within the people, community, relationships and memories and the library is one reflection of that. Does that make sense?
Yes, absolutely. I’m reminded of Stuart Hall, who wrote about the term “living archives." He said, “Constituting an archive represents a significant moment, on which we need to reflect with care. It occurs at that moment when a relatively random collection of works, whose movement appears simply to be propelled from one creative production to the next, is at the point of becoming something more ordered and considered: an object of reflection and debate.” Does this resonate with you? Are there such points of becoming, propulsive edges and geographical coordinates, at which the Berkeley archives are growing?
I envision the library as a nexus of all of these threads and cords and connections across time and space and relationships. And as far as the moments where objects become archives, that process can be really fluid. A lot of times, it's as simple as people reaching out with materials that they found in their house or their family members' archives. Or maybe someone has recently passed and their community and family are trying to find a place for their archives and books. Sometimes people send things in the mail, or come by and drop things off at the front desk. Some of them want to be recognized as the donor. Others don't want to be recognized. They just want to know it will be preserved for future generations.
Then there's all these library processes that describe and make things visible. A big part of it is processing the archives, going through every single box, every single file, and making sure everything is safely stored and organized and that private information is protected. Then there's the cataloging of it, making sure it's entered accurately and in detail into online catalogs so that people can actually search for and find them. We can have all these amazing archives, but until this work is done, it won’t be accessible to people. If an archive is only known to a few people, or if it’s not possible to visit, it’s not really accessible, right? If it’s not preserved and maintained with a sense of looking very far ahead in the future, it may only be available for a few years. All of these processes take a lot of time and at each step, there are ways in which one’s knowledge, lived experience, and bias can make a big difference.
Then there’s all the work day to day to keep the library open and helping people visit and navigate the archives. Talking to classes and researchers or creating exhibits so people know what kinds of resources and archives they can access. I think one of my roles as the librarian is to hold a bird’s eye view of all those processes and connect the dots where I can.
How did you learn to navigate all those processes? What was that journey like for you?
It's definitely been a lifelong journey. When I look back to the reasons I felt compelled to go towards the library and archives world, a lot of it had to do with being kind of a family archivist in my own family, seeking answers about our history and trying to grasp at what felt like sand slipping between my fingers, of history in a diasporic family with roots in China and Southeast Asia, in a family that has a refugee history. Trying to piece things together. Why are we here? What happened? Why aren’t stories like ours in the books I’m reading at school? I often felt and was treated like an outsider and wanted to understand where I belonged. As a young person, I started working with my grandfather, my Gong Gong, for many years on writing his life story down and I feel like working with him was the early days of forming what archives meant to me.
But being at the library is on another level. I think a lot of learning to navigate these processes comes from experiential knowledge and learning from the guidance of others. I learned a lot from other librarians and archivists when I worked at places like the Asian American Pacific Islander Collection at the Library of Congress and I learn from my colleagues at the Ethnic Studies Library all the time. I learn from research, talking to all the different people that visit the library, practice and making mistakes. There's a lot of things you could learn on your own, but in relationship with someone who can provide some guidance, that opens up so many more doors and directions for you to go. Having guidance or just accompaniment makes such a difference and it’s something we don’t always have access to when we are part of marginalized communities or first-generation students.
What was it like working on the project with your Gong Gong, and were there people who guided you there?
One of the reasons why I started working with my Gong Gong was to keep out of trouble. My mother was a single parent who had come to the US at the age of eight. My father passed away when I was young. I had a rebellious and unsettled spirit and the idea was for me to live with my grandparents and help them with things. I don’t remember being excited about the idea at first, but I had no idea how it would later shape my whole trajectory. My grandfather decided to write down his life story in English for future generations and he had me edit the text. He would write and I would edit, and we would pass floppy disks back and forth. I didn’t have a strong writing background and I didn't have a lot of guidance as far as what I was doing, but we just figured it out as we went along. I was really proud to be part of that and I learned so much. My family may not have always been very forthcoming about our history, probably because it carried a lot of trauma, and of course, everyone had their own perspectives or memories of what happened and did not necessarily agree. Maybe the idea was to leave the past in the past. We don't need to talk about it or burden the younger generations. But for me the past felt very present and working with my grandfather helped me understand more about the way my family was, what they had been through and therefore, how they came to be the way they are.
Are there qualities of your Gong Gong that still inspire or inform your work in the archives today?
There's a picture of him giving me two thumbs up on my desk at the library so he’s definitely always with me. He wasn’t perfect, but he encouraged me and he was the kind of person that would have me come as a little kid back into his den and sit me in front of him and we would exchange stories. I remember my grandfather being someone that might just let me talk and go on and on and tell my tall tales and imaginary stories. He had a lot of stories to tell me too and I loved to listen to them. My imagination could run a bit more free with him. And that space that he held for me is something that I cherish and try to bring into the library—the space to imagine, to be curious and feel confident in learning, sharing and exchanging. During the process of helping him with his writing, I also learned that sharing stories and deepening our relationship was as, if not more, important than the final book itself, and I have definitely kept that lesson in mind as well.
What does it mean to you to be a librarian, or work in a lineage of librarians? What does that word mean to you?
For me, the best parts of librarianship are about learning, connecting, and cultivating a sense of belonging and curiosity in history and in the world. Getting to meet and support people in the process of learning or creating something, learning from them—that's one of the fulfilling parts of being a librarian. There are endless paths of creativity and inspiration that one can follow and that touches on a sense of wonder and curiosity that I really enjoy. I think the deeper thing for me is that the library has always been a safe place and sanctuary for me, especially around being neurodivergent. When I’m curious about a topic, I’ve always enjoyed researching and have lots of sparks of ideas and connections. But at the same time, my thought processes were always different from most of my peers. The library was a space where I could imagine and be in my own world. It's always been that kind of a sanctuary. So cultivating that kind of environment for others, it means a lot. It's very fulfilling. Both of my grandparents on my mom’s side also worked in libraries, so I definitely am following in their footsteps. It’s a familial sense of lineage but also a broader sense of lineage, getting to be a part of the bigger project of preserving histories that might otherwise be lost or forgotten.
I wonder how being neurodivergent informed the question of the work you wanted to do. Did you struggle with linking that dimension of self-knowledge to what you wanted to devote your life and labor to? Is that something that came very quickly and naturally?
I definitely struggled. I’ve always felt drawn to libraries and archives and there are ways that being neurodivergent for me align with the work of being an archivist or librarian. But it was a pretty winding path. School was always challenging. I originally pursued the sciences, but I was politicized in high school and college during the Iraq War and around issues of racism, labor and feminism. I had worked in the special collections library in college and at a radical bookstore and was drawn to archives, literature and political education. I realized that working as a scientist didn’t appeal to me. After a few years, I decided to explore the possibility of working as an archivist. After having lived with a lot of instability and working a lot of jobs from auto mechanics to food service, I felt like working in archives was potentially a way towards more stability but also a way that I could be in an environment I enjoyed while putting my radical values into practice. I think what I perceived as more quiet work in the archives appealed to me too. I didn’t have much of an idea of what I was getting into or that being a librarian would be so different from archives work. But coming to the Ethnic Studies Library was exciting because it brought together so many of my passions and interests. It wasn’t something I imagined was possible.
Now that I’ve worked as a librarian for more than a decade, I’ve also experienced how challenging the work can be for neurodivergent people and people with disabilities, like myself, especially at universities where you encounter a lot of intellectual ableism. It's been a long process of learning from experience, growing and pivoting as I learn more and continue to evolve. And now that I’m at the library, the collection evolves along with me. It's very dynamic and organic. Even though the archives are imagined as this space of stillness or quiet, working there can be completely different in my experience. Even on a quiet day, things are constantly circulating, needing to be done, people coming in and out. At the end of the day, while I do enjoy working in the library, it’s important to recognize the difficulties too and that work isn’t the only way we should define ourselves or value our productivity.
Berkeley is one of the more well-known institutional archives for Asian American Studies. Do you interface with a broader community of librarians who work in Asian American studies and archives?
Definitely. There are many networks, community organizations and collectives, so many different groups who are working in different ways on memory keeping and archives. Professionally, there are groups like the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association and the Association for Asian American Studies where librarians and archivists connect. In the University of California system, the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley is one of several libraries with an explicit focus on Asian American Studies alongside libraries and archives like the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive and the UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. There’s a collective knowledge sharing group around Ethnic Studies for librarians and archivists in the UC libraries and there are many librarians at other universities or in public libraries that focus on Asian American communities and materials. I find that librarians and archivists, even though they are usually very busy, are generally open to collaborating, sharing information, and helping each other. There are Asian American archives in so many places like universities or historical societies, community archives and museums, digital projects, or people's homes. But having an Asian American Studies collection that has a physical space where people can visit and a dedicated librarian is unique and important. We're able to devote more time and resources and have more specialized and focused knowledge. At most archives or larger repositories, Asian American archives or materials are usually subsumed under a large number of broader categories, so it may not get as much attention.
There’s also a community of librarians, archivists and memory workers who are attentive to questions of justice and repair. The term reparative archives has become more well-known these days, it’s essentially working to repair the harm that's been done to marginalized communities within libraries and archives. Some examples of spaces that come to my mind are the Radical Libraries, Archives and Museums space at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan and more recently the group Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care led by professor and archivist Thuy Vo Dang and professor Crystal M. Baik at UC Irvine. These spaces are really important and generative and it’s critical to have collective spaces to think through these huge issues together. No one person can figure it out or do it all alone.
But a lot of times in our everyday work, librarians and archivists on the ground do have to just figure it out and make the best decisions that we can, document why we did that and learn from our mistakes. Maybe a year later we would look back and say we would do things totally differently. But time and history keeps moving and evolving and archives and books and materials keep coming in. There is a level of just needing to do the best we can. Especially in academia, there can be a really strong drive for perfection that I’ve found, through experience, can be a barrier to the work.
What's an example of a difficult decision you've had to make?
I’d say some of the most difficult decisions for me sometimes come up around deciding whether to accept an archival donation. It can feel fraught especially if people are reaching out with urgency, but there is also a lot of labor and space that is needed to preserve and make archives accessible long-term. Sometimes it can be really difficult to decide that we can’t accept a collection, but in those cases, I might try to connect folks with other people or places that they could reach out to. That has gotten easier over time, but it's always difficult, because there is a great need. There’s this sense of urgency and immensity to the archives world, a sense that there are an infinite number of archives that need to be preserved and we can only do our small part. Probably those are some of the hardest decisions. But I always remember that the Ethnic Studies Library and any library or archive is just one part of a vast ecosystem of libraries, archives, museums, and community centers. It’s not about trying to collect everything, which to me comes from a colonial way of thinking about archives. It’s about knowing what our strengths and capacities are as a library and making sure we are responsible stewards for the collections we do care for because overwhelming our staff or library space can also lead to eroding care for the library and collections as a whole.
I was looking at the Ethnic Studies library page, at the paragraph which starts with, "Today the term Asian American is more often used as a demographic marker" and then it speaks to an expansive and inclusive approach in the collection—what’s included, excluded, the bounds of Asian America and the ways in which AAPI or API can be problematic where it excludes and marginalizes experiences. What does archival harm or repairing harm look like in the context of the evolution of “Asian American”?
It’s important to acknowledge biases and marginalization within Asian American Studies as well as the tensions within and between our communities. For example many narratives or collections have not been intentional about representing South Asian, Arab American, or Southeast Asian communities. The terminology of “AAPI” or “API” is often used in ways that ignore or marginalize Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. Sometimes there can be romanticization or essentializing that can make it difficult to be critical of power dynamics within our communities and in our ancestral homelands. There are juxtapositions between the politics and perspectives of different generations. There are inequities and dynamics like in any community along lines of class, gender, religion, or nationality. I try to be mindful of these dynamics though I will always be learning, and do what I can to acknowledge that the library is a space that isn’t perfect but where we can have those conversations. It's not about being perfect, but about being in relationship with each other, even, or maybe especially, when it is messy. At the library, I try to take an expansive approach to the Asian American Studies Collection which is different in some ways from how the collection was approached in the past. It’s been something that I've put a lot of intention into while I’ve been the librarian. It's ongoing and in any archive or library, it's like every year is another layer on top of another layer. You can’t really go back and change things, right? History doesn't work that way either. So you just keep making the best decisions you can, making changes when you can and acknowledging what was done before. You can always choose to go in a different direction, but the foundation always informs the work that you do.
One of the things I've learned about the history of the term “Asian American” was that it was rooted in a vision of coalition, solidarity and collective liberation. It came out of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) in the 1960s and replaced the term “Oriental” which was still widely used. The formation of AAPA and the coalition with Black, Chicano, and Native students to form the Third World Liberation Front and Ethnic Studies was very connected to the formation of Asian American Studies and the library. Specific communities, primarily Chinese, Filipino and Japanese communities, were part of creating that framework of solidarity between Asians and with other communities of color in the 1960s. Things have evolved in so many ways since the 1960s and the exclusion era, especially in terms of migration. Most people, especially first generation migrants who make up the majority of Asian Americans today, would probably define themselves more by their specific nationality than as Asian American. There are a lot of stereotypes or different ideas of what Asian American means. You might technically be part of the same demographic group or from the same continent, but you may not have a sense of solidarity or belonging with others. There's a constant tension that I think is pretty normal for people and communities between the ways we identify and the ways that others identify us. There's so much fluidity and evolution in terminology and history and I think it’s important not to get too fixed and rigid but rather allow for multiplicity.
At the library, I feel it's important to touch back to that original sense of solidarity and coalition. Since the early days of Asian American Studies, the way people may view the term Asian American has really shifted towards more of an identity or a demographic as opposed to a political vision. The American cultural imagination of Asia is also so narrow that it can constrict our imaginations. Oftentimes people might make the assumption that there probably isn't anything in the library for them, or they might have a negative reaction to the term Asian American. They may not know what the library considers part of Asia or not, because those ideas are fluid and have changed over time too. But really, the library is a place where all kinds of contradictions coexist, just like in the world. I try to just make it clear that it's a space where you can take what’s helpful and leave what’s not and that by having conversations, you can be part of shaping it too.
When I heard you speak at the “Building a Queer and Trans Pacific American Living Archive” at the AAAS conference in Boston, I remember how you gestured to the real abundance in the archives—so many boxes, right? You said people come and are often surprised at how many boxes there are.
I think there's a real sense of historical erasure that many of us carry and I see that a lot with people who visit the library. They've often been told there's no archives about their community. They might do a search and nothing comes up, because the terminology used by mainstream or academic archives can be so different from what folks use themselves or because archives didn’t feel that it was important to collect those materials. That's a very insidious way that our communities have been robbed of a sense of history and connection and lineage. There's never been a time in history where people haven't communicated or expressed themselves, whether written or spoken or sung. But there were so many reasons why that knowledge was not valued or was seen as a threat, so it was either destroyed or not preserved in the ways it should have been. There's a real sense of loss there, it's the grief that we build our hearts around and it's a grief I feel is carried by a lot of people. Sometimes it shows up in that way of just being shocked when there's actually this abundance of knowledge and archives. When people find that there is actually an abundance of archives and resources if they know where and how to look for them, it can be overwhelming and healing. Oftentimes, people can’t imagine how long it may take to go through a box of papers or an entire archival collection and then they realize that they could spend days or months or years finding and learning from just one archival collection.
I also don’t think people often think about the physicality and labor of archives. Boxes of books or papers are heavy! And when you have dozens or hundreds of boxes, there is a very physical aspect to the work of archiving and even making things accessible to people that includes lifting and moving. I think many people don’t often think about it because they are thinking more abstractly about archives but I think about it a lot as a disabled librarian. I think the labor of archive and library work is something that needs to be centered, especially in academia where labor and wellbeing are often overlooked.
Are there particular underrepresented communities or stories that the library is currently actively looking for to be more represented in the archives?
Being queer and non-binary myself, I feel a personal call to document queer and trans communities, especially within this political climate and because sometimes our movements have been marginalized by broader left movements. Archiving and documenting is a way of creating a kind of permanency and affirming existence. You met Trinity Ordoña at the AAAS panel, and her archival collection at the library is part of that. Before I started, the library had already been collecting books and different newsletters or magazines like Phoenix Rising, Trikone or Lavender Godzilla. Trinity’s collection brought a new dimension and she also established the Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies Library fund which will support work in the future. In general, I tend to look for archives of resistance and activism and communities which may be underrepresented in the library or that don't always get the same kind of attention when it comes to archives. I try to support people or organizations working on archiving when I can as sometimes there is a precariousness that can make archiving even more challenging.
Do any recent examples come to mind, how precariousness affects the way that things get archived or not get archived?
I think it always comes down to our lived experiences in the sense that having the time, space or capacity to devote to archiving is dependent on our survival and wellbeing. Sometimes I work with elders and people who are trying to preserve their own archives and they may struggle with having the time, health or the physical space to be able to organize things. When you're working on donating archives, issues of displacement and housing, financial stability or disability come up. People might have to move suddenly or they don't have the time to be intentional about deciding what should be included or not included. So you just need to figure out how to pick up those 30 boxes as soon as possible. When people are struggling with surviving, the idea of archiving can seem like a luxury, because you're in survival mode. Activist communities can have that issue too. A lot of the work is in reaction to urgent issues and the idea of preserving things, even though people have this really strong intention to do that and they love archives and history, the actual time and space to do that labor of renaming all the files in your Google Drive for example, that's hard. Who has time for that? It’s something you dream of doing and sometimes people are like I'll just take a day and do it and then they realize I need months or years to do this, because it's such a long process. People are busy living, surviving and organizing, and so preserving archives and doing all the labor that is entailed in that is often secondary to survival. Another thing I notice is that sometimes our elders may not realize the value and importance of their archives and stories. They may think, who cares about this, I just did what I had to do to survive. But, to younger or future generations, those stories may be precious ways of understanding ourselves and our histories.
If there are any activist communities or organizers who are reading this interview, as a librarian, are there any tips that you would give them, such as how to develop an archiving practice, or best practices to keep in mind; are there even small things they can do that really help with archiving later down the line?
The biggest thing is resist perfection and do what you can. That seems to be a theme. A lot of people don't start because they know they don't have the time to do it the perfect way they would like. For example, if I have a box of flyers, I might have this yearning to digitize and document every single flyer and label it and organize it. All these steps. But I may not actually have the time and capacity to do that, and so it might be just good enough to make sure that those flyers are flat, and in a box labeled “flyers” with the date so that I can get to it later. I think a lot of times we don't know what to do with all the things that we've picked up. I struggle with that personally. So just finding a way to keep things safe for a time when you are able to make a decision, I think is the most important thing.
I think it's also really important that activists, artists and others know that it's so important that they be the ones to tell their own story. Oftentimes we're doing things, but we don't necessarily focus on creating the narrative about it. That's where you see researchers or people who may not have been involved trying to look through archives to piece together the story and sometimes getting it wrong. So if there is time, write down what happened, even if it's a journal or a diary, or record interviews or oral histories with each other. We really have to take a very active role, if we can, in documenting our own lives on our own terms. Because otherwise others will either do it for us and might get it wrong, or not do it at all because they don’t see the importance and the value. We are the ones who know the value of our work so deeply. This is one of the reasons why I gravitated towards making zines as a young person too because it was an uncensored way to tell and document our stories.
That's awesome.
Yeah?
Yeah. An uncensored way to tell and document our stories. And remembering it is us who know the value of our stories so deeply.
Yeah. And that's a real thing also, because a lot of the folks I’ve talked to were and are really focused on the collective. They wrote for the newspapers, they wrote essays or poetry, or they created artwork, but they didn't necessarily feel like it was the work they were doing as individuals that was important. They felt like the movement was important. The collective was important. That's a really beautiful value that a lot of people have around collectivity. But I do see that also reflected in the archives through a kind of self-censoring, or self-erasure. It's like, oh no, don't put my name on that. No need. Sometimes you have to be concerned about surveillance, and so there's safety questions, or you just prefer to be anonymous which is always okay. But sometimes you see people minimize their role or stories because they don't see the value in their work or contributions. They just feel it's more important to see the collective, and I get that. But we are all a part of the collective and you should be recognized for the work that you did if you feel safe and comfortable to do so.
Earlier, you were talking about queer and non-binary and trans stories, and you mentioned tags in particular, and I was thinking of this kind of queer excellence related to imagination and invention of language and terms, and I wonder, do you see an evolution of Asian American queer language or languages throughout those archives? How is language a fluid thing throughout the stories told and moving over the years?
It’s a huge conceptual question that is so critical in day-to-day library and archive decisions. Classification systems are systems that were created to basically sort and organize and categorize books into different subjects like history, technology, medicine, etc. There's two big classification systems that are often used in American libraries. You’ll see the Dewey Decimal classification system at a lot of public libraries, and the Library of Congress classification system at academic libraries for the most part. These systems emerged in the late 19th century when there was this codification of difference around gender, sexuality, race, and other identities that we still grapple with today. There was an emphasis on Eurocentrism in terms of what subjects and authors were considered more important. Library systems were created with all of these biases imbued in it and it affects how knowledge is organized. The Library of Congress also maintains a set of terms or subject headings that most libraries use in cataloging and describing materials. You could think of these terms like tags that allow people to search for and find materials.
In the library world, there is a drive towards standardization of language. On the one hand, standardization can enable searching across a lot of different systems using the same term. But standardization comes up over and over again as something that we just can't always make work with the way that people identify and the fluidity of the language that we're creating and inventing and remixing and that is especially true for queer and trans communities. For example, I don't think the term “queer” is officially approved within the Library of Congress. I think the term “sexual minorities” is the subject heading that is in use. But how many people who identify as queer would identify as a sexual minority? Homosexuality used to be defined in relation to mental illness so if you were trying to look up information using the term homosexual, you would have been redirected to works about mental illness, and all kinds of different terms that were negative, derogatory, or pathological. The Library of Congress tends to follow state or academic definitions and terminology so we often add our own, what we call “local terms” at the Ethnic Studies Library, to supplement. We want people to be able to use the Library of Congress terms, but we know that that's not the only way people may be searching for things. A lot of things get lost in the sauce because people are searching for them using words that they're familiar with, and it's not connecting with the words that have been used in the library or archive. So you may search using the term “nisei” for example but materials are labeled “Japanese American” or you use the term “queer” but a book has the subject heading “sexual minorities.” Often traditional librarians and catalogers are limited to using the terminology from the Library of Congress so it’s important that the Ethnic Studies Library be able to use local terms and accept that there is multiplicity and fluidity in the ways people identify. That terminology is not neutral and people have reactions to it, it carries meaning and histories.
Wow. So what if you want to add something or see it added to the Library of Congress terms?
There's a whole process where you have to create a proposal, and you need to cite authoritative or scholarly works that use this term as evidence for why this term is legitimate. That in and of itself can carry a lot of problems. Even if the term is not referenced in an ‘authoritative’ work, the term could still be legitimate. It still exists and is in use. So there can be a disconnect. The Library of Congress process for adding terms, it does happen, and there are librarians who have devoted a lot of time and energy and have made significant changes which have made a huge difference. But sometimes at Ethnic Studies Library, we take this different approach where we add local terms to the catalog record. There can be a lot of resistance to that idea. People may ask, how long will these terms even be in use? There's an ephemerality to it that people kind of ascribe that can be delegitimizing. Like, this might be a fad, it's not serious. However, it is still important to use terms that align with the way communities identify themselves if possible to enable them to search for and find them.
Also, sometimes the collective knowledge across librarians about Asian American Studies can be quite low, unfortunately. So catalogers might not know what are the best terms to use and so they follow what has been suggested by the publisher or what the Library of Congress provides, and they have so many books they have to catalog in a day that for the sake of time, they do the best they can and just move on, right? It's not always malicious, but it's a lack of collective knowledge and the awareness, time and intention to really think through what are the words that are missing here and what will the community be looking for that are not going to bridge with what terms I'm seeing here. You have to dedicate time to learning about these things and often talking with people to find out how this plays out within community, and about what terms researchers might be using now. So it's really dynamic. I’m grateful that the Ethnic Studies Library is open to this creativity and multiplicity around language.
What you say also seems like an opportunity for librarians and archivists to work together with scholars and students and community members, within and against this apparatus of power wherein terms gain currency through being legitimated by scholarship.
Working with scholars, students, and faculty and learning from the community is definitely an important part of this process. There's a really good documentary called “Change the Subject,” about a group of Dartmouth students and the movement to change the subject heading ‘illegal aliens.’ That’s one example, but librarians, archivists and scholars collaborate often in order to improve systems.
So many languages are spoken in the Asian American diaspora—do the local terms also reflect that multiplicity of languages? Will you see Chinglish, for instance, in the local terms?
That’s an interesting and important question because many Area Studies libraries are limited to collecting in particular languages and sometimes the beautiful messiness of the diaspora can get lost. For the Asian American Studies Collection, we collect in different languages, as long as the subject or content is about Asian American or Asian diasporic communities. But that presents a big challenge because there are so many languages as you said and we don't always have staff that can catalog or translate these materials. So we often have to work with other librarians or catalogers, student employees or volunteers to do the best we can. I do think it's important that we not have that language restriction, especially as you said, because there are languages that are not officially recognized, like Chinglish or Taglish. The issue of language also touches on authenticity and voice, and the library tries to make space to affirm the realities of experiences and different voices in the diaspora as opposed to creating barriers that are too rigid to encompass the kinds of archives and materials that are important to preserve.
Yes, when we emailed, you specifically pointed me towards the Bibliopolítica exhibit.
The Bibliopolítica exhibit tells the story of the Chicano Studies Library, which also came out of the 1960s and has been led since the 1980s by Lillian Castillo-Speed, the Chicano Studies Librarian and current head of the Ethnic Studies Library. It merged with the Asian American Studies and Native American Studies libraries in 1997 to create what is now the Ethnic Studies Library. Prior to that, each of the libraries were autonomous reading rooms. The Bibliopolítica exhibit highlights the ways that the library workers of the Chicano Studies Library were creative and forward-thinking, especially around language and terminology. They said, well, if the Library of Congress doesn't have the terms that we need, we're going to create our own thesaurus or ‘controlled vocabulary’ called the Chicano Thesaurus. They published the thesaurus so that catalogers and other librarians could use it when they described and cataloged Chicano materials. They did so much work to create those library foundations for Chicano Studies materials, even creating new classifications that diverged from the Library of Congress classification system that are still in use in the Ethnic Studies Library today. That exhibit talks about these issues of language and cataloging and also about technology, how they evolved to CDs and to digital. The exhibit is a really good example of ways that you can use archives to tell a story and it is a really beautiful tribute to all the work that was done in the Chicano Studies Library.
Do you accept volunteer community translators, is there a big process to go through if you want to translate for the archive?
Sometimes we consult with other librarians or we have student employees that help. Sometimes people who do research at the library are willing to share their translations with us too. We do accept volunteers and it isn’t a huge process, but sometimes we are limited by how much capacity the library has to work with volunteers given our small staff. We always appreciate when people are interested in helping out at the library.
Sine, thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge with me today. Is there anything you want to leave us with?
Well, I guess I’ll just reemphasize how important it is that we be the narrators of our own stories, the importance of solidarity, of resisting erasure and scarcity and remaining open, curious and determined in searching for and documenting our histories. When we move from a place of abundance and confidence in our own ways of knowing, I think it’s possible to regain some of our power within a system that devalues and delegitimizes our knowledge and wisdom. That power is so necessary, especially in these times. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you!
Winona Guo is a PhD student of Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
Keva X. Bui is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. They are a scholar of science, technology, war, and empire and hold a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Their research examines cultures of war in everyday life in the heart of U.S. empire, and how anti-war social movements offer visions of life beyond the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. As a child of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, their life has been touched by war on multiple registers. These intimate encounters with the US war machine guide both their scholarly research and political commitments to the work of demilitarization.
What about Asian American literature and culture inspires you?
When it comes to Asian American literature and culture, I’m inspired by its capacity for forging new worlds from conditions of violence and catastrophe and to reflect back onto the world that we live. As a scholar and researcher, I'm constantly stuck researching horrific violences—how war and empire have devastated communities, environments, and ultimately, people's lives. There's no singular Asian American literature or culture; it's not a monolithic category, but rather something that imagines and creates worlds—that is world-making and world-breaking. The central question that I think about is: How can we imagine better futures for ourselves and our communities?
I'm constantly inspired by how central art and culture was to the imagination of the Asian American anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of poetry, a lot of political cartoons were circulated in radical newsletters during that moment that developed a very poignant critique of the military industrial complex. Those kinds of critiques offer us a pathway to organizing, to reflect on the world that we are trapped in and make use of narrative tools to unravel logics of violence. Literature and culture's capacity for shining a light on the world that we live in is so important to the work of demilitarization, and there's a lot of power in narrative to shape how we understand the world.
You said that you’re “constantly stuck” researching horrific violence—what makes this the case? Is there a link between that stuckness and the inspiration?
I think about that a lot, because I study weapons of mass destruction—things like napalm, herbicidal warfare, things that have caused horrific violence in our world. Obviously, it's not enjoyable work in a lot of ways, but I find it necessary; I do think we have to understand what led us to the violent conditions that we are mired within. How did we get here? How did weapons of mass destruction come to be normalized? There is a world before the military industrial complex—so how did this particular iteration of society become our norm? I think that's the tension between inspiration and stuckness that you're honing in on—that in order to be a scholar of demilitarization, to invest in anti-war social movements, I have to return to these violent moments to understand how they came to be. Reading the ways in which scientists and military commanders envisioned weapons—they envisioned this violence—sometimes it's so mundane how it's articulated in the archive, and it can be very jarring and painful to sit with those words and stories for long periods. But I also try to remind myself that it's in service of understanding the world, so we can build something better for our communities. To understand the anti-war movement means we have to understand the war machine that the anti-war movement opposed.
Was there an early moment that you became interested in these questions in particular?
I did my undergraduate training as an English major, and a lot of my early work was reading Asian American literature, particularly Vietnamese American literature. As the child of Vietnamese refugees, my entryway into Asian American studies was through personal and family experiences, thinking about, how did the Vietnam War affect my family's life and my own life? How is that structurally connected to a larger system of the U.S. empire?
And that led me to a specific interest in napalm; in Vietnamese American literature, napalm is a motif, a symbol, an idea that is constantly returned to. And oftentimes it would be this aside. It'd be mentioned. It would be a stand-in for something, a symbolic thing. For example, there was an interview that Ocean Vuong did with The Guardian where he talks about stories his grandmother would tell about the Vietnam War. He comments about how his grandmother would often mention napalm as an aside, such as “oh that came after the napalm,” but would never answer him when he would ask “what’s napalm?” I think there’s something significant about that exchange - napalm being omnipresent in these stories but lacking clear definition.
That interested me, so I began studying napalm’s history. The anti-war movement took up napalm as its iconic crime against humanity that the U.S. was committing in Vietnam. The infamous "napalm girl" photo that circulated in 1973 of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, for instance, catalyzed a lot of anti-war sentiments. But I also learned that napalm was developed during World War II and used in the Pacific Wars. It predates the atomic bomb. It was used in the Korean War. It was used in Israel's Six-Day War in 1967. For me, that posed a tension, in that napalm became this quintessential U.S. weapon used in Vietnam, but it stretches across all of these other histories of U.S. military intervention.
And so what makes it exceptional in the Vietnam War and normalized in other wars? Weapons are not just neutral objects, but themselves are bearers of political and cultural significance that shape the world that we live in. The tension between its symbolism and its material history is what sparked a lot of my interest in how cultural narratives around weapons of mass destruction are constructed, and then the work they do in consolidating the military industrial complex that we live in.
And what was your scholarly journey like, through Asian American Studies?
I was an English major at Dartmouth College, and then did my PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. I learned about Asian American Studies when I was at Dartmouth in rural New Hampshire, an “elite” Ivy League university, very white, very isolated. There I met a group of Asian American activists who were organizing on campus to establish an Asian American Studies program. That's how I began my venture into the field. I took the very few Asian American studies classes that were offered on campus by professors who are no longer there. But it provided a moment for me to think about the political stakes of Asian American Studies as a scholarly field. It demonstrated how Asian American studies was something we as students had to fight for. It was knowledge and an intellectual community that we had to fight for. That's what granted it a lot of meaning for me, is how we had to fight for the space to even learn about Asian American history, Asian American culture, Asian American politics, Asian American social movements. Students of Asian American studies know that the field has a long history of student organizing, that it emerges from the Third World Liberation Front, the student strikes in 1968 at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley that really established the field of Asian American studies and ethnic studies. I think that being in a place where it was something we had to fight for really was both a challenge but gave it, for me, higher stakes. And so I went on to do my PhD in ethnic studies and deepen my understanding. And so, living in San Diego, which is both a refugee city and a militarized city, it's very close to one of the largest military bases in the U.S., Camp Pendleton, and it houses a large refugee community of Southeast and also Southwest Asian refugees. Being at the Pacific borderland, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, creates this acute sense of living in a militarized city. Living there, doing a PhD in ethnic studies, really granted me a space of interrogating how, as I've mentioned before, war and militarization invades everyday life, because it was all around me. And at the same time, I began organizing with Vietnamese American communities in Southern California, with Viet Unity Southern California, the Hai Ba Trung School for organizing, and the Missing Piece project which is an artist-activist collective, and those organizations were important to my political development, especially how I think about the enduring impact of war on people's lives long after war “ends.” My scholarly study is informed by how I moved throughout society, and these political organizations; at the end of the day, I'm trying to understand how war invades our collective everyday life, and invades my own personal everyday life, how I constantly see war everywhere I move through the world.
In 2021, you wrote the article, “Objects of Warfare,” and then in 2022, “More Than Human,” then in 2023, “Eugenic Ecologies,” in 2024, “Napalm University,” and this year “Incendiary War,” a talk I heard you deliver at the AAAS conference. All are related to this subject; it seems to me that you've really allowed napalm to guide you in this very beautiful, ecological way. For you, napalm is coming out of diasporic Vietnamese cultural production in particular, yet also, when you spoke of napalm and white phosphorous at the conference this year, where people were grappling with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians alongside it being 50 years since the fall of Saigon, you seemed to be proposing a way for the materialities and symbols of empire to map this more expansive solidarity, wherein napalm was figured as a “sibling technology” alongside others. That was initially why your work stood out so much to me—how can we think through this ecology? What does it mean to draw this filial connection between technologies of genocide and war?
Thank you so much. That question really gets to the heart of what I'm trying to think about. This past year, we've seen Vietnamese American communities really grapple with how the anniversary occasions a moment to think about solidarity. But the tension is that the anniversaries connote an end that we have to commemorate as other violence is ongoing. What my research tries to articulate is that violence is not only ongoing, but it's recursive. There is this ongoing Nakba, almost two years since the most recent Israel bombardment of Gaza began, but a genocidal campaign that's been ongoing for decades since 1948. In 2012, the Human Rights Watch published an article about white phosphorus, and they declared it the “new napalm,” based on the U.S. usage of white phosphorus in Afghanistan, as well as Israel's usage in Gaza in 2009 as part of Operation Cast Lead. This is notable because white phosphorus was invented prior to napalm, during World War I, and was used as an incendiary device in wars ensuing after. Once napalm was invented, white phosphorus was used as an ignition substance within napalm bombs - napalm is a gelled petrochemical that can burn hot and stay hot, but needed white phosphorus to provide the initial spark. White phosphorus is a pyrophoric substance, meaning it catches fire upon contact with oxygen. So napalm and white phosphorus have always been used together. But what happens after the Vietnam War, is that because of napalm's iconography, napalm and other incendiary weapons were banned by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons treaty in 1980. White phosphorus is mostly unmentioned because it doesn't rise to the same cultural significance in terms of its iconography, so it goes unbanned. Then, it is continually used in the U.S. and Israel's wars in the years after. So my question about this sequence of events then is: what happens when we exceptionalize a weapon like napalm as exceptionally inhumane in comparison to other weapons of mass destruction? We risk inadvertently normalizing other technologies of violence, rather than saying, actually this entire structure of the military industrial complex needs to be abolished.
In this moment of the 50th anniversary, one of the things often unremarked about the radical anti-imperial, anti-war movements of the 1960s is that activists were making the claim that the U.S. was committing genocide in Vietnam. We're in a moment where there is a lot of debate over the term genocide. Who gets to claim the term genocide? But actually, the exceptionalization of the term obscures the ongoing structural conditions of violence that imperial nation-states continue to wage on colonized peoples. I draw a lot of inspiration from the 1951 Black Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide,” where a group of Black activists, three years after the UN Genocide Convention, which established the terms of genocide after the Holocaust, charged the U.S. with committing an ongoing genocide of Black Americans, dating through slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and all of these other forms of structural elimination. What this moment exposes is that if we allow genocide to be taken up at its full definition, then the U.S. would be culpable for all of these other imperial violences, from its ongoing structural racism against Black communities to its military interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, later in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as its support of Israel's genocide in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. These are questions to think about. Not to say it is or isn't genocide, but that the language offers a framework for understanding why the exceptionalization of the term obscures our capacity to understand how violence is connected in these expansive ways—not only in a way of analogy, like that Israel's genocide in Gaza is similar to the U.S.'s military intervention in Vietnam, but actually with material connections in the technologies that are created, used, and exchanged, and the ways in which those technologies enable new innovations across these joint military-industrial complexes to thrive. The severing of our capacity to recognize and map those connections across different moments of violence, is what leads us to think of war as an event rather than a structure, a one-time thing rather than a continuous structure of violence that we are living in.
That has to do with where you began—with forging new worlds, right? In and against the continuous violence of the world we live in now? How can we understand the structure of the current world?
Yeah. The world we live in is one of constant and permanent normalized war. People have this idea that war is a natural condition of human life, and I fundamentally disagree. War is manufactured, especially the way in which we articulate war in our current age. Contemporary war is completely different from pre-modern war, where you have clearly defined nations with clearly defined militaries engaging in combat on a battlefield. Now, war is very deeply seeped in everyday life. It's in our institutions. It's in our universities. It’s in our homes. It’s in our businesses, industries, corporations. People don't think of corporations like Google as a defense contractor, or a war company, but as recent campaigns like No Tech for Apartheid have demonstrated, Google has extensive contracts with the Israeli defense forces. And this is something that partially emerges in the aftermath of World War II, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where U.S. politicians and scientists were able to point to the “success” of the atomic bomb, of the Manhattan Project, as this collaboration between the military, the government, and scientists, and say, this is good for national security. And they consolidated that as the way in which we live. That's why we have the ballooning of defense contracts for the military and government funding for U.S. universities to conduct research that, whether directly or implicitly, aids the U.S. war machine. That's part of how the U.S. university expands in the post-World War II moment.
So I think about this often—how do I reconcile my place in the academy with the immense entanglement that the university has with the military industrial complex? But at the same time, as I write about in my article in “Napalm’s University,” the university has also been a really important site of the anti-war movement, where students have been able to find intellectual, political community that radicalizes them into these kinds of organized anti-war movements. The 1960s was this early moment of both, and the sit-ins, encampments, and protests are reemerging in our current moment, as that relationship between the university and the military has only deepened. People get the sense that this is how it's always been, and therefore will always be, but if we understand that there is a history to this, that gives us a pathway to imagine otherwise, and to understand that this isn't a normal condition of intellectual life at the university, nor a normal condition of life. It can be contested. It can be abolished.
One of the differences between contemporary and pre-modern war is the invention and use of the weapons of mass destruction that you research—not only napalm and tear gas, but also herbicidal weapons like Agent Orange. Alongside the “genocidal,” I keep returning to “herbicidal” as a category that gestures towards the eradication, as you wrote, of an “ecologically-porous definition of enemy life”—the exceptionalism you discussed is also deployed in terms of the human, so I’m curious if you could tell us more about how the U.S. war machine involves and affects not just people, but plant matter, land and ecology.
Definitely. When I write about herbicidal warfare, I'm particularly thinking about the history of Agent Orange, which is a chemical defoliant that was used in the Vietnam War to eliminate mangrove cover as well as cropland in rural and jungle areas of Vietnam. So part of the idea behind the chemical defoliant is that it could remove the plant cover that guerrilla fighters were supposedly hiding beneath and would become visible to U.S. fighter jets flying above. It was the idea that if you can remove the ecological life that the insurgents were embedded in, you could better fight the war. So war became a battle over control of land and terrain.
Arthur Galston, who was a plant biologist, coined the term “ecocide” to refer to the destruction of the environment as part of military intervention. One thing we sometimes talk about is that the U.S. military is the number one polluter in the world, and the number one contributor to carbon emissions through ecocidal campaigns like in Vietnam, as well as the emissions produced by millions of fighter jets, hundreds of military bases. So it's important to put that ecological devastation alongside the obvious human devastation of it. What is happening in the shift from pre-modern war to the modern military industrial complex, is that all of society, technology, infrastructure, and resources are geared towards the inevitability of war and extracted from communities. The increasing cost of health care, housing, education, child care, the lack of resources for communities of color, low-income communities, those are all structural because they are resources taken from those communities to funnel into the war machine. War is ending our world in many ways, in terms of how it conditions us to think, and how it is ending human life, and how it is shortening the lifespan of our planet through ecocidal campaigns of violence and the destruction of our environment, and these are all entangled in terms of how the military industrial complex has this cascading effect on more-than human life across the globe that we will feel for generations to come.
You earlier mentioned the photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but in addition to images, you also write about novels and performance. Do you see these forms working differently in relation to fighting imperial violence? Perhaps emerging more prominently from your work is a sense of the solidarity and insights of a coalition of artists across different mediums intervening in the world as is and forging new worlds.
It’s a big question that I'm still grappling with, because I think there's something intangible about what inspires us about art and culture. You know, sometimes we are moved by a particular piece, and only years later do we really identify why. Sometimes it's immediate. Sometimes we're like, oh, I know why. But I think that for me, part of it is its capacity to intervene into the world and make other stories visible and possible. A film that I watched recently that left a deep impact on me was “We Were the Scenery” produced and directed by Cathy Linh Che, Jess X. Snow, and Christopher Radcliffe. The film is about Cathy's parents, who were part of a group of Vietnamese refugees in a refugee camp in the Philippines recruited to be extras on the film “Apocalypse Now,” which is a very infamous, iconic Vietnam War film. The film centers on their experiences as background extras in the infamous napalm scene in “Apocalypse Now,” where a fleet of U.S. fighter jets drop tons of napalm bombs during the war in the backdrop, and in the foreground a colonel proclaims, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” This very militarized and masculinist portrayal of fascination with the violence of napalm has become an iconic and infamous depiction of the war. But “We Were the Scenery” uses that moment as a way to center the background actors and their experiences of how they made life in the refugee camps. What the film does is it takes this iconic moment of violence and turns it around to tell another story about it, that is hidden beneath, that is literally lurking in the blurred background of this soldier speaking about his fantasies of violence. What is in the background is people's stories of refuge that allows us to think, what lurks in the background of political and military violence? How can we use those stories to propel us to think about these larger questions about Vietnamese refugee communities, the military industrial complex, and the way in which military propaganda shapes how people orient themselves to war? It allows us to start asking questions about what we take for granted in the world. And in asking those questions, it gives us space to imagine other kinds of ways of being.
Do you think, when it comes to narratives told about Asian American history or in Asian American Studies, war and the military-industrial complex are too often also lurking in the background?
I don’t think that’s the case, actually. I think Asian American studies has been an important field for engaging counternarratives to war and militarism - both with its inception in the anti-war movements of the 1960s as well as really brilliant contemporary scholarship. My work would not be possible without this work coming to be—I am really inspired by the work that Asian American Studies and more broadly, Ethnic Studies scholars have been doing to ask critical questions about the military industrial complex and the war society that we live in. From scholars of the Cold War and Vietnam War to people critically analyzing the contemporary war on terror, anti-war scholars across the field are making really important connections that we need to grapple with. Anti-war scholarship is integral to the work that we're doing and how it can align itself with anti-war movements, both past and present. How do these visions for a world without war drive the kind of scholarship that we do? That driving impetus is important. I do think that we’re moving in a direction that will continually grapple with the multidimensionality of war. That’s what I'm really grateful to see, that we're grappling with the multidimensionality of war.
Who are the scholars who inspire you in this respect?
There’s far too many to name, because there are so many great anti-militarist scholars out there doing incredible work. Jodi Kim’s book Ends of Empire, published in 2010, was an important moment in the field for giving us a framework for understanding the Cold War as a structure, not an event. It helped establish a vocabulary for analyzing Asian American cultural production in the aftermath of the Cold War as a vector for understanding the racializing dimension of the war, and I think that opened up a lot of different modes of inquiry for understanding war in our everyday lives. Asian Americanist scholarship on war and militarism is extremely rich, and I’ve learned so much from the work of Simeon Man, Christine Hong, Yen Le Espiritu, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and so many more.
I have also learned a lot from my former colleagues at the University of Illinois - Junaid Rana, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Rachel Kuo, and Maryam Kashani who have all really helped me situate a lot of this scholarship on war and militarism within our present conditions of ongoing genocide and violence. And I also have a lot of collaborators and co-thinkers around the intersections of war, science, and technology whom I’m constantly learning from, scholars like Natalia Duong, Aimee Bahng, and Heidi Amin-Hong. And finally, I’d also like to give a quick mention to the Mundane Militarisms collective, which emerged out of one of Sunny Xiang’s graduate student seminars at Yale University. I use this resource all the time in teaching, to show students how war lurks in the background of our everyday life so seamlessly and invisibly. This model of scholarly inquiry is so important in our day and age, as we try to make connections that are not always otherwise apparent.
Your attention to inquiry as a mode, even unconscious mode, is really striking in your work. For instance, you wrote about the deep imperial logic embedded in the asking of this question, “How can we make war more humane?” I’m curious, what better questions can we dwell with? Is it, how can we demilitarize? How can we forge new worlds?
Yeah, that question is one, as I write, that imperial militaries and nation-states like to proffer—how can we make war more humane, how can we innovate more precise technologies? Currently, we see the increasing usage of AI targeting in military campaigns to “lessen” collateral damage, and so technology is proffered as offering the potential to make war more humane by “only” eliminating “terrorists” and leaving “civilians” unharmed. But these are all constructed categories, and how they are defined and employed is very much deeply racialized in our current moment of the war on terror. And it also explicitly and implicitly ignores the very stark reality that war, in requiring the elimination of human life, is by nature inhumane. And if we move from that premise, then the question of how to make war more humane becomes obsolete precisely within asymmetrical conditions of imperial warfare and the structural conditions of racism that lead to it in the first place. The question more broadly we could ask is, how do we make society more humane?
And that would necessitate the elimination of war altogether, the absolute abolition of the military industrial complex that exists to maintain a particular status quo of imperial power, and the prioritizing of human life, environmental life, ecological life, planetary life, and the relations that sustain us.
I’m also wondering about the structure of war in relation to a word like “peace.” There’s this injunction often used against war consciousness, “keep the peace.” I want to understand what undergirds such a phrase, and “peace” in relation to other terms, “liberation,” “revolution,” and “utopias” that may be impossible to fully imagine or define. What are the terms that sit together with, or are dialectically related to, the structure of war?
That's a good question, because I’ve always had conflicting feelings about the word “peace.” It is very much set up in this dichotomous relationship to war as an event - a singular moment in time. If we are not at war, then we are at peace. It is a language that was used in the post-World War II moment to say that times of peace are moments where all segments of society need to be preparing for war, for national security and future war. The sentiment is echoed in scientific advisor Vannevar Bush's document, “Science, The Endless Frontier.” This idea of peace is not necessarily the antithesis of war, but envisioned as a momentary pause, a ceasefire, in a perpetual condition of war. That's why peace can make me feel uneasy, because it is captured in a colonial imperial imaginary rather than an actual break, a break from the condition of a permanent world that we see as inevitable. That’s why I constantly return to the language of abolition and what abolition looks like. Of course, this is very much indebted to prison abolitionists who are imagining a world without police and prisons. Abolition gives us the language and framework to think about demilitarization more wholesale, that doesn't mean imperial nation-states putting down their arms and not fighting in a momentary pause from a permanent condition of violence. The end of war requires a radical reorganization of society, from the economy to industry to education, because society's resources are almost fully oriented towards continual and perpetual war.
Earlier, you said you see war everywhere you go, and I’m curious where you're calling in from, and where you grew up—in these places, how have you seen war in your daily life?
I’m calling in from Seattle right now, it's where my parents live, but not where I grew up. I was born in Texas, first in Houston, then Austin, and then when I was about 10, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan. There, I attended Taipei American School, an institution originally founded by missionaries on the island who sought an “American” education for their children and the children of US military personnel stationed in Taiwan during the Cold War after the Kuomintang political party fled there. Not a lot of people at the school acknowledge this history or think critically about it, but in my years after leaving high school I often think about what it means for my education to have been routed through a circuit of US militarism - how military occupation laid the foundation for “softer” forms of US influence on the island that persist to this day even in the absence of “formal” US occupation. How did war shape what my education came to be? How does war lurk in the background of my own life, and how is my schooling fundamentally a product of violent war and Indigenous dispossession? These seem like large questions, yet they are relevant to us no matter where we grow up or live - precisely because the US war machine lurks everywhere. And part of my work is trying to think more deeply about these conditions.
Our personal lives are very much inflected by war. My parents came to the U.S. as a result of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. That is what led to their movement from Vietnam to Texas. And then it was my dad's job in the tech industry that relocated our family to Taipei, Taiwan. This is a perfect example of how two transnational circuits - one of militarized refuge and another of global capitalism - move people across the world but still connected to the web of U.S. empire. These histories of war and mobility have fundamentally shaped my life and also the different privileges I was able to hold, attending an international school somewhere like Taiwan and the kinds of experiences and education I received as a result. War and militarization create these kinds of cascading experiences in how they invade everyday life. War brings about our world in particular ways.
What about Chicago, where you live most of the year?
Chicago is—I mean, as everyone knows, a heavily policed city. The technologies of policing that are present in Chicago are very much militarized and about tracking the movement of certain populations—particularly for Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. At this very moment, we are witnessing ICE terrorizing our streets and invading our communities - this notion that “inner cities” are an important frontier of war is governing the regime of state violence against communities of color. So when we talk about war as a condition of our everyday life, it's not just about the battlefield, but it's the ways in which technologies of war and militarization are mobilized to police the movement of populations, as well as the increasing dimensions of immigration detention, the deployment of ICE, and the increasing ballooning budgets of ICE to identify the “enemy” and remove them from the country. At the end of the day, this is the prevailing racial logic of war: to identify an “enemy” for elimination. These practices are inherently violent and enabled by these increasing surveillance technologies that are products, particularly of the post-9-11 movement, of the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Naturalization Services, the creation of ICE. We think these dimensions of society are normal, but are actually emergent in the post 9-11 moment of particularly acute Islamophobia and the policing of black and brown Muslim communities. It's war on the home front, as scholars of the war on terror constantly remind us. But Chicago is also a city with vibrant political movements, both historically and also in the present that have and continue to challenge this regime of oppression.
Seeing war everywhere, does that feel like a weighty experience? How do you hold and move with or through that?
It’s both weighty and I think we bear a responsibility to make it weighty, if that makes sense. War is so normalized in our everyday life, it lurks in the background in ways that most people don’t even notice its omnipresence. To make it weighty - to pause, reflect, comment, and challenge - is the work of untangling this constant presence that invisibly but indelibly shapes our movement through the world. And I think this is a crucial part of the work of demilitarization, to make visible what previously isn’t and to assert that war is not a normal condition of everyday life. And once that becomes our motivating thought, once that becomes our political compass, that gives us space to imagine something anew.
One thing I admire, during this interview, and in your writing, is the emphaticness of your sentences. I'm thinking of the way you closed “Incendiary War,” you said, “If napalm and white phosphorus are deemed exceptional, then that narrative only serves to inadvertently reaffirm a liberal narrative that there even exists an ethical, humane method for an imperialist nation state to wage asymmetrical wars against colonized others. I emphatically assert that there is not.” And then, rowdy applause throughout the conference hall. It feels like there's so much journey and substance behind or anteceding that emphaticness. It’s everything we’ve been talking about this past hour, but my last question is just—what is it like to arrive at this kind of emphatic sentence or emphatic voice? Where does it come from, how does one develop that kind of emphaticness?
My goal as a researcher and a scholar is to communicate my argument convincingly to an audience, and it always starts with the premise that it's emphatic, because my belief is emphatic. My belief in a world beyond war is emphatic. So I want to communicate that through with emphasis, a confidence in our ideas, but also not just confidence, a steadfast belief that this is possible, that a world without war is possible. The emphaticness that you are ascribing to my work is really a product that I want my work to offer a pathway into believing that something is possible. That is the first step to really envisioning these other worlds, is to actually believe it is possible to live in a world without war and then to find ways to bring that into being—through craft, through language that is about communicating the possibility to believe it is possible. That's one of the things that I strive to do in my writing, in my scholarship, is to leave no doubt that I do believe in this and that I believe that we can actually enact this world.
Winona Guo is a PhD student of Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
Dr. Rajorshi Das is a poet, scholar, podcaster, and incoming Teaching Assistant Professor in the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. This interview asks after the wondrous entanglements of their PhD dissertation, “Messy trans and queer storytelling: (un)doing Indian exceptionalism,” which they defended this past spring at the University of Iowa. Their work can be found in the GLQ (2025) and Interventions (2024). We called twice, between NYC and Rajorshi's parents' house in Kolkata.
I learned about your work because of Kareem Khubchandani, whom I wrote for editorial recommendations. I hope it's alright that I share what Kareem wrote back to me: "Rajorshi is the junior scholar focused on queer diasporic lit."
Thanks to Kareem for the recommendation. It's a very sweet one—although I don't exclusively focus on diasporic literature in my work. One of my dissertation chapters focuses on writers and editors, situated in India and the US, who were doing the kind of archival work that put Indian queer literature on the multinational publishing map in the late '90s and early 2000s.
Yes—when we emailed, you explained that you've written on Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, and Ocean Vuong, among others, but you've since moved away from literary articulations in the diaspora to focus more on trans activist literature in India, especially in your dissertation. Our opening question is, What about Asian American literature inspires you? But let me add, how did you come to make that move? How have your literary curiosities and inspirations traveled over time?
When I think of Asian American literature, it's a very interesting category for me because, in India, I was reading some of these works, but I did not instantly think of the category “Asian American” because that's not necessarily how I was reading it. I was reading it more as South Asian diaspora, like Agha Shahid Ali or Suniti Namjoshi, and others who are writing from North America. Especially in the case of Ali, that was a way in which he was also negotiating a sense of loss in relation to India, Kashmir, and the occupation of Kashmir. So I was always making connections between how Ali was writing versus, let's say, George Abraham, who is writing now in relation to Palestine, and how Vuong or others are writing in relation to Vietnam and their experience of living in the States. But these are also very different and distinct experiences.
Ali's work seems to me more rooted in South Asia. I wanted that kind of rootedness in my work—especially in the grassroots, working class activism in the region—as somebody who has grown up in India and been involved in activism in India. I'm not saying that it cannot be working class across diaspora; it is. I just felt more invested in India as we know the land to be. But also, because it would be tricky to categorize writers like Ali within the Indian diaspora. He's from Kashmir and I'm not sure if he would have wanted to be included in the term, Indian. That was one of the reasons why I thought, okay, let me be a little more specific in my dissertation. Then it changed a bit.
At the same time, I was drawing from literary strategies that have been used by writers across North America, because that's where I was doing my PhD. Not just Ocean Vuong, but also Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others. I kind of approached Asian American literature through the lens of queerness, and colonialism. That's how I realized, oh, these are conversations already happening in the diaspora. Diaspora is not at the center of my dissertation, but it’s something that I can draw from to inform my understanding of messiness and storytelling in India specifically.
What kind of literary strategies do you mean?
For instance, I have taught Vuong, Ali, Abraham and Piepzna-Samarasinha Samarasinha, also Trish Salah in my General Education Literature classes because of how they use language, the English language, and used specific genres. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong is constantly drawing attention to each sentence, and punctuation, and the role of English as a colonial language. His novel breaks into poetry to showcase the kind of pain that the narrator goes through when he loses a friend and lover. Here, the traditional genre of the novel is not enough to write about the pain. But his metaphors associated with the Vietnam war are messy and politically subdued as compared to what you see in Salah, and Abraham’s treatment of Palestine. Abraham’s “Broken Ghazal, Before Ghazal” does not intend to move with pain per se. It is meant to indict and show the power of refrain toward a political goal. He is more direct than Ali whose treatment of Kashmir is poignant but seems to shy away from naming India as an occupying power. And these are literary strategies, depending on your position and also the aspirations and vulnerabilities that you carry.
Ocean Vuong and Agha Shahid Ali, both of whom you mentioned, also appear in your dissertation in relation to “messiness.” First question, you cite Vuong early on when writing about the messy relationship with your mom—how did Vuong’s writing clarify this for you?
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, when I had the first draft of my introduction, it was more anchored around On Earth. There's this very powerful line in the novel, where the character, Little Dog, says something like, “I'm a mess, Ma.” I think he's trying to explain what writing means to his mother who does not read English.
That encouraged me to begin my introduction with a personal note, unpacking my messy relationship with my mother who I also call Ma. But mess, need not have a negative association. It can be something that you see as untidy, that doesn't make sense or that seems incongruent—that has its own process. It can be very strategic, and makes sense if we approach it not from a deficit mentality. Messiness then requires labor, and requires a certain degree of rigor.
In the dissertation, I tried to first unpack my own messy relationship with Ma. She was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and only moved to India later and became a naturalized citizen through marriage. So it's very easy for me and my father to renew our passports, but for her, there's more inspection and surveillance. She's someone who is not very comfortable with my sexuality, even though I know she loves me. At the same time, she's someone who buys earrings for me, and stitches my blouses. So these are some of the interesting contradictions, which are part of our relationship.
At the same time, I felt that contradiction is not necessarily the word that explains what's happening here. I felt somehow that some of her approaches had to do with her own upbringing in a rural part of Bangladesh, being part of a political family, because her father was part of the Awami League. But at the same time, she comes from a privileged caste background though did not get an English school education like I did. At the same time, she understands gender fluidity because it is prominent here. Those factors also contributed to how she perceived sexuality and queerness, and not necessarily through certain markers. So it would be okay for her to see me wear certain kinds of clothes, but only in private, not necessarily in public. At the same time, I cannot have some discussions with her, even in the so-called private space of the home.
In your reply, there’s an insistence on the phrase, “at the same time.” How does this phrase, a gesture to temporal synchronicity, help you think about the region and the need to theorize messiness there?
I didn't notice the usage of the phrase until you pointed that out. I was thinking about how some of this work, labor intensive work, whether it's from activists on ground or activist storytellers—has a method of messiness. All of that is happening simultaneously, at the same time, because often when we are trying to understand politics—and I mean the ideological work that we do, inside or outside the university—we often are unable to reconcile with contradictions. Certain people think as if politics needs to be pure. Just because one person is supporting one cause, they also have to support, you know, the other X, Y, Z.
And for me, it was very important to point out that all of this is happening simultaneously precisely because it's messy. If you pay attention or embrace that messiness, you'll be able to understand why there are these contradictions, how they can be traced back to identity as a process, which then facilitates certain decisions or actions. I think unconsciously then I was also insisting on the fact that it has a temporal dimension. It's all happening at the same time. One can think about Stuart Hall's “conjuncture” as a theory of how these contradictions are kind of clashing against each other at a certain time frame. And then what kind of possibilities emerge from that coming together. I'm not saying it has to be resolved or anything.
You also named Agha Shahid Ali earlier. You’ve written about Ali’s refusal to be included in Hoshang Merchant’s anthology of gay writing from India. Could you unpack that moment for us in relation to messiness?
I didn't necessarily think about Ali as somebody who was messy in writing so much, but maybe in terms of other decisions. That's where I suppose his refusal to be part of Hoshang Merchant's edited anthology comes into the picture. I don't know what Ali was thinking; I can only speculate. Akhil Katyal reads it in his book The Doubleness of Sexuality as something that could have to do with Ali's father’s Kashmiri nationalism, and perhaps a degree of reluctance to out him through that anthology—though the word gay became a kind of a metaphor in Merchant's book and the way Merchant approached the word. I was arguing that maybe Katyal’s was not the only reading here. Maybe there was more to it in that decision.
So here, mess or messiness can be an optic, where I as a researcher am embracing the messiness of this entire process and then trying to unpack what could have led to that decision. And that's something that I do throughout my dissertation, especially when I think, okay, this doesn't make sense. Then I pay attention to why it is not making sense or why somebody uses certain myths in a certain way to achieve a certain end. I do that especially with regard to Ruth Vanita's use of Hindu myths versus A. Revathi's use of Hindu myths. Some of the myths are very similar, but in one (Vanita's) case, it celebrates Hinduism in a way that ignores the violence of the caste system. Revathi is more rooted in an anti-caste vision, and yet does not necessarily reject all Hindu myths. And that would be very different from Living Smile Vidya's approach to Hindu myths, which is a complete rejection. So one needs to understand where these approaches are coming from. Even though they may feel messy, they are very strategically deployed because there is a political aim into what you want the book to be, or who your target audience is. The readership counts here, and of course, books have a life of their own. And that's where the podcast also came into play. I wanted to trace that through some of the podcast interviews that I did.
Let’s talk a little more about the methods and archives you used. How did the concept of “messiness” travel and thread through the podcast?
When I was initially thinking about the methodological part of my dissertation, as somebody who has been trained in literary studies, we obviously rely more on close reading. And in some cases, of course, other kinds of reading. But I wanted to also talk to people, writers and organizers who have inspired me over the past couple of years, to understand what it means to do the kind of politics that they are doing. I needed a different kind of method, and initially, I even thought of doing an ethnography. But then, in the English department, we don't necessarily do that, the way an ethnographer in Anthropology would do that, like I may not be able to spend a year in India to do that. I was also constrained by the pandemic, because at that time when I was preparing for my comps, we were in the first phase of COVID with less safe options to talk face to face.
I thought the best way for me to approach it would be through podcast interviews, which then were done largely virtually. So that was also a messy process in the sense that I have to be very mindful of the kinds of access that people have. Let's say if I'm hearing a certain kind of hesitance in their voice, I cannot assume that it’s coming from the question itself, but sometimes also from the surrounding that they are in, like when people are being interviewed from their natal houses or public space, they may not be able to share certain things with you.
The post-interview process was also very messy because some people realized that they said certain things and didn't want it in the published version. Often when, let's say, an ethnographer doing interviews, it may be more of a private collection as opposed to a public podcast. Then the process involves certain ifs, and buts, or dos and don'ts. That involved a degree of care, which perhaps I wouldn't have been able to do if I was just relying on close reading. Let’s say people wrote something 10 or five years back, they may be in a completely different positionality now. Sometimes the shifts didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I was able to understand why people were making certain decisions as I spoke with them more and more.
You’ve called your materials, “trans activist literature.” What constitutes that term? Does “trans activist literature” challenge ideas of “literature” that may be received from or more intelligible to the university?
That's a great question, because I was thinking, what is activism? What is literature? What is activist literature? I didn't really define them, and I don't think I can. It's more about how these texts are circulating, and what they're trying to do. It's perhaps a very traditional answer, because everybody talks about gender as something that you do, and not what you are. But I believe that's also something true of literature. Maybe you would think of Dickens’ Hard Times as activist literature in Victorian England. But I don't think, for me, that is activist literature now. It’s about the time, the situation, the positionality.
And at the same time, not every text that I've included is necessarily activist literature. Sometimes I've included them to have a harsher criticism of their process, or to compare them against a more grassroots anthology or text—for instance, in chapter one, when I discuss s editorial approaches. I wanted to think through the lens of what Anjali Arondekar describes as abundance. It's abundantly available to us, so you don't think of certain communities as in deficit, or approach them from a deficit perspective. But at the same time, just because someone is doing grassroots activism doesn’t mean that activism is anti-caste or anti-right-wing. So, I had to bring in other work. The word activism has to be a certain kind of activism, at least from my perspective, because everybody is an activist. I had to be mindful if writers have the reputation of being anti-Muslim, for instance, in the Indian context. There is a vast difference in just being an activist, and being somebody who is more radical and willing to take chances and make certain political decisions that might even make them vulnerable, such as a lot of people who are currently incarcerated in India, including one of my professors, Hany Babu.
In some ways, the people you encountered may have been more opaque to you, or ephemeral, than a copy of Hard Times on the table. Did you adopt a kind of radar for what their political commitments overall are? Or do you rely on other testimonies of those people?
I didn't want to say it out right, but in one or two cases, I knew that a person’s ideologies may not match with mine. I was thinking, okay, do I interview them? I eventually did but I didn’t get the answers that I was looking for. And that’s okay. You have to talk to people who don’t share your values but have a threshold, I suppose. Again, in some cases, I realized through common circles that certain guests have turned out to be vocally right-wing later.
Also, when I was revising my dissertation, the genocide had already started. So I was also looking at who was saying what on my social media. Some people turned out to be surprisingly Zionist and anti-Muslim, and I didn't know that when I engaged with their work. The trick with social media is that it's very fragile, and it can change very quickly. Of course, if a post is public, you can still cite it. I did that with a few scholars to hold them accountable precisely because of their position in queer literature or theory.
Did you draw from other archives as well for the dissertation?
I had started by looking at traditional archives and libraries in universities. Cornell had Hoshang Merchant's manuscript archives. But I didn't necessarily engage with them beyond a certain point, because while the decisions there could have been unpacked, I felt there is a lot of joy in talking to the person directly. I interviewed Merchant in 2022, I think. It was so much fun. This was my second interview with him actually, and he opened up quite a bit.
Thanks to the support that I received from the grad college through several fellowships, I was able to go to Hyderabad to do the interview. That also made me spend more time in communities in West Bengal. That's why the fourth chapter takes a turn to auto-ethnography. Initially, the plan was just to have fun with friends or acquaintances at LGBQ+ events. But there was a certain kind of care I hadn't experienced earlier in queer and trans circles, or kothi and non-binary circles in India, which I found there, and I wanted to write about it. And that became its own method. I thought given the fact that I was entering certain spaces as a very privileged person, I needed to discuss a different kind of literature being produced through them—which may not be written in English, or published in the form of a book or a monograph. Rather, they may be pamphlets, open invitation calls to come to certain events or impromptu dance performances. That's why often the distinction between text and performance also becomes very blurry in my work.
In the process of the dissertation, how did you come to identify and listen to your own joy and put a priority on it?
I had a very supportive mentor in Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, who let me do the things that I genuinely wanted to do and believed in. Where Kareem’s comment may be relevant, is that initially I wanted to work on English literary texts, but beyond a certain point, I was not finding the joy in just reading the texts. I wanted to be in a space where people could talk to each other, and then I also felt that people whose books have been circulating as Indian queer literature come from very privileged positions. I don't want to name them; of course, people know who is privileged because of their surname, which also give away your caste, right? So that pushed me to look for other kinds of texts. From texts, I realized performance is something that I have to think about, because most of the works on and by Indian trans and hijra communities have been centered around performance, and issues of livelihood.
As I read more and more queer or color critique, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s work and others, I realized performance is where I wanted to go. All these activist spaces are also spaces of performance or spaces where people are dancing without necessarily thinking, I'm being watched. Kareem's book has been very remarkable in that sense. I’m referring to Ishtyle, which talks about the transnational nightlife in India and the U.S. Obviously people are being watched, but that's not the primary concern, but rather the desire to dance in community and sometimes to dance for certain people too. That's something I wanted to write about but centering the grassroots. And my mentor was very supportive in that regard. I think it matters who is on your committee or their vision of the idea of your dissertation. In my case, I got a lot of freedom to pick texts, do texts.
You shift between terms in the dissertation; there's pink-washing and then saffron-washing, homonationalism as well as Hindu-homonationalism. There’s a rigor in which you theorize messiness in the context of cultural capital, or caste capital. When messiness travels from India to the diaspora, how does the language of the optic evolve? Can you tell us more about how to calibrate the messiness differently, based on the context?
First of all, thank you so much for reading the dissertation. It's still amazing that someone actually read it. I mean, someone outside my committee and, you know, some select friends who I know read it. But yeah, thank you so much for that labor.
To give an example, when I talk about Telangana in chapter three, I have to be mindful of how people are approaching the question of self-respect or Swabhimana. That Swabhimana is very much rooted in the region and in the anti-caste traditions of that area, but at the same time, it also disidentifies, and I'm using the word the way Muñoz theorizes it, in the sense that they don't completely align with the anti-caste traditions of intellectuals like Periyar. A lot of the organizers of the 2015 Hyderabad Pride Walk, which later came to be known as the Swabhimana Walk, and which was documented by Moses Tulasi's film Walking the Walk, were a coming together of people from disparate ideologies, but it was completely led by working-class hijra and trans workers. Many of them were sex workers. During the podcast interview, Rachana Mudraboyina, one of the organizers, explained to me that anti-caste activists share a very tricky relationship with sex work because in devadasi traditions and various other contexts, sex work was and is caste-based labor, so it's often perceived as slavery. But in the past, a lot of people like Namdeo Dhasal and others have tried to go beyond the traditional Ambedkarite and Periyar's opposition to sex work by embracing sex workers. So maybe, there is a slight distinction there between the work and the worker, and it's a struggle. It's still happening. That needs to be distinguished from a Gandhian supposedly anti-colonial opposition to sex work, or a Leftist intellectual opposition to sex work as work. So unless one understands the region, unless one understands the investment of trans sex workers in Telangana, one cannot understand self-respect.
And that requires an optic of messiness. At the same time here, what's amazing about the walk is that people like Mudraboyina, Vyajayanti Mogli and others who were part of the organizing group—they also practice messiness. Of course, they may not be calling it messiness. But when I see the work that they are doing, I feel like they're deliberately practicing messiness, because we are invoking local customs festivals to bring people together and make them feel that, okay, this is pride, but it's not necessarily the pride that we see often in the so-called West. It's different, it's more rooted. So you can come here and do different things. Of course, there is also the criticism that I cite from people like Kancha Ilaiah, who don't want some of these festivals to be embraced by the working-class Bahujan. “Bahujan” is a word that literally translates to “majority,” but here, following Kanshi Ram, it refers to a coalition of sorts between people from different oppressed groups, or people who care about oppressed groups. But, in the interview that I did with Tulasi, the director, he mentions that many of these festivals were appropriated by mainstream Hinduism, so they may not be necessarily Hindu in origin. It is now perceived as Hindu, and the state gives a lot of money or showcases these festivals as state festivals. So here, there is a practice of messiness, where you don't want to give up on certain codes, even though these codes may seem mainstream at this point. So it's a delicate balancing that they do. That's what makes messiness work, at least in this context. It may not work in other contexts.
In the diasporic context, one can look at how organizations such as Anjali Rimi’s Parivar Bay Area have collaborated with or supported grassroots community groups in India. In fact, Mudraboyina was on their team earlier. I don’t discuss Parivar in my dissertation much, but it’s interesting how Rimi shares her proximity to both Democrats like Harris and Biden as well as Indian right-wing like Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. Unlike many trans organizations in India which maintain a distance from right-wing trans or hijra leaders, Rimi does not mind sharing her proximity with Tripathi on social media. Messiness is helpful here, so that I don’t ignore associations that may romanticize Hinduism or Harris’ Indian roots at the cost of downplaying the caste and anti-Muslim violence in India and in the diaspora, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Is Swabhimana located specifically outside the university? I see it as a thread throughout your work, this deep commitment to interdependency with queer and trans spaces outside the university. You write that academia cannot aspire to being a place of trans joy, due to its ingrained need for productivity and accumulation. And how when you go back to Kolkata, you feel alive and joyous in the presence of fellow trans-Kothi activists. Could you describe your practice of moving in and out of the university during your PhD, and the energy you experience in these different locations?
So when I was writing a significant portion of my introduction, we—I’m thinking of the U.S. in this context—had already gone into genocidal mode. I was deeply disillusioned by the responses from U.S. universities, because the protests hadn't started yet. They started rather later in Columbia, CUNY and other places. I was wondering, is there a place of resistance and love within the university? Because at the end of the day, even when I am writing, I'm doing this work also for my own academic profile, my career. There’s that pressure to publish in certain journals or with certain people and then get a job, so on and so forth. But how does that do anything? Is it supposed to do anything to at least make sure that we are not doing the same shit that people have been doing, whether it's India in the context of Kashmir—upper castes continuously trying to annihilate Dalit and other caste-oppressed communities, or in the U.S., where they are funding the destruction of Gaza? One has to recognize that without the money and the backing that Israel has right now, none of this would have happened.
That's where the fourth chapter happened, because I wanted to return to the spaces which have nourished me over the years. I come from very elite university backgrounds. I did a large part of my education in Calcutta University, then in Delhi University. I was briefly also enrolled as a PhD student in Jawaharlal Nehru University. All these spaces allowed me to meet some radical people and build connections. But at the same time, there are spaces outside those universities which are perhaps even more important. A lot of these battles are being led by people who may not have gone to the university or may not have finished their schooling. And yet they are the ones who are leading these struggles for dignity, for work, or stable work, something as basic as dignified livelihood.
Of course, the university has been under attack, whether it's in India or the U.S. Hany Babu is still in jail. Students like Sharjeel Imam are still in jail in India right now. The Polis Project carried his prison letter a few months back.
But I wanted to show how the university is not the only site of knowledge production. I write about how Sintu Bagui or Sumi Das are organizing in Seoraphuli and Coochbehar with or without academic support. What is happening beyond the metropole or the city? I don't think I have gotten really deep into it, because I'm still a very city-bred person.
You also use this term standpoint. You quote Patricia Hill Collins, that “standpoints may be judged not only by their epistemological contributions, but also by the terms of their participation in power relations.” I really admire how throughout your work, you're engaged in this powerful critical interrogation of your own standpoint in relation to being an upper caste scholar and as you write, not trying to reproduce savarna ways of knowledge production. You even close the article published in Interventions with this very emphatic moment that goes, “The queer savarna then must die. However, I don't see it happening anytime soon.” Can you tell us about this injunction? Why did this feel crucial for you to say?
It's a very contradictory statement, because if I'm writing as a queer savarna, clearly I'm not practicing that kind of dying, right? I think I derived that idea from Manmit Singh’s understanding of “Rahao,” which is a pause. They are in conversation with Shaista Patel's work and the pedagogy of pausing. But at the same time, how much of that practice should you do? If you're writing, if you're getting published, aren't you also not pausing and centering yourself? And to be honest, this was my comprehensive exam article. And I was like, should I publish it? Should I not publish it? And eventually I did send it out because I thought, okay, I'm going to be in the job market. So I need to send something out. That's how the article happened.
The idea of annihilation also comes, most importantly, from Bhimrao Ambedkar, in the Annihilation of Caste, where he talks about annihilating the caste system because it segregates laborers through the segregation of work. When Ambedkar was writing the book, I think he was also thinking about Hindu society as a whole. This was much before his conversion to Buddhism, so you can see a shift in his own thinking where he perhaps did not even believe that Hinduism could be redeemed. And that explains his later decision. His strong radical critique of Hinduism, you know, gave people like Gandhi and others a lot of pain. That's why there were vehement disagreements between these two contemporaries. Again, that's where messiness can be helpful in unpacking the optic. Like, okay, this guy may have led this so-called non-violent movement. I'd say so-called because there's a degree of violence in that entire rhetoric of non-violence. But then when you think of Ambedkar, it seems very decolonial, and not just anti-colonial, in the way that he is thinking of completely changing the premise of Hinduism, which is the caste system.
So, these are some of the conversations that one needs to have when one is thinking about death, which of course is metaphorical in this sense, but it also means, do you continue to publish on this topic or do you stop? And maybe because self-criticism could be its own centering of guilt. So then how much of that is needed? Or have you reached that saturation point where it's no longer required? I'm sure if I ever publish a book, it will not have the same degree of it. It will still have the standpoint—Collins, and the standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding and others, and more recently, Shailaja Paik has talked about Dalit feminist standpoint—that is important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can appropriate it, to take up so much space that it becomes only about you.
It reminds me also of the way your work has this very life-affirming and life-saving quality to it. I’m thinking of how you end the dissertation, you write, "Mess is an inevitable part of life. It is untidy, wet, sticky, and chaotic. It exhausts both Ma and me, demands unpaid labor, but also teaches us how to love and hold hands—metaphorically or not—and not give up on life.” I'm curious, from this standpoint of having completed the dissertation, how has all of this labor and work influenced your life more broadly? When you say “messiness does not give me hope, even as it gives me clarity”—has it offered you a kind of clarity that is also the will to live with which you close your dissertation?
I'm glad that you thought it was more positive and life-affirming, because when I was writing the conclusion, I was actually thinking the other way around. I had this entire conversation happening with my therapist, and I was trying to find something to hold on to before submitting the document to my committee members, because we were in the second year of this genocide, and it's still continuing and it just keeps getting worse when you think there cannot be anything worse than what has already happened. That's why I was wondering, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of even trying to theorize mess? We can call it what it is, but at the same time there are people who are getting killed and people who are being starved, whether it's in the Biden era or in the Trump era. For them, messiness may not be useful. For them, clarity may not be useful. Messiness is perhaps only then useful for certain scholars, because it's also a little distant—some scholarship is distant, not because scholars are not invested in what is happening on the ground, but because they have a certain purpose. We are part of the academic industrial complex, and so the purpose of the book or the article is not about doing something good or creating a moral compass of sorts—maybe that is the purpose for a few scholars—but at the end of the day, it's often about more and more knowledge production, through a very mechanized manner.
So right now, I don't see a lot of hope, honestly, in embracing messiness, beyond seeing it as an optic that helps me understand actions, and reactions, or afterlives. It's helpful to me as a researcher, and may not be that helpful to me as an ally of Palestinians or as an anti-caste ally. At the same time, of course, I love having conversations. I haven't published a podcast interview since December, but I'm going to do one soon. I love those conversations and I love that part of it, and I hope I can do that irrespective of whether or not I'm in academia. There is some possibility of political change, yes. But it also depends on the state machinery and how brutal it can get, or what it will do, or whether or not it will listen to certain stakeholders. I think that's what makes the situation a little bit scary—when you think that despite the large-scale protests or despite the resistance, this is not ending, and why? We can discuss these questions and their messiness may be very helpful, but may not help in achieving a certain desired end.
What do you hope to talk about next on the podcast? And what questions are on your mind going into the fall semester?
I know I'll be very busy with teaching soon, so I'm hoping that in the next couple of months, I'll get to do a few interviews. I want to talk to people about the question of race and racism in the Indian context, which I think has come up a little bit in some of my earlier conversations with Davidson and Pavel who founded the Chinki Homo project. But I don't think I've explored that enough. I also need to be more in conversations with people who are currently in West Bengal, because that's where I am right now. I'm hoping to interview some more activists from the region. And also, maybe approach some people from the diaspora. And yeah, also I think, despite my best attempts, most of the people who are on the podcast are still Hindus, from different castes but still Hindus. I'm hoping that I will get to interview Indians who practice other religions. All that’s in the back of my mind.
Winona Guo is a PhD student of Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
