Love is a Well of Resistance - Lessons from the Asian Diaspora

• In Event: Struggling Through Together: AAPI and Asian Diaspora Leadership Perspectives

Abstract

Purpose:
This conceptual paper focuses on how to resource and sustain an expanded solidarity (Mabute-Louie, 2025; Nguyen, 2024) through the lessons and strengths of democratic resilience in South Korea (Goel, 2024; Lee & Lee, 2025) and from thought leaders of the Asian diaspora (Boggs & Boggs, 1974; Mabute-Louie, 2025; Nguyen, 2024; Said, 1979).

Perspectives:
This paper explores the complexity of leadership beginning with Yuri Kochiyama’s call to remember, “we are all part of one another” (Kochiyama, 2004). In such challenging times, where people are being disappeared or eradicated, and the attempts to destroy our public school system continue, we have to remember to struggle through these dangerous times together, within a justice-oriented collective consciousness.

Methods:
First, the paper discusses the display of democratic resilience between the Fall of 2024 and Spring of 2025 shaped by South Korea’s historical struggles (Goel, 2024) and the lessons from collective actions resisting President Yoon’s declaration of martial law. These lessons are aligned to Nord & Lindberg’s (2025) ideas on how democracies rebound from autocratic actions connected to institutional safeguards, societal collective action, and timing.

From the lessons of civic and political actions from South Korea, the paper next focuses on the lessons of justice-oriented thought leaders from the Asian diaspora (G. L. Boggs, 2016; Nguyen, 2024; Said, 1979) underlining a call for justice-oriented collectivist approaches.

Conceptual Framework:
The paper uses the term Asian diaspora instead of Asian American as a way to heed a call for expansive solidarity (Mabute-Louie, 2025; Nguyen, 2024) that threatens hegemonic cultures, yet grows community “between unlikely others in an ever-widening circle” (Nguyen, 2024, n.p.). The idea of widening the circle is one Nguyen (2024) connects to Said (1979), who also wondered of ways to widen our circle. Pointing to philology, Said reflects on Goethe’s perspective about seeing “all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole” that preserves the “individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole” (p. 15-16). This expansion of our solidarity connects deeply to the concept of collective struggle, underlining that there is no utopia or promised land and that the struggle for justice is the highest expression of human creativity (G. L. Boggs, 2016; G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012; J. Boggs & Boggs, 1974).

Connection to Conference:
In a search for ways to strengthen our democracy, this paper draws out the strengths of the South Korean people and justice-oriented thought leaders from the Asian diaspora. From this well of strength is a familiarity of collectivist love that drives a liberatory praxis compelling us to resist dehumanization across all layers of society. As the AERA 2026 theme calls us to do, connecting our work of resistance to the cultural wealth of oppressed people pushes us to learn from knowledges beyond white-centered U.S. exceptionalism.

Author

• Paul Koh, Towson University