Building Diasporic Allegiances: Sustaining Asian American Activism Through Emotional Transnationalism

• In Event: 30603 - Global and Comparative Approaches to Activism

Abstract

This paper utilizes a framework of emotional transnationalism to explore the ways that Asian American activists in New York City cultivated diasporic allegiances and in so doing, a commitment to leftist radical critique throughout the 1970s. Echoing the call for transnational scholarship to bring dynamics of emotions to the fore (Williams 2018; Liu 2018) while also bridging the literatures of emotions in social movements and the emotional life of diasporas, this article asks, how and to what extent did the relationships developed in and through Asian American leftist organizations build diasporic consciousness? By examining the history of Basement Workshop, the first pan-Asian political and arts organization on the East Coast, I explore how the relationships between members of the organization and with other community members influenced their diasporic consciousness. Using interviews with members, content analysis of Basement’s cultural productions, and first-person narratives, I center the ways that deep friendships and mentorship drove individual members’ commitment to the organization. Ultimately, these relationships and the emotional work involved created a form of diasporic allegiance necessary for members to sustain their movement activism and engagement in anti-imperial and anti-racist politics.

Author

• christina ong, University of Nevada-Las Vegas