All posts by David Ludden
Global Asian Urbanisms
Where we began at the NYU Centers for Global Asia:
“Port City Environments in Global Asia.” (A research and teaching program funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, 2018-2014)
- 2018. 25-26 May. “Port City Environments in Global Asia”
- 2019. Mar 7-9 .”Imperial Connections: Ports, Power, and People”
- 2019. 24-25 May. Port City Workshop. This workshop is producing a special number of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Our work on port city environments has spawned a more capacious project, “Global Asian Urbanism,” including seaport cities around the world of Asian mobility but also strategic sites of urban connectivity on overland and airplane routes that now cluster around seaports but also follow inland tracks of transport infrastructure, including ancient routes across the steppe. This project is evolving in undergraduate courses and graduate student and faculty research based in our three NYU campuses and embracing NYU global sites.
At NYU in New York, we focus on New York City in the Global Asian Urbanism project
- 2019-2021. “New York Immigrant City” was VIP Course jointly in CAS and Tandon, co-taught by Heather Lee and David Ludden
- 2022. 30 Sept. Heather Lee Book Discussion: Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York, 1870-1949 (forthcoming).
PROJECT PROPOSAL: New York as a Global Asia City.
- Asia mobility is now providing most of the population growth in New York City — more than half the city’s growth since 2010 — and also most of its added cultural and economic diversity. (More than any other demographic influence.)
- With this in view, our three NYU Global Asia Centers are planning a three campus Global Asian Urbanisms program for research and teaching focusing on all the many ways that Asian mobilities shape the urban environment of New York City.
- This community-based research and teaching program will form an NYU-CUNY alliance for long-term studies of Asian America in the city and many of the mingled ethnic diversities that shaping the city, where NYU has a huge Asian student population and sits in the Chinatown neighborhood, in one of Global Asia’s great urban centers, with perhaps world’s largest current urban accumulation of Global Asia social and finance capital.
- We have made considerable progress in planning this project. We have NYUAD and NYUSH firmly on board and enthusiastic support from CUNY’s AAARI.
- We will have an all-day meeting with a public keynote lecture at 19 Washington Square North on 6 October to launch the project
- A sketch of our 2023-24 planning agenda appears below.
OUR 2023-24 Project Agenda:
- To build a foundation for a long-term research and teaching program on New York City’s Global Asian Urbanism, we plan to hold five meetings during the final year of our Luce grant (AY 2023-4).
- The first meeting — on 6 October, 2023, at 19 WSN — will include a range of current and potential GNU and New York City stakeholders, including experts to help us with a foundation funding plan.
- At four smaller meetings, we will share research findings and methodologies, ideas for program design, and practical lessons about funding.
- These meetings will yield a proposal for long-term foundation funding for
- ongoing multidisciplinary longitudinal database studies and
- intensive community-based neighborhood field studies of multi-generational strategies and experiences of Global Asian urbanism.
- Our program will produce
- ongoing sustained collaborative relationships among New York scholars, teachers, universities, schools, and communities and
- evolving platforms with online open access learning and research resources for for public use, for teaching in college and K-12, and for graduate training.
New York Global Asia City
HERE ARE SOME RESOURCES
Jenny Cheng, “The Chinese American Takeout Cuisine” (YouTube)
For a general resource, see City of NY Neighborhood Map; Wikipedia Asian Americans in NYC; NYC neighborhoods StoryMap; NYU Furman Center, Neighborhood Data; The Immigration and Ethnic History Society. A relevant book by Lauren Hilgers: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown (New York: Crown Publishing Group) New York Immigrant City Factsheet Course Webpage: New York Immigrant City. DETAILED INTERACTIVE MAPS: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND DIVERSITY IN NYC CUNY has a number of NYC/Immigration sites: e.g. “A People’s History of New York City, by Samuel Finesurrey. A student project: People of New York. Movement/Spread of Chinatowns.
Furman Center Neighborhood Profiles Demographics . Furman Core Data Downloads from: US Census Neighborhood Community Survey.
INTERACTIVE MAP: Race, Diversity, and Ethnicity in New York, NY
Zeemap of Chinatowns by Nastassja Rebecca Victoria Gerlich
Aazah Mirza, the circulation of some South Asian artists (restricted map under development)
Sarah Sun Map: “Distribution of Chinese Restaurants.” The data comes from NYC Open Data: DOHMH New York City Restaurant Inspection Results.
Good Wikipedia Sites: New York City ethnic enclaves. and Asian Americans in New York City (New York City itself contains by far the highest ethnic Chinese population of any individual city outside Asia, estimated at 628,763 as of 2017) — Nine Chinatowns. NYC MICRO NEIGHBORHOODS: ASIAN FOOD AND CULTURE IN FLUSHING, QUEENS
LONG ISLAND CITY IS A HOTSPOT: Nicole Hong, “Inside the N.Y.C. Neighborhood With the Fastest Growing Asian Population,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 2021. Updated Oct. 19, 2021 NEW YORK CITY is also Hub and transit point for migration elsewhere, e.g. New York State, where Asian populations are growing faster in many other cities. REF: Linying He, “State of Change: Asian Populations Transform New York.”
BUFFALO IS A HOTSPOT Caitlin Dewey, “Influx of newcomers brings ‘so much energy’ to Buffalo neighborhoods others once fled,” Buffalo News, Aug 29, 2021 Updated Dec 16, 2021.
- In addition to Bangladeshis, who frequently move to Buffalo after initially settling in New York, Broadway Fillmore has seen a sharp uptick in residents of Burmese and Somalian descent.
- The neighborhood is still majority-Black, with 6,200 Black residents.Today, Broadway Fillmore boasts at least half a dozen full-service grocery stores selling halal meats and imported produce. New shops offer kaftans, hijabs and international calling cards a stone’s throw away from older businesses selling pierogies and Black beauty products.
Here are the cities in New York and New Jersey with the largest PERCENTAGE Asian population in 2022. (pinned in Blue on map below) New Hyde Park, Great Neck Plaza, Ithaca, Scarsdale, Manorhaven, Valley Stream, Williston Park, New York City, Floral Park, Mineola, Palisades Park, Fort Lee, Edgewater, Leonia, Englewood Cliffs, Closter, Ridgefield, Tenafly, Norwood, Old Tappan
Blue pins point to high Asian population percentage cities. The orange pin is to the highest Indian concentration in New Jersey. The RED pins on THIS GOOGLE MAP are to high Asian concentration neighborhoods in New York City.
The New York University (NYU) Department of History Oral History Class Collection contains over 180 sound and video interviews conducted by graduate students from the NYU Department of History in 1984, between 1991 and 1995, in 1999, and by volunteers from the Workmen’s Circle in Manhattan, New York in 1993. The majority of the narrators lived in the Lower East Side (LES) neighborhood of Manhattan, New York. … The narrators reflect the changing ethnic composition of different neighborhoods in New York City, and include Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America; and migrants from the southern United States and Puerto Rico. Topics covered by the interviews include life in tenements in the LES, life in public and cooperative housing in the LES, family life, ethnic identities, intercultural and interracial relations in New York City, education, religion, paid and unpaid work, immigration and migration experiences, religious and social activities in East Harlem, Asian American activism, socialist and anarchist organizations, political activism, anti-war movements, community gardens in New York City, and experiences of women in higher education through the 1970s and 1990s. In addition to the interviews, the collection includes transcripts (full and partial) of interviews, notes on and indexes of interviews, field notes taken by interviewers, and preliminary questionnaires completed by narrators. Some files include articles and ephemera created by the narrators or are related to the topics they discussed in the interviews.
CHINESE FOOD IN CROWN HEIGHTS
Oct 24 Alf Nilsen Inequity in Modi’s India
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Nov 29 Nile Green Book Launch
Jan 21, 2023 Covid Chinatown Archive
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“Archive as Memorial” Exhibition |
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Time: Gallery Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1:00-6:00pm Location: Storefront for Ideas: 127 Walker Street, NYC Chinatown Archive as Memorial is an exhibition organized by members of A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project, a volunteer team of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural workers, oral historians, educators, caretakers, and activists who have worked collaboratively since lockdown in March of 2020 to document the COVID-19 pandemic and the myriad ways it has impacted Asian/Pacific/American communities in New York and beyond. The project was developed in partnership with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. |
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Archive as Memorial reflects the A/P/A experience at the intersection of several historic events —an ongoing global health crisis, a transnational Movement for Black Lives, and a surge in anti-Asian violence that has led us to national conversations about community safety and memorialization during a time of immense trauma. Included in the exhibit are recorded interviews, shared stories, and artifacts documenting the themes of mutual aid, community care, economic impacts, interracial solidarities, disability politics, and experimentations in mourning, both for our futures and our pasts. While A/P/A communities are too often at the center of recent conversations as objects of anger, curiosity, or sympathy, our work intervenes to document stories within our communities in our own words—this is not just essential for our communities’ own process of recovery but for all of us to heal as we begin to rebuild a “post COVID-19” world. In refusing the capitalist imperative to move on, as well as our desire to create with and for one another, we offer an alternative interpretation of the archive as an embodied activist practice that deepens community connectedness. Archive as Memorial is one of many lifeforms the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project has taken over the span of three years. The exhibition was made possible by project volunteers and core committee members, including Lena Sze and Crystal Baik, and generous support from Laura Chen-Schultz and Amita Manghnani at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Support for the exhibition was provided by the Asian Women Giving Circle, a donor advised fund of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Immigrant Social Services. Lead Curators and Community Amplifiers-in-Residence: Tomie Arai and Diane Wong Curatorial Committee: Laura Chen-Schultz, Preeti Sharma, Vivian Truong, and Mi Hyun Yoon |
Jan 21-22 Afro-Asia Interactions Conference
May 9, 2023 In Search of Bengali Harlem
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| Join Professor Vivek Bald (PhD, NYU American Studies) for a screening of his acclaimed documentary with actor and playwright Alaudin Ullah, In Search of Bengali Harlem (85 min), which follows Ullah as he investigates the lives of his Bangladeshi immigrant parents, unearthing a lost history in which South Asian Muslims, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans forged an extraordinary multiracial community in the tenements of mid-twentieth century Harlem.
The screening will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Professor Dina M. Siddiqi (NYU Liberal Studies), featuring Bald, co-Director Ullah, and community members Yolanda Musawwir and Shahazan Khalique. Thursday, March 9, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST Venue: NYU Cantor Film Center, Theater 200 Address: 36 E. 8th Street New York, NY 10003 US Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYC Center for Global Asia, Center for Black Visual Culture at the Institute of African American Affairs, and Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu. |
| Vivek Bald is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, and scholar. His work over the past twenty-five years has explored the stories and experiences of South Asians in the US and Britain. Bald’s first documentary, Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) examined the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Bald’s second film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) focused on South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the faculty Director of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. He is also developing “The Lost Histories Project,” an interactive documentary and participatory oral history that will build upon and extend the Bengali Harlem film and book. Bald received his PhD in American Studies from NYU in 2009.
Alaudin Ullah is a playwright and actor and the son of one of the first Bengali Muslim men to settle in Harlem. Ullah is the author of the acclaimed one-man show, Dishwasher Dreams, based on his father’s life in New York City in the 1930s-60s. Ullah premiered Dishwasher Dreams at the New Works Now! Festival at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, and was subsequently awarded one of the Public Theater’s prestigious Emerging Writers Group Fellowships. Ullah’s three-act play Halal Brothers centers on the interactions between African American and Bengali Muslims in a Harlem halal butcher’s shop on the day of Malcolm X’s murder in 1965. This emotionally charged ensemble drama is in development for stage production. Dina M. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist by training and teaches in the School of Liberal Studies at NYU. Her research, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. Siddiqi is on the advisory board of the journals Dialectical Anthropology, Contemporary South Asia, and the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS) and a member of the Executive Board of Sakhi for South Asian Women. Her publications can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dina-Siddiqi. |
Mar 31, 2023 Global Vietnam
Global Asia Colloquium
MARCH 31, 2023
4:00-7:00 Room 701 KJCC
(53 Washington Square South) Elevator Floor 7E
Studying Global Vietnam: Tensions, Limitations, and Possibilities
Asian and Asian American Studies have long been split along institutional, epistemological, and political lines. But scholars working at the intersection of the two fields have challenged the entrenched boundaries that have siloed the two fields. Vietnam studies has mirrored these dynamics.
War and its aftermath––the mass exodus and scattering of refugees across the western world––stretched the Vietnamese body politic into something we may call global Vietnam. But Vietnamese area studies and Vietnamese American studies have largely developed as separate fields of knowledge. One emphasizes training in the Vietnamese language and concentrates on the people, places, and events inside Vietnam. The other probes Vietnamese immigrant experiences as an American story and analyzes them within the framework of race and ethnicity studies. Yet, the dense and enduring connections between the diaspora and Vietnam militate against the study of one in isolation from the other.
This event brings together scholars who bridge the divide. The interdisciplinary panel features Ivan Small (Anthropology), Marguerite Nguyen (English), Quan Tran (American Studies), and Y Thien Nguyen (Sociology) whose research illuminate the diverse linkages that constitute global Vietnam and represent some of the most innovative efforts in Vietnam studies. Following the research presentations, Nu-Anh Tran (History) will moderate a discussion with the panelists about the tensions, limitations, and possibilities of straddling Vietnamese and Vietnamese American studies.
Rana PLAZA ten years later
Global Asia
PROJECT ON
GLOBAL BANGLADESH
at
PEOPLE’S FORUM
320 WEST 37th St.
