Events

Drawn from her forthcoming book Worlding Latin Asian: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics, this chapter examines the Getty-sponsored 2017 Chinese Caribbean Art Exhibition that was jointly organized by the Chinese American Museum and the African American Museum. The exhibition offered the rare opportunity to showcase internationally acclaimed artists like Wifredo Lam, Albert Chong, and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, as well as other notable artists of Chinese Caribbean descent, and to explore the different facets of their cultural heritage, the complicated histories of mixing and migration, and the diverse cultural sources that inform their work. As a form of public culture, the exhibition facilitated encounters among vastly different social groups and created possibilities for engagement and mutual recognition. Yet this exhibition strived to do more. To give rise to an intimate public, she suggests that one must engage as an active spectator in the different registers of self-reflection, of meaning-making through one’s interactions with the artworks and with the narrative of the exhibition, and of communing together in a suspended space of memory, imagination, and affect.

Dr. Lok Siu is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley. She is an award-winning author and cultural anthropologist working in the areas of Chinese diaspora, Asian diasporas in the Americas, transnational migration, non/belonging and cultural citizenship, food, and ethnography. Her books include Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (2005),Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (2007) co-edited with Rhacel Parreñas, Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (2009) co-edited with Caldwell et. al.; Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective (2021) co-edited with Khachig Tölölyan, and Worlding Latin Asian: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics (forthcoming with Duke U. Press). She recently guest edited the special issue on “Diasporic Futures: Sinophobia, US-China Relations, and the Fate of Chinese Overseas” for the Journal of Chinese Overseas (2024). As a regular public speaker, she contributes and appears in various national and international media, including CNN, NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, CBS, VOX.com, and Le Temps.

This chapter is from my current book manuscript tentatively titled “Musubu: Knotting History at the Gila River Incarceration Camp”. This book combines archaeological, archival, and oral historical research to understand the confinement of Japanese Americans at the Gila River Incarceration Camp, built on the land of the Gila River Indian Community. Framing the incarceration camp as a tangle of knots, it examines the people, landscapes, materials, and histories which came together to produce the camp and their afterlives in the present. This chapter looks to the ways that diaspora shaped the practices of incarcerated Japanese Americas, materially linking the camp to multiple sites nationally and transnationally, while simultaneously forming new relationships with Indigenous communities and land.

: Koji Lau-Ozawa is a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for American Cultures. His research focuses on the archaeology, history, and memory of Japanese diaspora, especially as it intersects with Indigenous land. Lau-Ozawa received a PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University, an MA in Anthropology at San Francisco State University and an MA(Hons) in Archaeology and Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh.