his July, the long-awaited 2023 Asian American Literature Festival at the Smithsonian was canceled without adequate explanation just a few weeks before it was to take place. In acknowledgement of the efforts invested in the festival by the writers and organizers, and of the loss this represents to American literature and the strength of its communities, we are releasing this feature from the NER archive. The essays here, published in NER 41.1, came directly out of the Asian American Literature Festival in 2019 and represent some the imaginative and intellectual work that this festival has to offer.
Secret Histories: From the Asian American Literature Festival
JENNIFER CHANG + LAWRENCE-MINH BÙI DAVIS Introduction
We associate lectures with dull erudition and cold, sterile lecture halls. Our associations with history are hardly different: history, we think, exudes importance with broad-shouldered publicity, such pomp. But for marginalized communities, our cultural knowledge has come with far less fanfare. . . .
KAZIM ALI Shreela Ray: An Introduction
I want to talk about the “secret history.” The term itself acknowledges that whether the history is known or not, it has an impact upon our present lives, which is to say the “secret” is worth knowing. It’s not only to better understand our present that we seek to learn the secret history: we also want to give due to past masters who were marginalized by political conditions, colonization, or intended or unintended discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or national origin. . . .
JENNIFER CHANG Looking for Wong May
There were two things I wanted to do in Ireland. I wanted to go to a bog, and about this I was emphatic, reminding my husband daily that the trip would be a failure if there were no day at the bog. Any bog would do. The second thing I wanted to do was find Wong May, a poet with whom I’d begun corresponding in the months preceding. . . .
CHING-IN CHEN Breaths for Mark Aguhar
(1) I’m sitting down tonight to think of Mark Aguhar.
This writing began as an invitation for a sideways look at Asian American poetry. A secret, alternative history. “To imagine Aguhar’s legacy as a space—not instead of a body but as supplementary to it—encourages proximity without approximation.” . . .