Ethnic studies departments came together Friday to help Northwestern’s Asian American studies department celebrate its 10th anniversary.
The event, held in Norris University Center’s Big Ten Room, featured two discussion panels and a keynote speaker. More than 120 people attended the celebration, organizers said.
Although the event was hosted by the Asian American studies department, panel discussions and keynote speeches addressed issues beyond the context of Asian American culture. Panel topics covered a variety of disciplines in ethnic studies ranging from “The Struggle for Islamic Studies” to “Rethinking Racism and Blackness.”
Yen Le Espiritu, chair of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego, was the keynote speaker for the event. Her lecture, “Ethnic Studies for the 21st Century,” discussed racial violence in relation to state power and racial history.
Espiritu described racial violence as a “ghost” that was “always present but never surfaced” because people never acknowledged it.
She said it was particularly vital for there to be a “reconciliation of race divides” in immigrants and refugees in America, the land of immigrants.
Aldon Morris, a sociology and African American studies professor and former director of Asian American studies at NU, said the Asian American studies program at NU was “historically the result of Asian American students struggling on campus.”
In 1995, NU Asian American students went on a hunger strike to advocate for the program, which broke down administrative resistance, Morris said.
“Northwestern is a stronger University, socially and intellectually, simply because Asian American studies, Latino studies, Islamic studies and Indigenous studies programs exist,” Morris said.
Ji-Yeon Yuh, director of Asian American studies, said the event was important to commemorate the milestones of the program and especially to highlight the significance of Asian American studies in relation to other fields of ethnic and social studies.
“Ethnic studies tells you what it means to be a member of the society and locate to everybody else,” Yuh said. “These ways of thinking are essential, particularly in an increasingly, explicitly diverse and globalizing world.”
By hosting different activities, such as forums and performances, the Asian Pacific American Coalition aims to “generate political interest and education on campus” so that people will be interested in courses such as Asian American studies, said Calvin Lee a board member of APAC.
The Bienen School of Music and Weinberg sophomore said this event was an occasion to remember how students came together with “passion and cohesion” to bring ethnic programs that mattered to them to NU.
