Friday, Dec 5, 2025, 9 am to 6 pm
During the late 1960s and 1970s, Third World Marxism was at the center of Asian American Studies. But today, the history of Asian American left critiques of capitalism, racism, and imperialism has largely been forgotten. This conference asks: How did Marxism leave its imprint on Asian American studies? How can we rethink the relationship between theory and practice for the 21st century—a time of intensifying class contradictions within Asian American communities, surging domestic and international fascism, and growing mass movements?
Convenors: Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Cynthia Gao, and Colleen Lye
Speakers: Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen, Harvey Dong, Diane Fujino, Estella Habal, Marlene Kim, Scott Kurashige, Tracy Lai, Promise Li, Steve Louie, Crystal Luo, Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Paul Nadal, Bruce Occena, Mark Tseng-Putterman, David Song, JM Wong
Sponsored by the Asian American Research Center, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by: Department of English, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program, Transpacific and Asian American Studies Colloquium, the Robert Haas Chair, Materialist Institute for Research
Program
9-9:15: Coffee and tea
9:15-9:30: Welcome & Introduction: Colleen Lye
9:30-11: Movements 1: Roundtable on Life in the Asian American Movement and After
Chair: Calvin Cheung-Miaw
Estella Habal, Harvey Dong, Steve Louie and Bruce Occena
11-11:15: Break
11:15-12:45: Arguments 1: Problems of Theory and Method
Chair: Oriana Tang
Paul Nadal, “The Exhaustion of Asian American Criticism”
David Song, “American Schools and Their ‘Asian Problems’: Theory and Practice in Dialogue”
Marlene Kim, “From the Margins of Asian American Studies: Economists’ View on Race and Class”
Sarika Chandra & Chris Chen, “The Political Economy of Asian Racialization”
12:45-2: Lunch on your own. There are many restaurants within a 10-minute walk.
2-3:30: Arguments 2: Internationalism & Global Capitalism
Chair: Lindsay Choi
Diane Fujino, “Reconsidering Asian American Movement Opposition to the Vietnam War”
Mark Tseng-Putterman, “The War at Home: Internationalism and the Political Economy of Empire”
Crystal Luo, “Sweat and Blood: Labor and the Asian American Movement, 1967-1999”
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood,“Surplus Relatives: The Philippine Systemic Cycle of Dispossession and American Terminal Crisis”
3:30-3:45: Break
3:45-5:15: Movements 2: Organizing an Asian American Left
Chair: Cynthia Gao
Tracy Lai, "Organizing and the Academy: The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism"
Scott Kurashige, “The Post-Leninist Moment, or My Life as an Asian American Radical in the 1990s”
JM Wong, “We Could Have Met in Longhua: Diasporic Labor and the Geopolitics of Solidarity”
Promise Li, “The Asian American Working Class and the Culture of Class Politics”
5:15-5:45: Closing remarks: Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Cynthia Gao and Colleen Lye
Bios
Sarika Chandra, Associate Professor of English, Wayne State University
Sarika Chandra is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. She researches and teaches in the areas of Globalization Studies, American Studies, and comparative racialization. She is the author of Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and Remobilizing of Americanism (2011). She is the co-editor and contributor to the edited volume Totality Inside Out. (2021). With Chris Chen, she is completing a manuscript on the political economy of race.
Christopher Chen, Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, University of California, Santa Cruz
Christopher Chen is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles, poetry, and reviews in boundary 2, Post45 Contemporaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Money and American Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and Tripwire. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (2022), a comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry.
Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Cordelia and William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of History, Duke University
Calvin Cheung-Miaw is an historian who specializes in Asian American history, intellectual history, and social movement history. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Asian Americans and the Color-Line, that uses the history of Asian American Studies to explore the rise and fall of U.S. Third Worldism. His writings have appeared in the Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, Verge, and Convergence Magazine.
Harvey Dong, Continuing Lecturer in Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Harvey Dong is a Continuing Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where he teaches Asian American Studies and was awarded the 2016 American Cultures Ronald Takaki Teaching Award. He is interested in research and writing about the evolution of Asian American and Third World social movement activism on campus and in the communities. He was involved in the I-Hotel History Committee to write a timeline history of struggle. Along with Beatrice Dong, he has run Eastwind Books of Berkeley since 1996, publishing and promoting Asian American and Ethnic Studies books. He uses his community work experience to bring life to his Asian American history, Chinese American history and Contemporary Issues course. Many of his students have gone on to work in social justice causes.
Diane C. Fujino, Professor of Asian American Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Diane Fujino is professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara and past co-editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her research explores Asian American Left activism, 1940s-present, Black Power, Afro-Asian solidarities, and Third World internationalism. She is author/editor of a number of books including Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation; Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party; Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake; and Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. Her most recent writings on the Asian American Political Alliance reveal the anti-imperialist ideologies of the early Asian American Movement. She has long been active in liberatory projects on and off campus, including the Organizing Knowledge Project, the Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson Archival Project, UCSB’s EXITO ethnic studies program, Santa Barbara Tenants Union, and UCLA’s Asian American Studies textbook.
Cynthia Yuan Gao, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Middlebury College
Cynthia Yuan Gao is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. Her current research project tracks the influence of revolutionary political theory and practice from Asia on second-wave feminism, US Third Worldism, and the New Communist Movement. Her most recent article, "In Search of the Asian Nation," examines Asian American Movement debates over the meaning of the national question, arguing that they indexed the contradictions of integrating the US and Asia, race and class, reform and revolution, into a unified political program. She was also the editor of a dossier on Global Maoism for positions: politics; her contribution, '"Don't Wave It, Use It!"' examined Ann Tompkins' 1974 guide to criticism/self-criticism. She is also an avid collector of left-wing ephemera, so if you have any interesting pamphlets lying around, please get in touch.
Estella Habal, Professor Emerita, Asian American Studies, San Jose State University
Dr. Estella Habal is a lifelong activist and more recently a scholar. As a young adult, she joined the anti-Vietnam war movement learning that it was a racist and imperialist war. But when the Philippine Marcos Dictatorship declared martial law, she joined the KDP, a U.S.based Filipino revolutionary organization, which opposed his repression against the Filipino people. She also fought to stop the eviction of elderly Filipino and Chinese tenants at the International Hotel in 1977, and in the 1990s, she helped to resurrect a new International Hotel. As an academic and scholar, she told the story in a book, San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement (Temple 2007). She taught at various colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area and later became a Professor at San Jose State University, teaching courses in Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies from 1999-2014.
Marlene Kim, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Boston
Marlene Kim is a fourth generation Asian American—Korean on her paternal and Japanese American on her maternal side. She grew up in a low-income immigrant community in Los Angeles. Today, she is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She specializes in race and gender discrimination and the working poor. She is editor of Race and Economic Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2007) as well as numerous scholarly articles on these topics. She has been featured on NPR, CNN, CBS, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, USA Today, Newsweek, and the New York Times on these topics, including Asian Americans in the US. She is the first recipient of the Rhonda Williams Prize and serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Scott Kurashige, President, James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation
Scott Kurashige serves as President and Literary Executor for theJames and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation. He is the author or co-author of five books: The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008, recipient of AHA and AAAS book awards); The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century with Grace Lee Boggs (UC Press, 2011); The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (UC Press, 2017); Exiled to Motown: A Community History of Japanese Americans in Detroit with the Detroit JACL History Project Committee (University of Washington Press, 2024), American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (UC Press, forthcoming early 2026). A scholar of history, ethnic studies, and social movements, he has engaged in activism and community organizing in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle.
Tracy Lai, Professor Emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies, Seattle Central College
Tracy Lai is professor emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies at Seattle Central College and a member of Seattle Central’s AANAPISI Faculty Collective. She is active in her union, American Federation of Teachers, and the Seattle chapter and national executive board of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA). She has helped build the Seattle chapter of APALA into the largest active chapter of this national labor organization. She is honored to have received the Association of Asian American Studies Engaged Scholar Award in 2024 and the APALA Philip Vera Cruz Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Tracy co-authored The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism: Community, Vision and Power with Michael Liu and Kim Geron. Tracy and Kim also co-authored a chapter on AA&PI workers and organizing for UCLA’s Foundations and Futures
Promise Li, Writer and Tenant Organizer
Promise Li is a writer based in Los Angeles originally from Hong Kong. He is a tenant organizer with Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), a member of socialist organization Tempest Collective, and was previously active in rank-and-file union organizing in higher education.
Steve Louie, Organizer in Labor, Community and Student Movements
Steve Louie has been an organizer in labor, community and student movements in Los Angeles, SF Bay Area, Boston, and NYC since 1968. He has been involved in prisoner support work, antiwar organizing, the Asian Community Center, the International Hotel, US-China people’s friendship work, and spent the most time organizing with fellow workers on-the-job. He is the co-editor of the anthology Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (2001) and served as co-editor of the Wei Min Bao monthly newspaper.
Crystal Luo, Assistant Professor of Asian American History, Georgetown University
Crystal Luo is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Asian American History at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on Asian American and Asian immigrant histories as they intersect with questions of race, capitalism, and urban politics in the global 20th century. Her current book project, Asiatowns, seeks to understand how Asian Americans at once produced and resisted various aspects of late 20th century globalization through a study of labor and capital migration from Asia to the California Bay Area. She received her PhD in 2023 from the University of Virginia.
Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Colleen Lye, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, is Chair of the Asian American Research Center and author of the award-winning America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005). Most recently, Professor Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). She is a member of the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. She is currently writing a book about the rise of Asian American political identity and the late New Left in the global sixties.
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Assistant Professor of English, Vassar College
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood is an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. He is a cultural studies scholar whose work focuses on Global Asias, political economy, aesthetic mediation, and materialist approaches to the environmental humanities. His current book project, Reproductive Fictions: Overseas Filipina Writers and Capitalism’s Crisis of Care, establishes a longue durée continuity between martial law-era crises of social reproduction the Philippines, the state-sponsored export of care work, the contemporary outsourcing of digital intimacy, and diasporic Filipina literature. This project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the First Book Institute at the Center for American Literary Studies, and the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.
Paul Nadal, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University
Paul Nadal is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. His book Remittances, Literary and Economic is under contract with the University of Chicago Press, and a chapter was published in the September 2021 issue of American Quarterly and received both the Carlos Bulosan Excellence in Scholarship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Best Essay Prize from the American Literature Society. He currently serves as Delegate Representative for Literary Theory and Method at the Modern Language Association and is on the editorial board of Critical Times
Bruce Occena, Activist
Bruce Occena was raised on the east coast and went to the University of Hawaii where he participated in the first occupation of the administration building to protest the Vietnam War. Then he transferred to UC Berkeley and participated in the Third World Strike. At UC Berkeley he began to seriously study Marxism and participated in the International Hotel struggle from the beginning. He was a founding member of the Katipunan ng mga Demikratigong Pilipino (KDP) and served on the National Committee. Later, he participated in the formation of the Line of March.
David Shuang Song, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, University of Oklahoma, Honors College
David Shuang Song is assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His forthcoming book, Multiracial Mandarin (University of Minnesota Press, fall 2026), is an ethnographic study of Mandarin Chinese language education, diasporic multilingualism, and Asian American racialization in a working-class public high school in urban California. He is co-authoring a second book on the role of race and other nomoi in diversity and friendship-making in higher education. His work has been published in AmerAsia Journal, Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Higher Education, and Language Policy. He was born in Wuhan, China.
Mark Tseng-Putterman, Visiting Scholar, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University
Mark Tseng-Putterman is a historian of US imperialism and Asian American community politics, with interests in transnational social movements, grassroots diplomacy, and urban geopolitics. His academic and general audience writing has been published in venues such as The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Pacific Historical Review. With Diane Wong, he is the coeditor of Asian America Rising: New Directions for Political Activism (New York University Press, 2025). He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow.
JM Wong, Independent Researcher and Organizer
JM Wong (they/them) is a queer child of the Chinese diaspora living on Duwamish lands (Seattle) via Malaysia/Singapore and many cities in between. They are a healthcare worker, community organizer, researcher and writer. They write about movements, desire, and longings across distances and bordered spaces. Of diaspora, of the logistical supply chain stretching over ocean waters, of connections transcending prison walls, of crossings over to the ancestral realms. What we each journey through matters, and the futures we imagine begin from now. They do grassroots organizing with the Massage Parlor Outreach Project and are the Organizing Director for Puget Sound Sage.
Image: “Salmon Eyes,” by Pam Tau Lee.
