Asian American Renaissance: Possibilities for the New Century was one of my favorite workshops at the ECAASU 2010 conference at UPenn. It was led by founder and director Ryan Takemiya of RAMA a “Bay Area base collective of young Asian Americans devoted to fostering the creation of a new Asian American Arts Movement for the new century”. What does Asian American Renaissance mean? Renaissance in the sense of the word means “rebirth” a cultural movement. When I saw the name of this workshop I knew that I definitely would have to attend it and learn about the Asian American cultural movement in our new century.
To start off the workshop, Ryan put up pictures of four houses that represented White, Black, Latin, and Asian cultures. I found this very interesting and it made me understand what Ryan was conveying to us. The White culture had a big, upper-middle class home that was made unique from the other cultures with their house made up of country music, St. Patrick’s Day, certain cultural dress, slang, and so forth. The Black culture had a nice house too, except that the house was more distinct from the White culture and others. It has its own style, dialect, traditions and so forth that are not African that no one else in the world has. The Latin culture has a distinct house as well, but their house is distinct from both the White and Black culture. It is a culture that is not completely the same as the cultures of Latin America.
When we were shown the picture for the Asian American house, there was just a foundation. Ryan said that this foundation was laid in the 1970′s by leaders like Helen Zia, Yuri Kochiyama, and Congressman Mike Honda. Our generation must now build a house upon the foundation that they built. Ryan believes that it is a mistake to use the word “fusion” to describe an innovation. The word that should be used is “cultural synthesism”, because it is evolution. He said that, “every generation creates something new for every community, they take whats around them and change it, creating something entirely new and yet it resembles everything that came before it”. Ryan said that the “greatest example of cultural synthesism is the Harlem Renaissance” and that Black Americans at that time were in a similar place that Asian Americans are in now. Asian Americans are still facing identity and self-esteem issues. They have yet to create their own cultural synthesism.
From the Harlem Renaissance, Black Americans came out with their own style of dress, slang, poetry, dance: swinging, boogie, the twist; music: jazz, blues, and all of this spread across the entire country. Every generation went through cultural synthesis. But what do the Asian Americans have that they can call their own? It was pointed out in the workshop that fortune cookies, egg roll, and Sriracha sauce are things that were invented by Asian Americans. But Asian Americans need more, that can’t just be it. Ryan asked us if anyone had been to Hawaii. We all replied in the negative. He had been to Hawaii where he said Asian Americans there have done just that. They have their own distinct culture, slang, food, that have undergone cultural synthesis which Asian Americans on the mainland lack.
Ryan said that, “We need to be creators of our own cool. The masters of our own identity. We don’t want someone to create our identity for us. We’ve been protesting Hollywood and media literally for 100 years to let more Asian Americans in”. He said he has some problems with this. They are that “they give us only one role, they are giving it to us, why are we not giving it to ourselves”? He also said, “We are still outside the doors. We’re not in the boardroom, we’re begging them to give us table crumbs”.
Asian Americans are beginning to start their own publications, clothing lines, music labels, etc.. Ryan said that, “We need to stop being just employees and be creators, give back to your community. One of the biggest problems Asian Americans have is that we don’t even talk to each other, we’re almost afraid of each other, we’re afraid to collaborate with each other”. As Asian Americans, we must demand that whatever we create we do not make spectacles of ourselves and become unethical. The internet is a huge platform to get your voice out there and create something. Anyone can access it and once people put up for example, a YouTube video, word spreads fast simply by people telling a friend, who in turn tells another one, and so forth.
Be sure to visit Ryan Takemiya’s websites StudioRama and GO!STYLE and as he says, “Go out there and create something”.
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