COUNCIL FOR RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES

This project expands upon my previous research focused on Hawaiʻi to Oceania (the Pacific) at large, bringing together the scholarship on Aotearoa / New Zealand and Australia; Melanesia including West Papua and Fiji; the Federated States of Micronesia; and Polynesia, including Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa. I bring this scholarship on indigeneity in Pacific Islands studies into conversation with Black studies, Asian American Studies, and theories of race. Holding fellowship with CRES faculty and students who are experts on race across disciplines including graduate students pursuing dissertations in these areas would allow unparalleled development of my thinking on this topic.

My project for the CRES Fellowship proposes to investigate the language materiality of caste and its attendant anti-Muslim and anti-black sentiments. I am requesting a 50% course reduction to do preliminary reading and writing to develop this new project. The goals are multiple: one is to reconsider the shifting socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic positioning of South Asian Americans in a moment when dynamics of migration are once again shifting; another is to identify an emergent set of stakes regarding the heightening significance of caste in diaspora; and a third is to consider parallels in theories of race and caste across different historical and geopolitical contexts. Through these areas of inquiry, I aim to better understand the relationship between the Indian caste system and its reach into the South Asian diaspora, and the American caste system that sanctioned slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and centuries of physical and mental violence of black people through white supremacy.

This dissertation investigates how the atmosphere and air in various forms—wind, flight, ambiance, breath, weather, climate—function simultaneously as a complicated enviro- epistemological weapon in colonial-imperial history and, more recently, a medium for anti-racist, anti-colonial collaborative projects in contemporary art. I define the atmosphere as a force that artists engage on a multisensorial level, manipulating or visualizing the air in artworks and performances, shifting it from a means of domination to a channel for creative resistance. Analyzing interventions that depart from historical visualizations and representations of the Anglophone Caribbean, I present artists who address the increasingly urgent ecological crises facing island nations, inaugurated with colonial invasion that was partly justified through racialized atmospheric anxieties about the tropics. In response to past and ongoing exploitation, Caribbean collectives engage an atmospheric aesthetic defined by collaboration and conversation.

This project investigates how people at the border employ aesthetics to negotiate them to create new possibilities of the border at the ground level. I observe how people at the border live with this forced dichotomy of nation-state to understand the border as an aesthetic practice. As a result, the border serves as an aesthetic site of a particular colonial and racial reality that comes into being at these points of contact between San Diego (SD) and Tijuana (TJ). I forefront the experiences of queer and trans people of color in my study to understand how their aesthetic elements inform their relationship to borders; and, how queer and trans of color life re-deploy the aesthetic to create a transformative intervention.

This project focuses on the material and cultural processes of racialization by historicizing ambient media like air, light, and olfaction in order to think about how Asian American artists and writers contend with the fact that race, while firmly embodied and material, also assumes forms that are not always easily recognized. Ambient Stylistics asks us to understand race not as reified bodily essence, or the telos of a perceptual process, but as dispersed modality—an object that moves and is arrayed across myriad social, perceptual, and material configurations. What happens when we track race from the outside in—as a produced effect of atmospheric technologies, vernacular aesthetic practices, and the environment—rather than from the inside out?

Drawing on the fields of Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Carceral Studies, Central American Studies, and Critical Education Studies, “Schooling the Crisis” considers how these fields analyze neoliberalism and racial capitalism’s symbiotic relationship to the carceral state. More specifically, this study is particularly concerned with how Central Los Angeles is ideologically, materially, and spatially designed to confine, surveil, and control racialized bodies, social behavior, and political consciousness in the wake of transnational displacement and state- engineered violence in Central America’s northern triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). To this end, my interrogation of carcerality in Central Los Angeles seeks to map the historical and spatial (re)arrangement of a transnational racial order that has been, and continues to be, enforced through neoliberal domestic and international policies as a means to obscure its imperialist and colonial origins.

This dissertation project investigates the dynamics of colorism and analyzes the explicit and implicit sacrifices dark-skinned female dancers offer to comply with the dance industry standards to fit into this cultural hierarchy of power. I will investigate how dark-skinned female dancers use anti-respectability and disidentificatory performances to create alternative spaces of being. Also, I will explore how social media, such as Instagram and TikTok, has contributed to the perpetuation of colorism in the dance industry. In this research, I focus on the representation and positioning of dark-skinned female dancers in performances and how the shades of their skin determine their visibility. Although previous research has examined racial discrimination within the dance industry, most especially in the ballet world, less attention has been given to colorism within this discourse of race on how the skin shades of black dancers determine their visibility. Also, there is little to no research on the sacrifices these dark-skinned female dancers have to make to attain full cultural and national belonging.