arts of noticing – Frances Tran

I am so excited to be presenting at the 2018 Association for Asian American Studies conference: “Solidarity and Resistance: Toward Asian American Commitment to Fierce Alliances” (March 29-31).

Our panel, “Entangled Ecologies: Transpacific Alliances and Resistance in a More Than Human World” (Friday, March 30; 8:00AM – 9:30AM; Yorkshire) explores the contributions Asian American studies and Asian Americanist critique can offer to unfolding discourses on ecological crisis and the anthropocene. I am thrilled to be in conversation with a brilliant cast of thinkers, teachers, artists, and activists: Chad Shomura (University of Colorado Denver), Jess X. Snow (New York University Tisch School of Arts), and Heidi Hong (University of Southern California). Please join us tomorrow as we think together about aesthetics, culture, entanglement, resistance, survival, temporality, space, and super pigs.

You can find our full panel description and the abstract for my paper on Bong Joon Ho’s urgent and beautifully executed film Okja below. Hope to see you bright and early at our session!

Panel: Entangled Ecologies: Transpacific Alliances and Resistance in a More Than Human World

Session Abstract: In our contemporary moment, human-driven climate change continues to disproportionately affect working class communities of color, devastate animal and plant life, and threaten indigenous ways of life. This panel explores Asian American and Pacific Islander strategies of resistance against imperialism and militarization that also attends to our entanglements with nonhuman ecologies and organisms. It acknowledges that lands, oceans, and organisms not only witness colonial violence, but also produce vibrant materialities and connections in its aftermath. Our panel asks: What resistant strategies and tactics form alliances between seemingly disparate geographies, populations, and species? How can we develop alternative ways of being that recognize the knowledge, resilience, and resistance of landscapes, oceans, and non-human animals? In what ways can Asian American studies align itself with struggles against ecological destruction and dreams of sustainable futures?

Continue reading “Join Us for “Entangled Ecologies: Transpacific Alliances and Resistance in a More Than Human World” at AAAS!” →

Dear Anna,

I have been a fan of your work since I read Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) at the beginning of my graduate studies, so I don’t know why it has taken me this long to pick up The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). But since I started reading it in late August, I can’t stop thinking about your project.

It offers such a captivating invitation- to follow the lifeways of matsutake, wild mushrooms, and the lives it assembles. Who would’ve thought that a project could be built around a single type of mushroom? …But you did. I’m sure there were and still are people who would dismiss a work like this for daring to focus on something so small and, some would say, insignificant. And yet, you elegantly show us how following matsutake opens up whole worlds.

Your work has attuned me to new ways of seeing and understanding received categories and concepts–capitalism, ecology, labor, freedom, precarity, and ruin. I am still in awe of how deftly you take readers from the day-to-day struggles of mushroom foragers searching for matsutake in the forests of Oregon and the complicated stories of how and why they began picking mushrooms for a living, to consider broad-scale questions about ecological devastation and forest renewal, to how matsutake enter capitalist markets and informal gift economies in Japan.

Continue reading “Following Wild Mushrooms: A Letter to Anna Tsing” →