All you ever wanted to know about the AAAS Conference

Well, no, not really. But dear lord this report is huge, so I've added headings for your reading convenience. Skim to your heart's desire.

After a couple of days spent recovering and driving two hours to and from UCLA to spend a half-hour photocopying a stinking essay, I'm now ready to give my report on the Association for Asian American Studies Conference in Atlanta last week/end. I was so exhausted when I came back on Sunday that I passed out after getting home to Palmdale and eating a lot of spicy wings and some Papa John's pizza. I was gone for four days, but in that time I didn't eat or sleep very much. Too nervous and excited, you know, seeing old friends and of course worrying about my presentation, which was scheduled for the last session of the conference in the late afternoon Saturday.

First, Atlanta:

I really like this city. It was surprisingly chilly on Thursday when X and I arrived from our respective red-eye flights, but it warmed up gradually over the course of the conference. The conference was in the Buckhead area, which apparently is the most happenin' part of the city at night, packed with major restaurants. We got a really great hotel room near the top of the hotel (on the 24th floor out of 25) thanks to X. The area around our hotel was unfortunately riddled with large-scale construction, so it was rather unpleasant to walk around. But in general, people were nice and helpful with directions. There were times when people were so kind that it almost made me want to cry. Serious. It must be what they call "Southern charm"?

Because I'm attentive to these things, I noticed that it was mostly the people of color -- predominantly African American -- who were this nice. We came across clearly class-privileged white people who were utterly rude, as in, bumped into me without noticing, as if I were a wall or a tree, or scooted away when I sat down. One preteen blonde girl actually elbowed me in the face when she got up from a restaurant's waiting couch we were both sitting on, and I swear she didn't even look around. What the fuck, right? She could have used a lesson in manners, or a good bitchslap, and I would have been very happy to oblige. Despite all that, though, I would return to Atlanta for a longer visit.

The conference panels:

Even though there were, like, a gazillion panels available (warning: large file), I only managed to make it to six during the whole conference -- one of them mine! -- partly because I had to shower and take a nap on Thursday (got very little sleep on the plane) and because I spent most of Saturday traveling to and from the Martin Luther King, Jr. museum. However, the panels I managed to see were great, a few quite excellent. I usually focus on the Filipino/American panels at this conference because it's the one time per year that I get to glut myself on Fil/Am studies with other Philippinists and Filipino Americanists from other schools. The conference at Boston a couple of years ago was particularly disappointing, but this year the number of panels focusing on Fil/Am studies made me happy.

On Thursday, I got to see the panel, "Politics, Culture, and Community: From the Philippines to Filipino/a America and Back," featuring Ligaya Domingo, Geline Avila, Ethel Regis, and Emily Noelle Ignacio. Even though I was exhausted by this point, I'm so glad I went because they did a really great job: Domingo talked about her research on the tensions, conflicting social and political agendas, and history of various groups involved in the Filipino Community Center of Seattle. Avila presented on the Filipino veterans of World War II who suffered from the Rescission Act of 1946 that stripped them of the veteran benefits promised to them upon their enlisting to fight for the United States against the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines; she made a salutary connection between this issue and the history of U.S. immigration law. Then Regis presented her research on The Filipino Channel (TFC) and the problematic work it does for the Philippine state in relation to the Filipino diaspora. The fourth presenter, Prof. Emily Ignacio, gave a talk on her sociological research on Chicago's Filipino community, which was very interesting in its findings on language differences, regionalism, and transnational flows vis-à-vis racial and ethnic classifications in the United States.

Another particularly excellent panel was the Friday "Megasession" on Filipino labor which featured Profs. August Espiritu, Rhacel Parreñas, and Robyn Rodriguez. Titled "Legacy of Labor: Filipino Migration to the United States in the Last One Hundred Years," the megasession was a commemoration of the first documented migration of Filipinos to the United States as laborers in Hawai'i in 1906. Espiritu noted some of the interesting connections between the historical tradition of Philippine protest and the resistance of Filipino migrant laborers against exploitation in the United States in the early 1900s. Parreñas presented some of her research as a japayuki, working alongside actual Filipina migrant workers in Japan (is this method called participant observation?); she spoke of how America is still very present in this diasporic community, and argued that there are hierarchies in the Philippine diaspora, wherein Filipino Americans are the most privileged. Finally, Rodriguez argued that the Philippines is what she has termed a "labor-brokering state" in that it deliberately encourages, facilitates, and profits from the exportation of human labor around the world; she foregrounded the neocolonial status of the Philippines and its history of U.S. imperialism because, as she says, the labor-brokering state tries very hard to obfuscate these histories of colonialism and neocolonialism. Another important issue that Rodriguez brought up, which she said came from conversations with Lucy Burns, was how "fraught" the notion of commemoration is, given the problematics of Filipino labor that the panelists pointed to. Someone in the audience also added that in Hawai'i, Filipinos, along with other groups, are considered colonial settlers by the Native Hawaiians. Ultimately, then, it's quite problematic to celebrate the history of Filipina/o migrant labor.

A really great panel that wasn't actually a panel but a roundtable was the one that Prof. Lucy Burns put together, called "Situating Filipino American Studies: Curricular and Pedagogical Matters." There were no official presentations, and everyone was expected to say something, whether about their experiences teaching or trying to teach Filipino American studies at their institutions, or why they were interested in the roundtable. It was a great group of people who gathered together, and I learned about how to include Filipino American texts in various types of courses, how to propose Filipino American studies classes, and how invested people seem to be in seeing Filipino studies gain the status of the much more institutionally entrenched Chinese and Japanese studies, for the different intellectual perspectives that Filipino diaspora studies can offer the academy. The roundtable provided a lot of food for thought, but it was also particularly heart-warming because everyone was so open and friendly to each other; there was a sense of sharing and I loved seeing the collegiality among professors, grad students, and undergrads/recent college grads. Afterwards, most of the group went to lunch together and had a grand time getting to know each other and their research interests better. I even got a couple of citations for my dissertation from M-T, a dissertating English grad student from the University of Minnesota. How cool is that?

I saw several other panels, but I just wanted to briefly mention an individual presentation that I enjoyed, UCSB grad student Caroline Kyungah Hong's "Margaret Cho as a 'Funny Asian': Claiming an Asian American Comedic Tradition." She helpfully defined her terms in the beginning, then picked out some funny Margaret Cho lines to illustrate precisely what she was arguing in her paper. I also thought it was cool that she relied heavily on Rachel Lee's "fabulous" essay on Margaret Cho, which I've blogged and raved about before here and on Makeweight. It's nice to know there are people out there who think the same way I do about some of these things.

There were a lot of panels that I wish I had been able to see, but these are the panels I really regret missing:

• "Light, Sound, Text: Filipino American Creative Responses to the Colonial" with Benito ("Sunny") Vergara, Francisco ("Kiko") Benitez, Rachel Devitt, and Jose Capino
• "Re/Visions of the Landscape: Spatial Imaginings in the Filipino Diaspora" with Marie-Therese C. Sulit, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, L. Joyce Z. Mariano, and Eric Estuar Reyes
• "Asian American Studies and U.S. Empire: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" with Susan Koshy, Gary Okihiro, Dylan Rodriguez, and Setsu Shigematsu

And these are the presentations I wanted to see but couldn't for one reason or another:

• "Constructions of Racialized Queer Masculinities" by Joyleen Sapinoso
• "'The willingness to be wounded': Abraham Verghese's My Own Country" by Susan Moynihan
• "Feeding an Asian American Yen: Eating 'Back' in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" by Anita Mannur
• "Feeling Ancestral: The Geopolitics of Multiracial Consciousness and Colorblindness in Asian America" by Jeffrey Santa Ana

The food and drink (and of course the people I had them with):

On Thursday night, I had dinner with An, Je, and Al at 10 Degrees South, a South African restaurant in Buckhead. I had a wonderful time with them, even though An was the only one I knew before she became a professor and thus I came into it feeling nervous. It was especially good to sit down and have a meal with Al since I hadn't really met him before. They were all funny and gracious, and had excellent taste in food. The lemon-butter calamari that we had for appetizer was especially good, as was the red wine they chose (a South African cabernet, I believe). The sauces at the restaurant had a tartness that I really like; their peri-peri sauce for instance tasted rather like hot taco sauce with several twists of lemon. Yum. Then we went to another restaurant/diner, where I shared a double layer chocolate cake with Je. Double yum.

When we got back to the hotel, there was a Pinoy drunk party going on in the lobby near the conference rooms. Apparently there was a committee meeting with a lot of wine and beer left undrunk, and the members decided to take it to the lobby and drink the rest of it together. I had a blast talking chikka chikka with Li, Ge, and Sa, and eventually Et sat down with us.

On Friday, I had a great pastrami reuben from a deli near the hotel. I unfortunately don't remember the name of the place, but it's in the plaza with the Kroger's grocery store and Cost Plus World Market at the corner of Peachtree and Piedmont. Like I said earlier, the roundtable went to lunch afterwards, and I joined them but didn't eat anything since I was still full from the pastrami reuben. But they went to a South American restaurant near the same plaza. I really enjoyed the conversations, and I was glad to spend a little more time with M-T, Jo, and Er. But I spoke mostly with Lu, D, and JC (the latter two were my fellow presenters). Lu is always fun to have intellectual conversations with because she's funny and sharp, and opinionated without being self-righteous or overly judgmental, which is a great combo to have in a professor.

Later that night was probably the most astounding thing I've ever witnessed at one of these conferences: in the hotel lobby, over thirty Filipino Americanists and Philippinists gathered to have dinner. At the same time. In the same place. Together. But unfortunately, there was no restaurant around that could accommodate the huge party, so we had to split into two groups (insert joke about Filipinos and splinter groups here), and I went for the Brazilian food instead of the Hawaiian BBQ. Some moments:

• R tittering every time the meat came her way. If you don't know how a Brazilian buffet runs, it's basically a slew of waiters bringing around sizzling, just-cooked meat on skewers over and over again to put slices on your plate if you want it. There were fifteen cuts of meat, including beef, lamb, and pork; I don't even remember what I ate, but most were delicious. R probably had the best set up.
• Sunny, who was on my left, starting a conversation with me, K, and T about--. Oh but I can't say here. Suffice it to say that the last time we talked about it (at the Pinoy Blogger Party last December), he was hella drunk.
• Getting the bill and hearing the shocked silence at how many digits the total entailed. I don't think I've ever seen that many digits on a restaurant bill, but then, I'm no hotel heiress or movie star. I think we created a minor vacuum in the atmosphere from the accumulated inhalation of air.
• M's unbelievable generosity in paying for my share and Sa's (we were the only two who didn't have university jobs). Let me reiterate: it was expensive. This isn't the first time I've experienced M's generosity; it's been more than a few times since I first met him, actually. By the way, I'm going to treat him to a fabulous trip/meal/whatever when I get a real job. (Actually, I'm going to have to do that for several people.) You heard it here first.
• Walking back to the hotel in the cold with everyone, getting a couple of hugs from An because I only had a sweater on (forgot my jacket in the hotel room), and laughing loud enough to be heard in L.A. at what M was suggesting about teacher-student romances.

Finally, on Saturday night, the last night before I went home, I had dinner with Su and X at the Buckhead Diner (where I got elbowed in the glasses by that little biatch). We missed the conference reception, but I had a good time chilling, especially since I hadn't seen Su since the AAAS conference last year. And my fish and chips were really good, crisply golden and made without a lot of batter. Su had a shrimp and pasta that made her swoon at first bite, and X had a delicious-looking portobello mushroom burger.

My presentation (feel absolutely free to skip this one):

Before my panel, I had gone to the Martin Luther King, Jr. museum, so I was totally wrung out and had been crying. I didn't much feel like giving my presentation, even though I was talking about the consonances between the representations of African Americans and Filipinos in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But of course, I was also really nervous, and I sank into a very boring presentation persona (I think my voice dropped an octave), partly because I didn't have much energy after the museum and partly because the lights in the venue were dimmed for the PowerPoint slideshows. I stumbled quite a bit and forgot to say, "quote...unquote" at several parts of the presentation -- baaaaad Gladys. Then I was nervous during the q&a and completely babbled -- I knew the audience wasn't out for blood, but I was that tired and wired. Thanks to K, however, for his comments and suggestion on the close relationship between Christian reform in the U.S. and American empire during this period. Wish he were at my school so I could put him on my committee.

Anyway, before I forget, I wanted to give mad props to Oscar Campomanes, John D. ("Jody") Blanco, Benito ("Sunny") Vergara, and Lucy Burns, who were all quoted or otherwise referenced in my larger paper from which my presentation was culled. Talk about building on excellent scholarship. Sunny (along with K) was in the audience, too, so I was doubly nervous during my panel. In any case, for the presentation paper I unfortunately had to cut out the whole section on the relationship between photography and colonialism/imperialism where I actually quoted Sunny's work, because there simply wasn't enough time to go through it all. However, my fellow panelist JC did call out Sunny's name since he talked about colonial photography.

Indeed, my two fellow panelists gave rockin' presentations that kept me interested and awake. JC, who went first, gave his presentation on one of Marlon Fuentes's photographic series. Fuentes, for those who don't know, also made the incredible film Bontoc Eulogy, which is, as JC said, a "faux-documentary" about the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair exhibition of native "savage" Filipinos. D, who went last, presented some work from her soon-to-be-completed dissertation, for which she did a ton of archival research to find literary works in English by Filipinas in the Philippines and the United States before and during World War II. I expect that her work will make us Asian Am lit people reconsider the traditional narrations of both Asian American and Filipino American literary history, especially on the early, pre-1965 period. I'm so looking forward to both of their dissertations. As a last note, I just have to say that D and JC are totally fantastic and funny bosom buddies, and I had a blast chatting it up with them on Friday and Saturday of the conference.

{Addenda: You can read my presentation here if you're interested; at least you won't have to listen to me drone-reading it.

I also wanted to shout-out Sprouthead, whom I ran into almost as soon as I walked into the hotel in Atlanta. It was great to finally meet her in person after meeting her here in Bloglandia, and, yes, she gives excellent hugs. ;-) }