At Long Last, Asian American Studies at Fordham: An Interview with Dr. James Kim
By Elissa Johnston
As of April 3, 2023, it’s official: starting in the 2023-2024 academic year, Fordham University will have a degree-granting Asian American Studies program. Students can now apply for a minor in Asian American Studies, and courses offered by the program will appear under the AAST tag in the registration portal. English News interviewed Dr. James Kim, one of the program’s founding Co-Directors, about what this exciting development means (and how we got here).
“It particularly behooves Fordham as an institution to have an Asian American studies program,” Dr. Kim said. “We think of ourselves as an institution rooted in New York City, and New York City is home to the largest Asian American population in the continental United States.”
Beyond Fordham’s need to address an enormous segment of NYC’s population, Dr. Kim points to a need to grapple with the complexities of racialization in the United States. “US racial discourse is a lot more complicated than it’s often made out to be,” he told me. “It’s been dominated by a black/white binary, and there are deeply important reasons why. We absolutely should think very seriously about anti-Blackness and how it cuts across all kinds of other divisions. Nevertheless, the US’s racial map is messier and more complicated than that. It’s important to introduce nuance into how we study [racialization in the US], not for the sake of liberal multicultural inclusion, but for structural transformation.”
Dr. Kim connects AAST at Fordham to a push for social transformation. “My working hypothesis is that we will be in a better position to effect deep social and structural transformation if we have something like Asian American studies informing our cognitive map of the US racial scene. We’re more likely to produce something that fundamentally challenges the social structure if we incorporate Asian American studies into our thinking. We’re also more likely to move beyond the facile and ultimately unsatisfying discourse of liberal multiculturalism.”
Dr. Kim also points out that the establishment of AAST at Fordham hasn’t happened overnight. Faculty, students, alums, and other invested parties have been waiting for this program “passionately” since the late sixties and early seventies, when student activists at Fordham began calling for institutional responses to racial injustice. As part of Fordham’s response, the African and African American Studies program was established in 1969. Students in the early seventies exerted similar pressure for Asian American Studies at Fordham, but these now-alums have been waiting with what Dr. Kim called “appropriate impatience” for fifty years.
“Part of what’s made this process so moving and gratifying for me is being in touch with those alums who were there from the very beginning,” said Dr. Kim. “They’ve been waiting for this moment for quite some time.”
Dr. Kim also credits student activism with bringing him to Fordham’s English department as a specialist in Asian American literature. “There was a group of students in the early 2000s who were very passionately committed to seeing Asian American studies installed on campus,” he told me. “They put a lot of pressure on the administration and eventually succeeded in getting a tenure-track faculty line in Asian American studies.” Dr. Kim also shared that when he first came to Fordham, he was told that there were hopes that he would build an Asian American studies program. “It’s kind of been part of my job description since I got here in 2003,” he said.
In Dr. Kim’s pre-tenure years, he made various efforts to build awareness of and support for AAST at Fordham (including a conference and some lecture series that the Reid Writers of Color series eventually subsumed). Like many other Asian American specialists in higher ed in the United States (including Fordham’s own Stephen Sohn), Dr. Kim had some trouble getting tenure, which delayed the push for an AAST program as he spent a few years gathering allies and changing culture.
Momentum picked up again in 2020 when Stephen Sohn (whose inaugural address as Mullarkey Chair of Literature takes place on April 25) came to Fordham. Then the 2021 Atlanta shootings drew national attention to anti-Asian racism. In response, Dr. Kim created a petition drive that collected over 1400 signatures from students, alums, faculty, and staff. “[This petition] served as a mandate for the University to really invest in Asian American studies in a much more concerted way than they had before,” said Dr. Kim.
After this successful petition, Dr. Kim put together a working group that included himself, Dr. Stephen Hong Sohn (English), Dr. Caitlin Meehye Beach (Art History), Dr. Daisy Deomampo (Anthropology), Dr. Ki-Eun Jang (Theology), Dr. Vivian Lu (Anthropology), Dr. Grace Shen (History), Dr. Tiffany Yip (Psychology), Dr. Qun Wang (Communications), and Daniela Pila (postdoctoral fellow). “Many of these people are completely new to Asian American Studies, but they’ve dedicated themselves to retraining in the field and have quickly gotten to a point where they’ve designed some wonderful courses,” said Dr. Kim.
Once these pieces fell into place, Dr. Kim shared, an official AAST program followed close behind: “Just last fall, we got the minor unanimously approved by various college bodies, and then just recently, we were told that we have funding for the program that will run the minor, so a lot has happened in the last few years.”
When asked about the program’s vision, Dr. Kim pointed to the program’s “embedded” social justice imperative and expressed a desire for the program to produce scholars and community organizers. “Deep, serious, rigorous thought is a form of activism,” he said, “and I want to see that emerge from our program.” He also hopes to see the minor instill an ethical orientation toward the modern world, supported by a commitment to acting courageously “to shape the modern world and bend it toward justice.”
Part of this justice-minded orientation toward the world involves cross-racial solidarity. The coursework requirements for a minor in Asian American Studies include at least one class in African American studies or Latin American and Latinx studies. Dr. Kim highlighted the program’s commitment “to thinking about race in relational and comparative terms.”
“You cannot think about Asian racialization in a vacuum. You have to think about it relationally,” said Dr. Kim. “Take the ‘model minority’ discourse. That’s basically a triangulated form of anti-Blackness. You cannot understand Asian racialization in a US domestic context; you have to think about it globally. And you can’t understand Asian racialization in isolation or only in relation to whiteness; you have to understand it in relation to the racialization of Black and Latinx and Indigenous folk as well. So in order to have a more intellectually honest and politically useful cognitive map, you have to think about racialization relationally.”
The minor requirement to take a class in African and African American Studies or Latin American and Latinx studies also reflects a desire for more collaboration between programs. “We’d love to organize events with AAST and LALS and AAAS, for example,” said Dr. Kim. “We really hope this is just the beginning of a much larger collaboration.”
“I also personally want to help create a counter-discourse against a growing carceral discourse that I see within the ‘Asian American community’ (and that’s a term I use very uncomfortably) against Black folk and others. There’s sometimes a discourse that tries to pit Asian folks against Black folks and tell the story of anti-Asian violence as part of a narrative of this interracial conflict,” Dr. Kim shared. “I am very, very unhappy with that historical narrative. I think it’s historically short-sighted, politically misguided, and ethically problematic. I want to try to begin to promulgate a counter-narrative.”
Finally, Dr. Kim shared what comes next. What can Fordham students, faculty, alums, and others do to support the upcoming stages of the program’s development?
“The immediate next steps are all boring administrative matters,” said Dr. Kim. “But some other next steps include recruiting new students! We need students to sign up for classes and the minor.”
“We also hope to stage an official launch event sometime next year,” said Dr. Kim. “We want that to be an occasion for the Fordham community to come together: anyone who has any meaningful claim or investment in the Asian American community. We want to come together and celebrate this major institutional achievement.”
As the program grows, its co-directors (Dr. Kim and Dr. Sohn, though Dr. Beach will serve as interim co-director while Dr. Kim goes on research sabbatical next year) will seek more interested faculty to affiliate with AAST. It will also seek to build its development strategies.
“I know we have a lot of people who’ve wanted to see this happen for a long time,” Dr. Kim shared. “It’s been my deepest wish for a while to be able to go to an alumni group, some of whom have been in close contact with me for years, and say, ‘We did it.’”
Finally, Dr. Kim thanked the Fordham English community for years of support and encouragement. “So many people in the English department have been so supportive of this initiative. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to you all for being so vocally encouraging about this. It’s meant a lot to me.”
Drs. Kim and Sohn also extend their thanks to the administrators involved in approving the program, including Eva Badowska, Laura Aurrichio, Patrick Hornbeck, Maura Mast, Ann Gaylin, and Tyler Stovall, and to Rafael Zapata and Felicia Satchell from the Office of Diversity. Thanks also to Anne Fernald, who was on the selection committee for the Teaching Race across the Curriculum Grants, and to the AAST graduate assistants, Corinna Cape, Lina Jiang, Tripat Rihal, and Jackson Lewis.
Dr. James Kim is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham. His scholarship has appeared in Camera Obscura, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, MELUS, and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996, edited by Asha Nadkarni and Cathy Schlund-Vials. Since 2016, he has co-directed the Seminar on American Studies at Columbia University. Before arriving at Fordham, he was Minority Scholar-in-Residence at Pomona College. In Fall 2018, he taught as a Visiting Associate Professor of American Studies at Princeton University.
