Third World Spiritualities
Channel: Ji-Yeon Yuh여지연
Date: 2020-06-12

Third World spiritualities: liberation theologies and the troubling of Asian American studies’s secular normativities.
Live discussion with Gary Okihiro, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Melena Sims-Laudig, Khyati Y. Joshi, and Justin Tse. Moderated by Ji-Yeon Yuh.
This roundtable elaborates on a gesture in the conclusion of the historian Gary Okihiro’s Third World Studies. Suggesting that the practice of liberation in the spirit of the Third World Liberation Front might require spiritual engagements, especially with the ecological order, Okihiro hearkens back to David Yoo’s troubling of the ‘neo- Marxist’ origins of Asian American studies and its reduction of religiosity to an opium of the people in the 1997 Racial Spirits special issue of Amerasia Journal. 
Following an introduction by the geographer Justin Tse on the centrality of spiritual sensibilities to ontological conceptions of space in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, Gary Okihiro will lead with a provocation that traces his journey from liberation theology to Third World studies. Clarifying the theological gesture in Third World Studies, he will tell his story of being an undergraduate majoring in theology and aspiring to graduate studies in existentialism and Latin American and African American liberation theologies, informed by the social contexts of the time, 1968, and the swirling struggles for self-determination in the Third World as informed by Marxism, anti-imperialism, and critical theory. He will narrate his turn from theology to Third World studies as a move as much motivated by racism (the church refused his ministry in a white church)—a negative turn, as by his affiliation with the liberation movements discursive and material—a positive move. In addition to imagining an identification with the people, the masses, the oppressed, his choice was both a break and a continuation, the latter in terms of varieties of positivism (dogmatism), phenomenology, and universalism. 
Okihiro will be put in dialogue with Khyati Joshi and Sylvia Chan-Malik, the editors of the 2014 Amerasia Journal special issue on Asian American religions, as well as Mélena Laudig, a doctoral student at Princeton examining black liberation theologies and their connections with Third World studies. Following Okihiro’s revelation about the racism he experienced in the study of theology, Joshi will discuss how Asian American studies often ignores White supremacy’s roots in Protestant Christianity, thus rendering Christian hegemony dangerously invisible in the field of Asian American Studies. In an account of Asian American theological praxis, Chan-Malik will discuss how contemporary discourses around Islam and Muslims function as catalysts for unearthing legacies of what she calls “the spiritual life of ethnic studies.” Finally, Laudig will raise questions about her experience attending the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California – a significant influence on Asian American studies through the Third World Liberation Front – and noticing that a number of Panthers had become Christian ministers later in life, such as Kathleen Cleaver and Bobby Seale. Looking to the work of the late James Cone and womanist critiques of his work, she will talk about interviews she conducted with these Panthers-turned-ministers to discern the nature of these Panthers’ radicalism as well as their thoughts on the continuities and discontinuities between that tradition, Christian ministry, and its implications about the spiritual core of Asian American studies.