SAADA

Christina Huang 00:00
Hello everyone, my name is Christina Huang. Today's date is July 28 2023. I'm located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. We are here today with Anupam Sharma, who was a student at Dartmouth and a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Student Collective, and a contributor to the Asian American Studies program that exists now at Dartmouth. Thank you so much for being here today. Would you please introduce yourself?

Anupam Sharma 00:26
Yeah. Hi, Christina. Thanks for having me. My name is Anupam Sharma. And I was a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Studies collective from the summer of 2021 through the spring of 2022.

Christina Huang 00:41
Awesome, yeah. Thank you so much for your work. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and like how your Asian American style influences your upbringing and family life?

Anupam Sharma 00:51
Yeah, sure. So I know, this is an audio only modality. So I guess I'll start with I am a an Indian presenting male. My parents come from the state of Assam in India, Assam does not fall into the sort of stereotypical north south Indian dichotomy through which we understand a lot of Indian experiences. And so right from the get-go, my identity as an Asian American has been one of questioning, confusion and belonging. I was born in Greenville, North Carolina, in a pretty rural town and then shifted to another rural town in Illinois. So I'd say I'm a proud Midwesterner. But I also learned later on that that deeply influenced my understanding of what immigrant identity means, what Asian American identity means. I think, you know, my early life was one of learning and exploration of figuring out what it means to be the son of immigrants and what it means to make friends with other folks of color, while operating in a majority white, generally, socially, politically conservative area. And so that was always interesting. I think, perhaps, early on, I developed a better understanding of who I was as an American than who I was as an Indian. Sort of throughout my early existence, I was very curious about some of these questions of belonging, and I was interested in other cultures. And so those interests kind of drove me to study anthropology.

When I when I arrived at Dartmouth, I was pre med and I'm not sure if I still want to go to med school, but I do know that whatever I do, I will hopefully be using the skills I learned in anthropology. So that's just a little bit about me. And we can get certainly into other stuff. And like what my college experience looks like as well.

Christina Huang 03:16
Thank you so much for sharing. I think that's a common story. And it's very difficult to navigate being one of few Asian Americans, or in your case, one of the few South Asian Americans in your community. I'm very curious to hear about, like, how does that identity and Asian American Studies impact you at Dartmouth? I know you're studying public health now? And how does that correlate to each other?

Anupam Sharma 03:47
Yeah, that's a great question. So I actually did not spend a whole lot of time thinking about Asian American identities at Dartmouth I have always been intellectually interested in nonwestern modes of knowing and understanding, particularly as it relates to health and wellness. And so I think it's really cool to learn about like Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Ayurveda in India. I think the idea that like we have this deep ancestral knowledge about our own bodies and spirits in in ways that currently is not reflected in “Western science”, which is generally like, the hallmark of what medical care looks like, right? And so, a lot of the questions I'd ask myself a lot of the things I'd be thinking about randomly on a Friday night because I'm fun at parties would be like questions like this on medicine and what it means to be what it means to be well. And so what's nice about Dartmouth is you don't have to declare a major until the end of your sophomore year and for me I was pretty confident I was going to anthropology so I declared almost at the beginning of sophomore year. And then 2020 rolled around, and COVID hit, and I was at home sort of sheltering at home. And I live with some folks who are immune compromised and so I really wasn't going out to do anything I could not volunteer at testing sites where I wasn't able to do like drop off for people. Because anytime I went out, I risked exposing a member of my family to that stuff. And so obviously, any notions of like doing research projects, and anthropology around health and wellness, and whatever, were kind of thrown out the window, because that just like wasn't feasible. In an ideal world, I probably would have gone to like India or Nepal and spend time with someone. But that unfortunately, didn't work out. But in some ways, it was a blessing in disguise, because it kind of affected the rest of my trajectory, and is largely the reason why I'm here talking to you today. So concordant with like the rise in COVID-19 cases, there was a similar explosion and anti Asian/ anti Asian American hate, largely directed at like the East Asian, Southeast Asian community, but also, South Asians were implicated in some of that stuff. My parents, for example, were worried about whether or not it's safe to go out. Seeing what I saw, in conjunction with my supervisor, who is a gem of a human being and just given me so much. I'm eternally in her gratitude. We sort of saw that moment, as something that needed to be recorded, there was a story to be told there. The charge of anthropology is, at its basic level, trying to hold up a mirror to the human condition. And I sound like such an asshole when I say that, in retrospect [Laughs]. but like, the whole thing is like, how can we apply like, using the traditions and modes of thought that that anthropology has cultivated? How can we understand ourselves? How can we understand one another, to hopefully make society a little bit less shitty? And so we thought that this might be an opportunity to hold a mirror up to why like this question of why this hate is happening, what is not being understood what stories aren't being told, in the Asian American community. And so, I thought I'd use you know, my considerable power and privilege as a Dartmouth student as the son of upper middle class, Indian parents, to hopefully shine a light on some of these other ideas in some small way. And I was lucky because my supervisor has had a long history of working with a nationally Nepali but culturally Tibetan community known as Mustang folks, they're from the Mustang region of Nepal. And they do not fit into our traditional, any stereotypical buckets that you can think of. So if we have like the very basic like South Asian, Southeast Asian East Asian division, it would be tough to place them in any single one there because they are at their core people from the mountains from the Himalayas and there is a very different ethnic identity. There's a very different set of social practices. And so there's definitely like a story to tell they're there. They also very recently, actually emigrated out of Nepal. And most Mustang folks ended up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York and so we have a recent history of migration. We have landing up in a very culturally diverse area, the most linguistically diverse location in the world is Jackson Heights. I think upwards of like 300 or 400 languages are spoken within a three square mile radius. And so there was an opportunity to talk about what they were going through and the Queen's area was also one of the first epicenters of the COVID 19 pandemic that's where folks were hit the hardest at the beginning.

Anupam Sharma 10:16
And a lot of Mustang folks were frontline workers were nurses and medical assistants and occupy those positions, working long hours, and often underpaid and undervalued. And so we kind of like took that historical and like current political context of Mustang folks responding to the COVID 19 pandemic, in what way they see fit combine that with my own positionality as the son of South Asian immigrants to actually say, well how are Mustang American teenagers, and like youth generally living through this moment? Because, and this is this was true for everyone. But, the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on everyone's mental health, but for teenagers, who are trying to figure out their positions as human beings and what they want to be and how they want to show up in different spaces. It was especially taxing and so that combined with the constant wrestling of questions that I described at the beginning for myself, what it means to be an Asian American had this compound effect. And so I spent the better part of a year working remotely with a group of a few kiddos who were just amazing, wonderful human beings. And I'm, like, so grateful for the work that they did. And so while I was engaging in this research, this would have been in the summer of 2021, I saw an interesting email that was like, come join Dartmouth with Asian American Studies collective. And I think at face value, I originally thought that this was just like a group of undergrads who are all interested or and currently doing like Asian American Studies research. So we have a few groups on campus, like kids who are specifically interested in cancer or people who are interested in some form of engineering. And so I kind of thought this was like an academic type club for everyone. And so I was like, this might be cool. I didn't even know that people were doing Asian American Studies on campus. Let me go like, hop on a Zoom Call and see what this is about. And I show up. And that's, you know, when I met Maanasi, Lily, Daniel and some other folks, and it turns out that, yes, I was among a group of people who are somehow academically involved in Asian American Studies. But they had come to the realization that Dartmouth College has no formalized Asian American Studies program, we don't have a major minor department, we don't even have a certificate in another department. And it turns out that this group was less about coming together and sharing conversations around the research that we had done. But really just like, trying to gain legitimacy and raise like the campus’ awareness that Asian American students are here. And we are interested in exploring our identities through an academic lens. And so, I left that meeting, feeling a lot sadder. And I was like, “Oh, shit, I didn't know this was a thing”. But I also kind of had a little spark that that was ignited. And I was like, well, maybe there's something to do here. And so yeah, sort of the rest is history. And we can get into that as well.

Christina Huang 14:01
I am very grateful and thankful that you've gotten involved because you definitely left a huge impact and seeing how you get involved in not just academia, but also in other communities as well is amazing to hear. Continuing like what you've started, like, what will happen next? What how did you guys start from nothing to something?

Anupam Sharma 14:25
So I will say, and I could, I'm sure I'm missing some folks who probably were involved earlier on than me, but in my mind Maanasi and Lily were very much the holders of this vision. Both of the problem like the issue with the lack of Asian American Studies and the implications for what that means, not only for us as Asian American students, but for you know, the Dartmouth society and the academic community. And so one of our first efforts was to draft a statement. I want to say manifesto. [Laughs] But like that's, of course, that's like the first time that comes to mind. But a statement that announces our presence, describes the problem and makes a demand to administration for the establishment of Asian American Studies. I know the original vision was loosely based off of the Combahee River collective statement, which I believe is like a group of radical black feminists doing work and maybe the sixties (founded in 1974). I should know this, but I don't I'm so sorry. I know that some of the themes which has to do with intersectionality. And solidarity with other groups. Definitely made its way into our statement. And so we worked, we spent that first few months working on that statement. One of the interesting things we struggled with was maybe not entirely knowing what it means to have a formalized space for Asian American Studies. So that involves money that involves having people like faculty on board to teach courses. And then there's also like politics and governance around that. So do you want a program like a standalone program, which is not a department but has some funding and maybe has one endowed tenure chair? And then visiting profs here and there? Or do you want a certificate, which is not involved with any academic department, but might be involved with like, our Center for International Understanding? Or do you push for like a full on department from the get go? Or do you push for a minor from a like under sociology or anthropology? Or ask school department, Asian societies, cultures and languages or something like that? And those are big questions. So at the same time, and this is the whole story of our time on campus is one of that work we do is ever in a silo, it's always somehow in connection with efforts going on elsewhere. And sometimes we're not even aware of those efforts. So we learned early on that some members of the faculty and I believe like the Department of Caribbean Studies and Latin American studies were involved in trying to put together this really broad articulation of something that they called the Department of the Americas. And the Department of the Americas, it's sort of like ideological orientation was “Okay, the North and South America have long histories of interaction, there are plenty of other folks and communities who have come and lived and made their place on that land. There are also histories of colonialism, violence and murder that have destroyed some of these societies. And having an American orientation to explore nonwhite stories and modes of understanding could be very powerful. I think that was probably the intent behind this Department of Americas idea. And so, when we heard about that, you know, we are part of the Asian American Studies Collective. And yes, while there is a distinct area of Ethnic Studies known as Asian American Studies with its own, like academic tradition, and schools of thought and prominent thinkers, this option of like, maybe pushing for Asian American Studies within the Department of the Americas was exciting because it had backing from professors that already gotten pretty far through some committees, and was I almost approved. And that means that it would have gained legitimacy early on. We thought "Oh shit, maybe like we could just be done like, like two months in and Asian American Studies established. We're good, we're golden". That, of course, was not the case. political tensions, academic tensions got in the way and I unfortunately don't have all the details on that, but I do know that one of the questions is around, like, how do you ensure "equal representation" of these different ethnic studies areas in the Department of the Americas. So if you want to talk about the Black American experience, or the Caribbean American experience, or the Asian American experience, you would ideally like give equal weighting to all those subjects, or at least give people the option to explore all those identities, and then also the intersectionalities between them. But what likely would have ended up happening is because faculty members from LALAC (Latin American and Caribbean Studies Group) because they had been heading up this whole proposal. It was the Department of the Americas, at least, their vision of it was perhaps unintentionally skewed more towards like the Latin American Caribbean Studies side of things. And seemed, at least to us, to a certain extent to be at the expense of Asian American Studies, and perhaps African American Studies- African and African American Studies, apologies. And so that proposal didn't really end up going through going completely. I'll also note that the histories of all the societies and communities of folks that would have fallen under the umbrella of the Department of Americas is so diverse, and has so many different histories and traditions that it would have been really tough to unify them. I think, ideally, a department would have like a single ideological orientation. And so anthropology is committed to the understanding of human society, both through culture and also archeology, that's a pretty clear ideological orientation for how we do what we do. And then economics, you know, very clear idea chemistry, whatever. Even Asian societies, cultures and languages, they have a very Asia centered orientation and understanding of the world and, and the studies that they do. But the department of the Americas was, I think it ended up being too broad, and you would not, you will not be doing justice to some of the groups. For example, there was an attempt or a push for to include Native American studies in the Department of the Americas. Whose whole ideological orientation is one around sovereignty, it's not about America, it's about indigenous traditions and indigenous nations. That's the lens through which they look at history in the world. And to actually try to put them under the Department of the Americas, in some ways is like to work counter to that sort of sovereignty first outlook, and would diminish the their value. And that would have been unfortunate. And so that proposal didn't work, right. We issued our statement, originally with that proposal, we gained a lot of support, people were kind of interested. But it got lost in the machine and got lost in the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is the Dartmouth administration and the faculty of arts and sciences. So I'll pause there, that was a lot. But yeah, happy to keep talking.

Christina Huang 23:40
When you're talking about I really brought me back to Berkeley and the Third World College and the whole department for each ethnic and racial group. I think it's really important that we acknowledge this, like, cross racial solidarity movement that's happening, and what does that look like at? What did it look like? And what does it look like Dartmouth with this? It's not just about Asian American Studies, but all these other groups and what does solidarity and community building look like?

Anupam Sharma 24:21
That's a really good question. And one, which I deeply regret not being more involved in personally. But I would say that a lot of our DAAC (Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective) members were Asian American folks, but we also had black folks, white folks, folks from with different gender and sexual identities that were part of this space. And so in the same way that they show up for us, we had to show up for them. We had to show up for our like, our local Palestinian Liberation Organization on campus, we had to show up for our Black Students Society on campus. We have to show up for the Dartmouth radicals, the folks who were pushing the envelope in terms of political, almost not like an anarcho aligned idea, but like really just radically questioning every single status and practice on campus. And so you show up to protests, you show up to meetings, you cross posts, on Instagrams of what events are going on, you include people and teachings and just try to have these dialogues and initiate conversations. And especially if you have a certain amount of legitimacy, or positional power, use that to uplift other people. And for the Dartmouth Radicals, for example, they were fairly new. So I know a lot of groups came together to try to help bring them up and like legitimize their efforts. We also worked with Spare Rib, a local feminist zine who republished a lot of like, really amazing, wonderful thought pieces on feminist activities at Dartmouth. And so that's what solidarity kind of looked like on campus among the students. And then also, I think it was important that if we were in a space where we could raise those concerns with the administration, or with faculty, that we did as well to say that our efforts to establish Asian American Studies is not new. Yes, it's a decades old. But also, women literally weren't allowed to study at Dartmouth until the 1970s. The African and African American Studies Department did not exist until like the 80s. And the same is true for the Latin American and Caribbean studies department. And so, recognizing that the labor that we perform now is built on the sacrifices and labor and struggles of people who came before us other marginalized groups: women, queer folks, Black folks, Latin American people. And this is, again, generally reflective, to a certain degree, of the Asian American experience at large, like in general, but that was certainly the case at Dartmouth. Yeah, so yeah of acknowledging the collective, acknowledging that collective history of organizing, and then also trying to support one another, in the present.

Christina Huang 27:33
So beautifully said, I completely agree. Like it doesn't have Asian American identity and studies doesn't happen in a vacuum, siloed, there's so many different components with intersectionality and with many different identities involved. Previous you had mentioned the machine that is the Dartmouth administration. And I thought that was a very interesting way to refer to college. I agree, when you talk to when you talk about PWIs (Predominantly White Institutions). And I'm curious, when we talked last time, you talked about like navigating the power dynamics and how do you approach an administration that doesn't prioritize your needs as students?

Anupam Sharma 28:23
Excellent question. One that I still struggle with to this day, I wish I had done things differently on my own, but like, I came into this space, not really familiar with what advocacy looks like, or what protests look like. And I'm going to be totally upfront when I would hear about protests to school, like occupying the president's house or whatever, or like doing a sit in, I used to think that's not going to work. Because you can complain, but you need to get the administration on your side to gain any legitimacy. And so I came into this work with like the intention of demystifying and understanding the power dynamics at play when it comes to the President of Dartmouth, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the person in charge of the budget, and I was like "It's like an episode of Shark Tank, we just got to pitch it to them, we can make them see that this is important and worthwhile". And they'll understand there. I assumed rational good faith actors.

So that was wrong. [Laughs].

I'm just going to be honest. The first thing to note is that our president at the time and much of the senior leadership were administrators but they were also professors. So, they taught courses. However, they were math professors, biology professors, computer science professors and engineering professors. So forget, even having an econ guy there, like arguably the most like one of the most stem oriented humanities subjects out there, and the one that has like the highest profile department at Dartmouth. We couldn't even get senior leadership and the views there and the academic traditions that they came from did not represent the same histories and academic traditions of the department and things that we were trying to establish. Like, even an econ guy, I felt like we maybe could have made a better case or, or sociology person or an anthropology person, but they weren't there. So that was my first misconception. And then, we submitted that statement, I think, Daniel Lin, who's amazing, and a wonderful human being, and super talented, the men plays like so many interesting instruments, anything that's a tangent. He's cool. I think he would like go to the president's office every single day with like a printed out flyer of our statement and be like, When are you meeting with us? When are you meeting with us? When are you meeting with us? And nothing happened. Until and this story, Sanjana Raj might know better than me because she probably had the connection … until our efforts sort of traveled down the grapevine and caught the eyes of a New York Times reporter who reached out to us and interviewed Manasi and Lily. And so very early on in our advocacy efforts, we got pretty big press. I think that was luck. It was fluke, it was not something that was granted, but it was a circumstance that presented itself and we capitalized on it. And we basically laid bare the administration's lack of commitment or lack of willingness to engage in discussions around establishing Asian American Studies. And so that came up I think in the winter of 2022. So not... I'm using Dartmouth phrasing for terminology so in January or February of 2022. It’s aweird article, because we very clearly say why there are not enough Asian American Studies courses on campus, we made a clear argument for why Asian American Studies is needed in academia, because academia presents like academia and academics see themselves as the ultimate stewards of knowledge and everything legitimate. And so if that's the case, then Asian American identities, histories and experiences need to be at the table, hence the need for Asian American Studies in a formalized academic, intellectual way. And the admins response was basically like “huh but students don't really want Asian American Studies”. And that was it. They're like, “we'd offer more courses, but they're not interested in”. It's like, well, that's some really good cyclic logic. They're like, yeah, students aren't interested because the thing doesn't exist. But the thing doesn't exist because the students aren't interested. Like, that's not really a strong foundation on which to make an argument. But in any case, that national press had the impact of forcing a response from the college, not to us directly, but to the New York Times. And because a spokeswoman had to get on a probably a zoom call, or like a phone call or meeting with someone and respond to Dartmouth, the administration had to acknowledge that there's a need there, and they can't ignore it. It's been going on for 30 years, like there have been so many other groups involved, but at the very least, now, they had to meet with us they had to, even if it's just for PR, they had to be like, “Okay, let's explore the option and see what we can do”. And so that national press was the only time or the one thing that I think got us got our foot in the door in terms of having a conversation. And so what that looked like was a sit down with our white male president, our white woman Dean of Arts and Sciences, Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences, another white man who was in charge of the budget and the organization of how Dartmouth endowment is structured. And then our newly hired EDIB executive who was a Black woman, and don't even get me started on the performative emotional labor that has to be done by Black women in EDIB spaces when they're like the only c-suite executives in that. Even the organization is like that now … but anyway. She didn't know what was going on, she had just started like a week ago, and she was already in this space. But anyway, we got a meeting scheduled. I'm trying to think of like, what that time must have looked like I remember, one of the things we did was like, they need to meet us on our terms, according to our time. We should not allow them to be the ones to be like, "oh, we can't do this time or that time". We expect the impetuous to be on their end to set up the scheduling and the least they can do. And then we had a really long conversations around what to say, how to say it, and what we're asking for. And during this time, we kind of partnered closely with some of the only non-stem Asian American faculty and Asian Americanist faculty, who are often either like postdocs or assistant professors that don't have tenure or might just be on the tenure track. And so they are already overworked, undervalued scholars in the Dartmouth community, but they still took the time to meet with us to sort of to advise us on what we need to ask for. And so we learned that what we need to ask for is $10 million from the endowment to establish one tenured chair position for Asian American studies and we need to ask for funding to have administrative support. To get that going, we need to ask for funding for a space and we also need to ask like for funding to help current scholars who are interested in established Asian American Studies, established funding for them to be able to work on this like to dedicate some of their FTE (full time equivalent equivalencies) to their work. And so this was all kind of new to us, right? Because we don't know what that looks like and we don't know exactly who's supposed to be involved at the table. So a lot of that prep for the meeting was trying to just not on, on like, all these intricacies and the back ends and processes of what governance at an institution looks like. And so, we were still new, like we were figuring this stuff out when the time came to present our case. But we had a strong social moral cultural conviction to do so. And we perform this extra emotional mental labor to understand where the faculty is coming from, or like at least those who are interested in to do this work. And so we showed up to the meeting. And it was clear that the President was interested in theory of of setting something up. And this was also at a time when we knew he would be stepping down shortly, like at the end of his tenure, I'd approached and I think maybe he was hoping that this could have been something that was part of his legacy or whatever, and would look good politically. But he wasn't super involved. He couldn't have been and the EDIB director was also new and she was actually very emotionally supportive. She was the one member of the faculty who will be like nodding along when we were saying about the importance of Ethnic Studies and like the previous solidarity movements in the history of advocacy that has happened, like she was the one person giving nonverbal cues of support in that room and other folks were kind of stoic and just reserved during that time. I was thinking about this the other day, and I remember I was really pissed off in the moment. And the memory came up again after our pre interview and I was upset again. And one of our speakers we had planned out who was going to facilitate the conversation. One of our speakers Lily, was... we were in the process of the conversation where we're like making the ask of what we need. And we had mentioned that we spoke with faculty, we spoke with people who are interested in making this a reality and that sounds like what we need is one, at least like one FTE to dedicate to this work. We need money, resources and finances to support one person to do this full time. And she used the term "one full time FTE". FTE literally means full time equivalent and so basically what she said was "one full time full time equivalent". And the dude in charge of budgets, who had not said a single word, had only like been smirking, or like taking joking notes or checking his phone, made this snide remark, which was, "you know, FTE stands for full time equivalent, right? You just said it full time, full time equivalent". This man has not made a single meaningful contribution to the discussion. And his snide remark and lack of dedication was a clear sign that he does not value Asian American students, he does not value Asian American Studies. And honestly, he was just there for the power. And that was such a disappointing experience. Because like I said, I thought that if we made our case, these are rational, good faith, human beings. If we made our case, they might understand and they can figure it out. But that remark, just completely flipped a switch in my mind, which is like the administration projects a narrative of logic and acceptance and open mindedness, but that is only a narrative that they hold that is not reflective of their inner nature. The inner nature is one of maintaining power, maintaining money. And this really small interaction was, to me, indicative of the fact that okay, this kind of trying to be nice thing isn't going to work. And I feel bad for Lily, because I think I mentioned this in the pre interview, like a lot of Asian American Studies movements across the country, but also definitely at Dartmouth, like the mental and emotional labor has been performed disproportionately by women of color, Asian women of color. And Lily and Maanasi are extremely intelligent, bright, understanding individuals, and they also have like seemingly endless reserves of empathy. And so just to have that, just to like, see Lily so clearly shut down in this stupid, meaningless way that completely diminished all of her efforts. And all the time she did and all their like time to spend and all the research she did was infuriating. And yeah, so that conversation was weird. And I think we tried to approach this work in a spirit of understanding, grace and compromise, like we will work with you to make something happen. And I think we left that meeting saying, we kind of have to not do any of that anymore. Like, we have to be more vocal and more demanding. Because if we do not make these demands, and do not execute the vision we want, it's never going to happen and the college will never be incentivized to do anything about it so.

Christina Huang 44:49
I am so sorry that you had first of all experience, someone else being shut down. I feel terrible for Lily. It sounds like you guys have a tight knit community and able to support her because that's such an unnecessary comment to make. And it was just, it was definitely a comment out of like being power hungry. Right? You're you us put so much effort to put together and just to be shot down because there's technical terms. That's very frustrating. And I think the way you're phrasing this is something we've noticed with a lot of these oral histories is that institutions like to push off students, you know, you here four years. So you have these meetings, and they're like, "Yeah, I'll give you these small action items," or you will not really have productive conversation or conversations like you had where you feel shut down. And I'm curious, what did that you said that that led to more protests and more, I guess, vocal movements and pushes? What did that look like? And how did you mobilize students to get involved and maintain that, like, sustainability and vitality?

Anupam Sharma 46:09
Yeah, so I think a lot of that really happened after I left in terms of student mobilization, solidarity creation, and I think that was done through, for example, teachings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or like, other advocacy groups on campus, to spread the word. But we also involve alumni. Because they're the ones with the money, they're the ones that are going to be contributing to the endowment, and if anyone's going to be able to direct funds and meet the administration on their level, it's the alumni. And so we formed a close connection with them pretty early on. And I remember we hosted a webinar. This in the spring of 2022, where we were invited to share our stories. And it was like us, and some other faculty members Mingwei Huang and other folks and other recent alumni like Asian American alumni, and we brought together like the Asian American alumni community to say, "Hey, we need your help. The administration is not doing this. They're not willing to appropriate like the funds to make Asian American Studies happen”. And that was one way in which we like tried to increase our vocal whatever. But the other thing we did was demanded more meetings with admin, like with a select group of administrators. And this was a smaller group and so like it was there was fewer admin people on their site, but we met maybe two or three more times. And there, I will say, I think things got a little bit better, because they, at the very least, they were like, we are working to establish an advisory committee or an exploratory committee to see who could be involved in establishing Asian American Studies and what that might look like. And remind me to come back to that, because there's also politics and humans involved there as well. But that was a space where we would often have to say, like, “cool that you're doing this, and it's not enough. It needs to happen like this”. We are no longer accepting breadcrumbs. Like that can't be our state our status it unfortunately, it's an all or nothing proposition, where it's like, if you don't have a properly resourced, funded supported entity to facilitate Asian American studies on campus, that's not going to work. Like that's what happened there. So I apologize. I know I didn't answer your question directly. But like that was that's how I remember the immediate like, aftermath regrouping, re strategizing posts.

Christina Huang 49:23
Do you want to expand on the point you made earlier? Now would you want to?

Anupam Sharma 49:31
Yes. So I mentioned earlier on that, like, none of the work we do is in a silo and everyone is involved in different ways. So the three groups that like most stick in my mind when we talk about the history of trying to establish Asian American Studies at Dartmouth would be the administration, faculty and students. Each group view the purpose of Asian American Studies a little bit differently. Each group knows that their involvement would look different. So the admin has to fund it, faculty have to teach it, students have to learn it and support it, ideologically. So this is, again, another area where different faculty members had different visions of what Asian American Studies should look like. We had some, younger, prominent postdocs with experience teaching Asian American Studies are studying it, who had performed a lot of emotional labor during COVID to establish work groups to talk about the need for Asian American Studies, among faculty like sort of parallel to what we did at the beginning of COVID. And they have been performing a lot of emotional labor. And so now when we're at the point where the administration is entertaining, the idea of actually supporting and sustaining a group to build out Asian American Studies, it was really important that they be involved. But what kind of ended up happening was the person who had been like, what's the word, provisionally appointed the head of that steering committee to explore Asian American Studies was a white woman who was a sociology professor. And she is wonderful, and she is deeply dedicated to the work and is very careful about like her racial consciousness. But the optics don't work, like the labor that has been done performed disproportionately felt most intensely, was most intensely by Asian American faculty. And so that first meeting, when they said that we were kind of like, "Wait, like, What the fuck, like, hold up, really?" And so that was, that was another indication of like, we don't even understand what the admin is trying to figure out. And there was another dean who was trying to work with us on some of this stuff, because he was genuinely, I think he was from LALACs the Latin American Caribbean Studies Department, but he had also been part of another center on I believe, it's like something something in immigration, Lily and Maanasi were more involved there. But like, he cared about this work, and wanted to make it happen, but he was also part of the admin. And so we were like, "Dude, you know, that that's not like, how this is gonna work, right?" "Like, what's, what's going on? Why would you not support someone, an Asian American, and an Asian Americanist, to be part of this faculty?" That was one issue. The other issue was that the steering committee was composed of very few Asian Americanists. So I mentioned before, that Asian American Studies comes from a very specific intellectual historical tradition. That's not even something that I know. I know that they have their own tradition. I don't know what that school of thought looks like. But the steering committee was mostly sociology, anthropology and ASCL folks (Asian societies, cultures and languages).And like I said, they have their own ideological orientations that don't jive with like the Asian American Studies approach like these are they're related, but they're different schools of thought and so the fact that you are appointing someone who doesn't have that academic background in the department you're literally trying to create kind of felt weird to us as students were like, not sure what was going on. So yeah, I would add that in that steering committee we don't remember what happened I think it like kind of got put on hold or there was like some infighting there to figure things out. But yeah, that's where that landed when I when I left. The silver lining was another thing we were able to push for, again, with the help from faculty was to senior hires in the English department, but like with the focus on Asian American Studies in Asian American literature. And so that was a process that students got to be a part of as well, in terms of like reviewing and giving feedback on that process. And I think was important in terms of like, expanding the very small nucleus like nucleation site of Asian Americanists on campus to actually then raise their collective voice and promote their intellectual mode of thought. But, yeah, those were the main outcomes of that work. Christina Huang 55:40 Yeah, seems listening to you and hearing all the things that you guys had to do and effort That… it definitely took a community. Planning meetings with committees and admin, reaching out to faculty, you guys are also very academically high achieving students. And so balancing college on top of this could be very draining, and also seeing sometimes the impact of the response like resistance or unset comments can be very jading. But how do you strike a balance? Like take care of your mother health, avoid burnout and set boundaries?

Anupam Sharma 56:26
Another excellent question. First and foremost, we have a group of really, really amazing people. Like I said, Lily and Maanasi, they would hate that I'm saying that I've called them the leaders of the group. They insist it's a flat structure. But like, they were the holders of the vision. And they set a tone and created such a welcoming environment for anyone with any level of background knowledge or interest in doing this work, that what they attracted was a group of really dedicated kiddos folks who, like me, don't know jack shit about Asian American Studies, but just wanted to help. I don't know anything about Asian American Studies. I don't know anything about advocacy. This was the first space where I was kind of actually involved in this organizing work. And I'm just eternally grateful for the support and love that we showed one another. Even when we didn't agree on anything, even when we didn't agree on how to move forward. Our small group Karen Zheng, she's another alumnus, like myself, amazing writer, her poetry is like next level stuff. She has her own podcast where she interviews like prominent Asian American thought leaders and stuff, check her out shameless plug. But we approach this work with a lot of anger, passion and frustration. But I don't think we really expressed that to one another. That was not something that became like the resulted in fighting in our group, we rather extended radical empathy to one another, just say, I feel you, and I feel your anger and frustration, like, I understand what you're going through, how can I support you. And that's, I think, what really helped us get through a lot of this work. We were also kind of liberated in the sense that like, after the administration didn't cooperate the first time, we're kind of like, “Fuck it, we do what we want”. And so we're gonna figure it out. And that kind of allowed us to enter a more creative space with some of this work to figure out what we want to say and what we want to do. Which was pretty special. But I can only really speak I guess, in terms of boundary settings to my own experience because spring of 2022 was I think the hardest I've ever worked like till that time because I was writing my thesis then and so I would regularly be working till three or four in the morning like stuck in the library doing this work and I know that I had to like taper down my involvement during that time, but we still like would make the time to come together on a Saturday afternoon. Like to at least discuss, check in, make sure everyone's okay, and then try to plan next steps but it was always putting our putting one another's humanity first and work second, like that was the first thing and then yeah, just trying to find joy in each other's company, which was special.

Christina Huang 1:00:03 Yeah. I love hearing like community building and how it supports one another like you said that like you're busy, but you trusted them to carry on your vision and continue the work and that's really like beautiful. And it's such a I know it's a difficult thing to make especially when I know when everyone's busy. And I'm glad to hear that, like you felt supported on campus.

Anupam Sharma 1:00:34
Yeah, really lucky. I mean, yeah, super, super grateful for them.

Christina Huang 1:00:38 Do you have like a favorite memory or story? From all of this that you want to share?

Anupam Sharma 1:00:45
Oh, man, that's a good question. I'll have to think about that. I just like they're a pretty funny group. There'll be cracking like random ass jokes. 24/7. And I just like yeah, just remember being in that space. And just having a good time. I don't know, I thought maybe one special thing was like, we were kind of recognized for our work, like our advocacy work by a group towards the end, towards the end of my time at Dartmouth, and there was a little Gala that we were a part of. And that was sweet. It was kind of bittersweet. Because it was like, “Oh, this kind of feels like it's coming to an end for me”. I'm going to be,… they gave us this for the seniors who are graduating, we got like these Asian American stoles and stuff. And I was like, "Shit, this is real now. And I was like, What do I do afterwards?" But that was yeah, that was a nice time. I remember after some of these other meetings, like just taking time together to be in a space, like we'd be outside on the front lawn, by the quad, just to process collectively and figure things out. And I think we all had a little bit of anxiety. And so we're just like, "Walking around, like, dude, what the fuck, that was crazy. Like, like, what happened here? And what did that person say? Or how did you read her tone? And do you think she said this? Did she mean it like that? Or did she mean it then?" So that's like, I think where some of the actual strongest community coming together stuff happens. This admin meeting for, you know however awry it went, I will just say, I was in awe of the people who spoke and they're so articulate, and eloquent and well put together and made their points forcefully. But like, with this kindness that I couldn't, I would have been pissed off like I would have, I had to hold my tongue for a lot of that. But I still like sometimes play that conversation over in my mind. And just to hear how brilliantly people handled that experience. So it's ironic, but actually, that admin meeting is one of my favorite memories. And one of the things I'm also kind of, like, pretty proud of like, that was the first time we came together to present a vision. And I think we did a pretty good job. I think they did a pretty good job.

Christina Huang 1:03:29
Yeah, I'm sure you guys did wonderfully and you guys are now... so much work and inspired... you guys inspired me while I am at Chapel Hill and you're gonna inspire so many other students. And do you have any advice for future students or current students? We're getting involved or how to start a program or advocacy at all?

Anupam Sharma 1:03:50
Oh man, you're asking the wrong person. I am only a learner. I don't have any wisdom to share. I'll say this. So I live in work in Berkeley, I moved up West and I've been lucky enough to work with some really amazing people in my in my public health firm. And man, let me tell you, those California Asians or someone else, dude. Oh my god, they have such a rich history. Like it's a painful history. The sorrow is a common refrain, but like, there's this strength and beauty and like elegance that they bring to this work, and they're still so actively engaged culturally, politically, towards like raising Asian American consciousness. And so, anyway, I've been loosely involved with a group known as the Asian Pacific Fund. And their whole thing is like, we bring together people with money and try to do good in the community to help Asian Americans and so I entered and I able to attend this this conference where and I'm gonna mispronounce his last name. So apologies in advance, but Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke, the author of The Sympathizer. He's a professor at USC now, I think or something. But anyway, he came up and I asked him the question, I was like, "How do you work to establish Asian American Studies when the administration tends to see Asian Americans not only as stereotypically hyper obedient, but also docile and unwilling to engage in stuff?" And he gave a great little pithy answer. And it was like, "You want to know how to... if they think you're docile, don't be docile, like, occupy the president's house, do this, and he was like, this is he went to Cal. He's like, "this is my inner Cal coming out but like you got to take over the president's house, and you have to show up and be forceful about it". And that's the only way it gets done. And I mentioned at the beginning, my understanding of advocacy and whatever I was let me be diplomatic about it and make it work. But I'm realizing that's not you, trying to be diplomatic is to play into the dominant forces power structure. And if you work in their power structure, you'll never get what you want, or what you need, you have to up end that you have to question every single moral and ethical imperative that they claim to have. Demonstrate that it's actually antithetical to your goals, and then do the opposite to, to get that done. So that's, and that's tough, I'm gonna be honest, when I think about that, I'm like, "God, that sounds terrifying, man, like, I don't want to do that". And I recognize that like, it is scary, and it is terrifying. And it calls for incredible vulnerability. As a human being, I mean, you're a student, like, you'd be well within your rights to be like, I am just trying to get through school, like there's so much going on academia today is, takes up a part of takes up parts of our lives in ways that we like… the consequences with which we still deal with that well, after we graduate. And so to be asked to, like, boldly go against the system that you're in right now is, is not easy. And like, I'm not saying anything revelatory, or new or novel here, but like, if you can try to be tough, that would be awesome. And I will also say, if you can't be tough, that's okay to like, you have to protect your peace first, whatever you do, like any advocacy work, any organizing work, I'm learning that now I'm involved in some racial equity stuff in my own organization, I'm learning that if I don't protect my peace first, like, then my work will not be good. My advocacy efforts will be like, antithetical to what I'm what I'm trying to achieve. And so, yes, it's vulnerable. Yes, it's hard, but protect yourself. And maybe one way to do that to allow for a little bit of vulnerability to allow a little bit of bravery is to, hopefully surround yourself with folks who care about similar things in similar ways. Like I said, I was lucky. I mean, this was not a given, things could have turned out very differently. But the group that we had doing the work that we did, we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, and we allowed ourselves to be brave. And we were our own support net. And that was really important to do any of this work. So yeah.

Christina Huang 1:04:17
I love that answer. I wrote down like the whole thing you wrote because I think that's so powerful. And I'm gonna share a soundbite with my members at UNC cuz I think they're gonna love what you said. Yeah. So just to be mindful of our time, we have like, 15 minutes left, and I want to make sure I have two more questions I really want to get kind of in. But if there's anything else that you want to make sure you get in. My next question is going to be about like, well, I'll let you talk about what you want to talk about and I'll ask my two last question.

Anupam Sharma 1:09:44
No nothing comes to mind at the moment. So please ask.

Christina Huang 1:09:49 Okay. I'm very curious. Okay. So I think part of SAADA's project is to capture South Asian American voices in advocacy in Asian American advocacy because it's last. And I'd love to hear about how the visibility or invisibility of your South Asian identity when you're on college campus and in your advocacy

Anupam Sharma 1:10:16
Really good question. As always, every single question you've asked has been amazing.

Christina Huang 1:10:21
Thank you.

Anupam Sharma 1:10:26
So I don't have any like generalizable trends, I can only speak to my own experience. And I mentioned my parents are from Assam, which does not fall into the north south dichotomy. So when my mom was in Bangalore, I believe she mentioned to her classmates that she was from Assam. And they say, "Oh, Assam, where's that? Is that India?" And then similarly, when my dad was in Delhi, doing his graduate medical training, and he said he was from Assam people said, "Oh, Assam, do you people still live in trees like monkeys". So, I have a very complex relationship with India, Indians and Indian Americans. I don't, for example, speak Hindi. My mom... I know some Bollywood movies, but like, I'm not a Bollywood fanatic. My dad, he had me late, he is a child of the 50s. He will sing old, old Hindi music like and that's the music I listened to, and I still like it. But as a result, that means that like, I don't know what people currently listen to. And so I never felt like I had a community of Indian Americans or like Assamese Americans, with whom I could share my experiences and come around and collaborate. Whereas other groups like Gujarati people or Punjabi people, these other states in India, they do have, like disproportionately larger representation in the US. And so those kids come together and they have their own inside jokes and communities, and they'd have their own Garba parties and stuff. And they'd share memes, and they have their own little insert groups. And I remember feeling like left out of those spaces. And just personally, I've feel like I have been left out of many spaces. And that was kind of a blessing in disguise because there was no expectation of how I was supposed to be, or what my personality was supposed to be. I could explore whatever I wanted. Personally, if I loved French, I could go all into French, I love learning about coffee, I could explore coffee and like, I didn't have to care about shit. If I wanted to do taekwondo, I could do taekwondo for as long as I wanted. And I was really lucky to be supported by my parents in that goal, but another thing that sort of that out casts whatever I'm being so dramatic about it, it's not really that dramatic.

Christina Huang 1:13:25
You're not being dramatic.

Anupam Sharma 1:13:27
One thing that made me feel like was sometimes I feel like I'm an alien that came down on earth. And I'm like looking on humans and trying to figure out like, “what's going on? Like, What are y'all doing? Well, what are these social interactions mean?” And so that would be like, those would be the questions that I had as a kid as a middle schooler, as a high schooler. And that's eventually what brought me to anthropology in college because I was like. Ah, I'm not the only one who feels this way. And I'm not the only one with questions around how human society works. And on campus, I intentionally distanced myself from South Asian Indian student associations because I felt not welcome in those spaces when I was there because I didn't speak Hindi or I didn't speak Tamil or whatever. But I am ultimately grateful for the work I did with my thesis and with my advisor, because in the same way that I am Indian and didn't feel Indian, Mustang teenagers are Mustang, but are often told that they're not Nepali enough, or they're not Tibetan enough or not American enough. And that story of having labels ascribed to you but not being fully welcomed into those groups not feeling not being made to feel that you belonged in those groups resonated with me. And so I am so grateful to have met the folks that I did, because I feel like I formed a connection with them where it's like, where you guys are not alone in trying to figure out who you are, you're not alone in being made to feel like you are other or less than I am there too. I am going through a similar struggle and journey, and they were a little bit younger than me. So I like tried to share things that might have helped me, but I just told them that their individuality and uniqueness is beautiful and needs to be celebrated, and that they should never bend to fit one group or another. And if anyone ridicules them for anything, those aren't people you should surround yourself with. And so yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot your question but.

Christina Huang 1:16:13
No, no, that was that, will you answer my question really well, and I really appreciate how vulnerable you've been an opened up to me today. And I think what you're saying is gonna resonate to a lot of people listening, not feeling like you fit in with the mold that is the norm. And yeah, thank you so much. This this kind of ties into my final question about zooming out, what does it mean for you to be part of this huge movement to get Asian American Studies? Yeah

Anupam Sharma 1:16:51
Yeah. I think... In summer of 2021, I stumbled onto a community of advocacy of advocates and organizers that I didn't know existed. And they have that work. And that intentionality has never left my heart or my mind. And is, even when I'm not like directly involved in that work, it informs everything I do. And like, selfishly, I learned so much from the people I've worked with. And I feel so lucky to be able to use that advocate for racial equity in my organization and the work that we do to promote, uplift, and help other communities going through struggles like immigrant communities going through these struggles, in terms of like managing their health, but also in terms of like, making us better as an organization. And so, coming out to Berkeley, being able to attend the AAPI Women LEAD conference, or the EPF Summit, or engaging in like hours long chats with my coworkers about what it means to be Asian American, and in this space and grow up has made me feel closer to the people I work with and gives the work I do a new valence. I used to think of medical anthropology and like this notion of uplifting nonwestern ideas of healing, I used to think of it from a health point of view, like we will be healthier people if we can appreciate and honor and promote this like deeply held ancestral knowledge in nonwestern countries. I'm now realizing that promoting, encouraging and uplifting that those deeply held nonwestern ideas of health and wellness is critical to formalizing our racial consciousness and critical to increasing solid solidarity with other immigrant groups, other communities of color other marginalized societies. And hopefully, maybe, I don't know, can work to make us better people. So I discovered a different way of answering the question. I've been stuff I've been thinking about since I was a kid, which was, what does it mean to belong? And how can we help one another? It used to be "oh, anthropology or medicine" and now it's like advocacy and organizing offers a different answer to that question. And it can be just as special and just as powerful. Every single answer you have so beautifully put together and it's just like I would like to listen to you if you have your own little podcast or if you give lectures, I'm so glad and I think the advocacy sphere and the Asian American community so grateful to have you in it and to be to have what you contribute to it and the way you speak and the passion you bring.