UC Davis

“Unsettling ‘The Asian’: Queering Museum Coloniality through Tactical ArtIntervention” takes a practice-as-research approach to examining how Asian American community-based tactical art intervention can transform racial discourse and the systems that produce it. Through two case studies that target blockbuster exhibitions at a public museum, I demonstrate how unsanctioned hybrid public and online cultural praxis can exploit the cultural capital of the institution to activate a collective, participatory, and networked process of discursive co-production, community empowerment and healing, and critical public pedagogy to effect political and epistemological impacts that reach far beyond the structure of the institution itself. With Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha, I argue for an Asian American form of culture jamming that articulates a contemporary Asian American political subjectivity by applying culture jamming tactics to contest the Orientalist racialization authorized and perpetrated by respected civic institutions such as the museum. Lord It’s the Samurai dramatically expands the scope and impact of this form of community-based cultural insurgency through a diversity of tactics that effectively construct a “museum without walls” to prefigure what a culturally democratic museum practice could look like.