Posts tagged Mimi Thi Nguyen

POC Zine Project’s 2013 ‘Race Riot! Tour’ Dates & Cities

Community,

Last year’s inaugural tour was amazing but that was just the beginning. 14 cities last year = 12 more cities this year <3 

Dates may shift slightly before October and we are still accepting invites from academic and community spaces, collectives, orgs and individuals. If you haven’t contacted us already, please do: poczineproject@gmail.com.

If you look at this list and think “Why the heck do they keep missing the full Midwest?” Don’t trip, chocolate chip. The 2014 NATIONAL Zinester Conference is going down in YOUR house! Yeah! Midwest all the way! And we’ll be bringing in FIVE international zinesters/activists to share their work! Yeah, buddy! If you want to help, reach out! 

Thoughts become things. Be intentional with your thoughts.

2013 TOUR DETAILS: What we know so far

#IdleNoMore solidarity will be a core component of this tour. If you’re actively involved in local efforts in your city, please reach out. We want you to speak at our events & help you distribute your printed zines/materials nationwide. We hope our small platform helps to make a difference.

We will be doing TWO events in each city, just like last year’s tour. There will be an academic event at a participating university in the daytime and one DIY/community show in the evening. The academic events will be free and open to the public, while the evening DIY shows will be a sliding scale cover. NO ONE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS <3

The DIY show covers pay for our gas and food, so give what you can.

We will be able to share accessibility/child care details for each city once we have more information.

The Race Riot! touring member lineup will be revealed in the coming weeks. HINT: Think more people, rotating members and lots of guest readers in each city.

OK, enough context. Here are the dates & cities!

1) 10/1: Atlanta, GA (Tuesday)

2) 10/2: Montgomery, AL (Wednesday)

3) 10/3: Jackson, MS (Thursday)

ALERT: Jackson has the only remaining abortion clinic in the entire state, which is in danger of being shut down.

4) 10/4: New Orleans, LA (Friday)

10/5: Travel Day (Saturday)

10/6: Research/Advocacy Day (Sunday)

5) 10/7: Austin, TX (Monday)

10/8 Research/Travel Day (Tuesday)

6) 10/9: New Mexico - but where??? Let us know! (Wednesday)

7) 10/10: Tucson, AZ (Thursday)

It is very important for POC everywhere, and especially in Arizona right now, to have access to independent publications by and for people of color.

10/11: Travel Day (Friday)

8) Los Angeles, CA as recharge zone/multiple events

10/12: Research/Advocacy Day in L.A. (Saturday)

10/13: Los Angeles, CA (Sunday evening DIY show)

10/14: Los Angeles, CA (Monday academic daytime event)

10/15: Travel Day (Tuesday)

9) 10/16: Bay Area, CA (Wednesday)

10/17: Research/Travel Day (Thursday)

10) 10/18: Sacramento, CA (Friday)

10/19: Travel Day (Saturday)

11) 10/20: Portland, OR (Sunday)

12) 10/21: Seattle, WA (Monday)

——

All details subject to change. We will share specifics about each city as we finalize tour logistics.

MICHIGAN FOLKS: Wow, such love! We’ve received a few requests from y’all to come out this year. We did two events there in 2012 and cannot return in 2013 (we are not a funded entity - we rely on donations and have day jobs/other obligations <3). If you’re in Michigan and want to support this tour in other ways, contact us, thanks.

We can only do so much, and we do a lot with very little. Richmond, VA and other cities: We wish we could be everywhere for this tour, but we can’t. Let’s figure out ways to partner that will yield long term outcomes for local POC orgs and collectives. Thanks for understanding.

OTHER WAYS TO PARTICIPATE

We are looking for the following:

• Guest readers in every city (you must be a person of color)
• Rotating tour buddies: Join us on the road and participate in 1-3 tour events as a panelist/reader/tabler
• POC (or POC fronted) bands to perform at each #raceriottour event!
• More POC & ally tablers for each city: come to a POCZP event in your town and table for your zine/org/collective/creative project (check out some of the POC artists/merchants who tabled last year) <3

We’re also looking for folks to help us produce #raceriottour fundraiser events between now and September. This might be a good solution for you if you are unable to travel.

Contact poczineproject@gmail.com for more details. Make sure to use “2013 RACE RIOT TOUR” as the email subject.

ABOUT THE RACE RIOT! TOUR

POC Zine Project held its first Race Riot! Tour in 2012, producing 20 events in 14 U.S. cities, which included speaking engagements at six universities. Click here to view photos from the POC Zine Project: 2012 Race Riot! Tour tour finale at Death By Audio in Brooklyn and access all the tour stop recaps.

We will be taking the Race Riot! Tour through 12 more U.S. cities in 2013. Stay tuned for updates as we work on partnering with POC-affirming orgs overseas. If you are outside the U.S. and want to be a part of our emerging POCZP Global Ambassadors program, email poczineproject@gmail.com. 

SUPPORT POC ZINE PROJECT

If everyone in our community gave $1, we would more than meet our fundraising goal for 2013. If you have it to spare, we appreciate your support. All funds go to our 2013 tour, the Legacy Series and the poverty zine series.

DONATE link via PayPal: http://bit.ly/SHdmyh

RELEASE: Barnard Library Donation Statement

In the summer of 2012, POC Zine Project partnered with Mimi Thi Nguyen to facilitate her donation of over 60 poc zines created in the 1990s to NYU’s Fales Library and the Barnard Zine Library. 

Here is Mimi/POCZP’s Barnard donation statement in its entirety. Click here for the Barnard blog post that includes donation details.

BARNARD LIBRARY DONATION STATEMENT

The Mimi Thi Nguyen Collection in Collaboration with the POC Zine Project

January 17, 2013

By Mimi Thi Nguyen

I first met Jenna Freedman from the Barnard Zine Library at event called, “Meet Me At the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990 to Today,” in November 2011. Freedman had contacted me in spring of that year with an open invitation to speak at the Barnard Zine Library if I ever found myself in New York City, after noting that I spoke about the Race Riot compilation zines at both the Chicago Zine Fest and the Midwest Zine Fest.

Having been invited to present my scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania later that fall, I proposed a side trip to come to Barnard. In short order, Freedman contacted Kate Wadkins of the For the Birds Feminist Collective and Daniela Capistrano of the POC Zine Project and organized the “Meet Me At the Race Riot” event, featuring a truly amazing panel of women of color zine writers – and thus Freedman is key to those efforts that laid the groundwork for the POC Zine Project speakers’ bureau.

That this should be so is no surprise, since Freedman in her position as head archivist for the Barnard Zine Library has made it the collection’s mission to focus upon zines by women of color as an important but much under-observed contribution to the story of contemporary zine culture in general, and to riot grrrl as feminist movement in particular.

It is with great pleasure that I collaborate now with Daniela Capistrano to donate these zines to the Barnard Zine Library. As the mission statement for POC Zine Project states, the archive and access to it are central: “POC Zine Project’s mission is to makes ALL zines by POC (People of Color) easy to find, share and distribute. We are an experiment in activism and community through materiality.”

With this mission statement in mind, I wish to address two issues that concern us —myself, and Capistrano at the POC Zine Project— in pursuing these archival collaborations: For the first, we argue that the archive is not just a place for study, but must be itself an object of it.

What is in the archive, and how did it get there?

What are the criteria for assembling, organizing and presenting materials?

Who selects and collects, shapes and donates their stories to an archive?

What is not there?

How do these materials and absences produce knowledges, including norms and teleologies?

It is stating the obvious to observe that no archive is an authoritative source for grasping a record of the past; we know from postcolonial studies in which the archive is demonstrably an artifact of colonial frames that the story the archive –any archive— tells is provisional, partial.

This concern then leads us to the second, focused on feminist historiography –how do we tell the story of feminist movement and teleology, and the place of women of color?

As the narrow scope of liberal multiculturalism has by now taught us, inclusion and incorporation might be made to cover over more troubling queries about how women of color are included, incorporated, or otherwise made visible. I am thinking of feminist archives or retrospectives that too often “hold a place” for women of color to say their piece, but in such a way that contains their critique and segregates it from the story of the movement’s contribution.

We can see this logic operating in retrospectives of riot grrrl in which the story of race is contained as a chapter, or a part of a chapter, in its history, when it appears at all. As I have said elsewhere, the archive is a political and cultural meaning making machine for the passage of objects into what Michel Foucault calls knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention, and for “minor” objects in particular, we know well how troublesome such a passage might be.

At the same time, myself and Daniela here wish to posit another historiographical gesture. That is, what if we refuse the emplottment of absence and subsequent redemption-through-presence that would render women of color as mere addition or supplement to the archives?

What if the intervention becomes the story to tell about them? This is the story, we believe, that the Barnard Zine Library aims to tell.

In that spirit, the donations made from my collection in collaboration with the POC Zine Project and in conversation with Jenna Freedman at the Barnard Zine Library are both a critique (broadly construed) and an alternate chronicle taking up questions about race and coloniality that cut across assumed feminist histories, investments and teleologies.[1]

These selections from my collection point to not a side story in riot grrrl movement or girls’ expressive cultures, but the story of encounter and contest, exchange and challenge – denoting not the singularity of feminist movement, but its slide by other feminisms, fracturing and multiplying into other worlds.

Again, as I have said elsewhere (and repeatedly on the first POC Zine Project/Race Riot! Tour in 2012), those other histories of people of color —here represented in the materials we donate together— are not an interruption into a singular scene or movement but the practice of another, co-present scene or movement that conversed and collided with the already-known story, but with alternate investments and forms of critique. These other stories of riot grrrl in particular and also punk at large unfolding enact historical and theoretical provocations with which we have yet to reckon.[2]

[1] I am grateful to my graduate research assistant Ariana Ruiz for the hours she put in copying and creating an inventory for the zines.

[2] Some of the material adapted here for this statement comes from Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Afterward,” in Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower, edited by Zack Furness, New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2012, 217-223; and Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” in Women & Performance special issue “Punk Anteriors,” edited by Elizabeth Stinson and Fiona I.B. Ngô, 22:2-3 (July-November 2012); 173-196. 

THANKS, JENNA <3

- Jenna Freedman

————————

Editor’s note: If you are interested in accessing digital copies of any of these zines, send us a message.

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Come to Mimi Thi Nguyen’s talk at George Mason University on 10/25/12!

Mimi Thi Nguyen, creator of the influential Race Riot series (read issue #1 online) and other zines, will be giving a talk next Thursday, October 25, at George Mason University for the Cultural Studies Colloquium.

The talk is called “Liberal Peace, Liberal War, and the Passage Between Them,” drawing on her new book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and some new research on our contemporary wars.

This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC <3 If you attend, PLEASE live-tweet whatever you can with #poczp and we’ll RT/collect your notes for a recap post.

Also, you can email daniela@dcapmedia.com with a recap and we’ll share and credit you on this Tumblr.

Here’s a map to locate the building on campus.

GMU’s address: 4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030 (at the Johnson Center, Assembly Rm E)

———-

Mimi was an integral part of POC Zine Project’s first Race Riot! tour, both as a speaker and organizer. 

ABOUT POC ZINE PROJECT

POC Zine Project’s mission is to make zines by people of color easy to find, distribute and share - community and activism through materiality. We took the Race Riot! tour through 12 cities from Sept 24 - Oct 7, 2012.

TOUR RECAPS ARCHIVE

Oct 7: Death by Audio - Brooklyn (TOUR FINALE)

Oct 6: University of Maryland + Brickhaus - College Park and Baltimore

Oct 5: St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church - Washington, D.C.

Oct 4: University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh

Oct 3: Skylab - Columbus

Oct 2: Rachael’s Cafe - Bloomington

Oct 1: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign + UCIMC - Champaign

Sept 30: multikulti - Chicago

Sept 29: University of Michigan + 3rd Death Star - Ann Arbor

Sept 28: The Trumbullplex - Detroit

Sept 27: Ohio University + evening potluck with Cindy Crabb - Athens

Sept 26: Mr. Roboto Project - Pittsburgh

Sept 25: The Wooden Shoe - Philly

Sept 24: 538 Johnson - NYC - Brooklyn

STAY INFORMED

poczineproject.tumblr.com

facebook.com/poczineproject

twitter.com/poczineproject

Race Riot! Tour Recap: Brooklyn! @ Death By Audio on Oct 7, 2012 

Ten days have passed since our Race Riot! tour finale event at Death By Audio in Brooklyn. Our last tour date had the most amount of people in attendance, and zine partner sales were higher than any other stop on our tour, so thank you NYC for your love and support!

We’re going to do a zine and art book about our first tour experience, (details coming soon) so for now, here are some beautiful moments from October 7, 2012:

- Cristy C. Road gets the crowd at Death By Audio to sing “Tell It to My Heart” by Taylor Dayne before she begins reading from Spit and Passion

Photo by Mimi Thi Nguyen

- POC Zine Project’s Race Riot! Tour attendees at Death by Audio on Oct 7, 2012

- Mimi Thi Nguyen reads at Death By Audio

- Leshaun lovell (l) Share roman (m) and Jade Fair (r) at POCZP’s Race Riot! Tour stop at Death By Audio on Oct 7

- DJ Shomi Noise holding her zines Building Up Emotional Muscles #1-3 at Death By Audio on Oct 7

- Shady Hawkins perform at Death By Audio

Photo by Mary Christmas

- Mimi (l), Cristy (m) and Suzy X (r) from the band Shady Hawkins chill on stage 

- Joan Chen came all the way from the west coast and brought Bay Area poc zines for the archive! <3 Thanks, Joan!

- Back of crowd during Anna Vo’s reading at Death By Audio

Photo by Mimi Thi Nguyen

- Osa Atoe, creator of the Shotgun Seamstress series (out now on Mend My Dress Press), reads at Death By Audio

- Aye Nako performs at Death By Audio

Photo by thetenderestheart

- Part of POC Zine Project’s Race Riot! Mall at Death By Audio

Photo by Mimi Thi Nguyen

MEMORIES FROM THE EVENT

By Daniela

The venue was PACKED and at a certain point (about halfway through the show) we had to ask everyone who was sitting to stand up so that a horde of folks waiting in line outside could get in. Like all of our other tour stops, the door cover was sliding scale/pay what you can with no one turned away for lack of funds.

Although DBA had a cash bar, people kept it together and the energy overall was amazing. Around 9pm, after I had made sure the projector was working, we kicked things off.

 Jamie Varriale Vélez, our local guest reader, did an amazing job and was super brave (she read first). Race Riot! crew Osa, Anna Vo, Mimi Thi Nguyen and Cristy C. Road followed. I played MC, worked at the Race Riot! mall, dealt with problems as they came up and took some of the photos you see in this post.

We’re still getting tons of positive feedback for Aye Nako and Shady Hawkins, the two fierce bands that held down the second half of the evening.

Jordan Alam tabled on behalf of the Barnard Zine Library (longtime ally entity), sharing some of the POC and feminist zines available in their collection. Thanks, Jordan and Jenna Freedman! <3

BIG THANKS to Cristy C. Road for coordinating our finale event logistics, Death By Audio for allowing us to use the venue and all the DBA folks who handled sound and door needs.

I’m probably forgetting to thank a million people but we’ll get it together for the zine and art book that we’re doing for the tour. 

We’ll have more candids and quotes from tour members and attendees in the weeks to come.

Thanks again, you reading this right now, for your interest and support. This is an experiment in community and activism through materiality. If you took any photos or video of this event and are willing to share so we can add it to our documentation, please email daniela@dcapmedia.com. <3

***ANNOUNCEMENT***

If you’re interested in developing your digital media and community organizing skills by interning for POC Zine Project, email daniela@dcapmedia.com.

We can provide college credit or, if you’re not enrolled at an accredited university, professional mentorship. Meatspace internships will take place at DCAP Media HQ in NYC. Telecommuting/remote production internships are also available.

IMPORTANT THINGS

1) We’re doing a zine about this tour, so if you were part of any of the events, let us know if you want to contribute by emailing daniela@dcapmedia.com.

2) We’re doing a national conference in 2014. 

3) We’re doing a west coast tour in 2013.

4) If you want to be a part of any upcoming POCZP events, let us know.

5) We love you.

ABOUT POC ZINE PROJECT

POC Zine Project’s mission is to make zines by people of color easy to find, distribute and share - community and activism through materiality. We took the Race Riot! tour through 12 cities from Sept 24 - Oct 7, 2012.

STAY INFORMED

poczineproject.tumblr.com

facebook.com/poczineproject

twitter.com/poczineproject

All tour dates: http://bit.ly/PeEgaR

TOUR RECAPS ARCHIVE

Oct 7: Death By Audio - Brooklyn

Oct 6: University of Maryland + Brickhaus - College Park and Baltimore

Oct 5: St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church - Washington, D.C.

Oct 4: University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh

Oct 3: Skylab - Columbus

Oct 2: Rachael’s Cafe - Bloomington

Oct 1: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign + UCIMC - Champaign

Sept 30: multikulti - Chicago

Sept 29: University of Michigan + 3rd Death Star - Ann Arbor

Sept 28: The Trumbullplex - Detroit

Sept 27: Ohio University + evening potluck with Cindy Crabb - Athens

Sept 26: Mr. Roboto Project - Pittsburgh

Sept 25: The Wooden Shoe - Philly

Sept 24: 538 Johnson - NYC - Brooklyn

Sept 14 - Wellesley College pre-Race Riot! tour panel

All photos should be credited to Daniela Capistrano/POC Zine Project unless otherwise noted. Please be sure to credit and link to poczineproject.tumblr.com if you reblog individual pics. Tx! <3

Meet POC Zine Project tour member Mimi Thi Nguyen!

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, 2012). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions on Southeast Asians in diaspora (20:3, Winter 2012).

With her second project on the obligations proposed by beauty, she continues to pursue her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies, and in particular as an untangling of the liberal way of war that pledges aid, freedom, rights, movement, and other social goods. Nguyen is also co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007), and publishes on queer subcultures and punk feminisms.

More information can be found at mimithinguyen.com.

Nguyen has published zines since 1991, including Slander (formerly known by other titles) and the compilation zine Race Riot (1997 and 2002). Race Riot is the first zine to comprehensively address race and racisms in punk and riot grrrl. Her zines are the objects of much academic study, which is an odd situation she addresses in her “Afterward” for the collection Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (edited by Zack Furness), and in the latest issue of Slander.

She is a former Punk Planet columnist and a Maximumrocknroll shitworker. She blogs about music, politics, and more at thread & circuits (threadandcircuits.wordpress.com). She is also co-author of the research blog on dress and beauty threadbared (iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com). 

Here is what Mimi had to say about joining the POC Zine Project tour:

I wanted to be a part of these events and this tour for two reasons. The first has to do with the retrospective turn in academic and popular monographs about punk and riot grrrl, and in particular the publication (within a year of each other) of Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front and the edited collection White Riot (which republished an old Punk Planet column of mine).

As I wrote elsewhere, this retrospective turn with its subsequent institutionalization of some stories about punk and riot grrrl and not others had been troubling me: What does it mean, for instance, to define punk feminisms through riot grrrl without a memory of other punk feminisms? What falls out when women of color feminisms are observed to be a frequent citation in grrrl zines (bell hooks being perhaps the most popular), but not an ongoing contestation within the movement? How do we critique the narrativization of punk as a white phenomenon, which is both true and false?

How can we trouble the usual story of punk as a white riot through a recognition that people of color (around the world) and have always been integral to punk musics, punk aesthetics, punk histories and punk politics – a recognition that would disrupt our echoing absence from the archives, but also disavowing our appropriation into those archives as an uncomplicated presence?

So I want to be able to respond to the institutionalization of some stories and not others, and as well some storytellers and not others. This leads me full circle to the second reason I wanted to go on this tour, which is the same reason I did the Race Riot zines in the first place (which I started to compile way back in 1995) – to connect with other punks of color about this thing we love and sometimes hate, to present something –a zine, a tour— that might make sense of that push and pull and give it a history, and then to create something new between us.  

Oh, and a third reason — because I am not a musician (and never a roadie), I’ve never been on tour. I’m excited to finally get my chance to drive for hours on end in a van with a bunch of rad punk girls of color!

Mimi has been involved with POC Zine Project since late 2010. Here is what she shared about how that relationship evolved:

I first got involved with The POC Zine Project when Daniela approached me, asking if she might be able to get copies and scans of the original Race Riot compilation zines to archive and distribute freely (editor’s note: you can read and download RR #1 here!). As a punk and a scholar whose intellectual and political genealogies include women of color feminisms, I thought this was such a brilliant idea (I have long loved the Queer Zine Archive Project), and I immediately said “Of course!”

Then last fall, I was due to be on the East Coast for a lecture at a Philadelphia university, and I approached Jenna Freedman at the Barnard Zine Library about possibly doing a free gig while I was there on the other university’s dime. In no time at all, she contacted The POC Zine Project and For the Birds Collective, and together with Daniela Capistrano and Kate Wadkins, these amazing persons brought together the first Meet Me At The Race Riot event in November 2011.

The response to the event was so moving (despite the windowless basement in which we found ourselves) that we brought another version of the event together for the Chicago Zine Fest the following spring. Again the response was incredible, and solidified my support for The POC Zine Project.

Community: Mimi will be participating in ALL of our tour dates! Please help her offset the cost of participating in this tour by making a donation and spreading the word about the tour.

Thanks again Mimi, for going on tour with us and supporting POC Zine Project! <3 

***Meet POC Zine Project tour members Anna Vo and Cristy C. Road!***

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CALL TO CREATIVES: We’re looking for folks to make iconic, Tumblr-friendly images that incorporate some of Mimi’s quotes provided in this post. If you’d like specific instructions, send us a message. Otherwise, feel free to let your creative juices flow and make your own! Just tag the post with “POC Zine Project” and we’ll reblog. We want to help spread Mimi’s comments! <3