Spaces of Resistance / Spaces of Repair

All struggles for freedom are intertwined. We believe song, literature, and community building shape our fight for our multiple freedoms.

The Sweat of Love & The Fire of Truth is a reading featuring DJ Rekha, Faith Adiele, Leah Johnson, Jai Dulani, Lisa Ko, Nina Sharma, Daisy Hernández, Quincy Scott Jones, Serena W. Lin, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Cathy Linh Che, Mahogany L. Browne, and Kay Ulanday Barrett

On May 19, 1921, in San Pedro, California, Mary Yuriko Nakahara—popularly known as Yuri Kochiyama—was born. A formidable Japanese American civil rights activist who was a staunch ally and champion for the rights and freedom of Black, Asian, and communities of color, Kochiyama left an indelible mark in history as a radical leader, organizer, and educator. She was—and still is—a profound example of what cross-racial solidarity and activism can and should look like.

Her activism for Black, Asian, and Third World Liberation spanned the gamut—she joined the Young Lords Party, was active in the Harlem Community for Self-Defense, and was an opponent of the Vietnam War. She invited and hosted countless activists in her home, with her political meetings being affectionately known as “Grand Central Station” or the “The Revolutionary Salon.” Kochiyama was the founder of Asian Americans for Action, an organization with a mission to catalyze Asian American political movement building in solidarity with Black liberation struggles. In 1977, she was a part of a protest with Puerto Rican activists who took over the Statue of Liberty to raise awareness about Puerto Rican independence.

After decades of activism and organizing, Yuri Kochiyama passed away on June 1, 2014.
On her 100th birthday, scholar-activist and community builder Akemi Kochiyama reflects on her grandmother’s life, legacy, and leadership and gives insights to the radical organizer and activist that was, is, and will always be Yuri Kochiyama. Read more on The Margins.

On May 27th, 2020 we hosted a powerful celebration of Asian American voices, featuring an acclaimed lineup of some of our community’s most prolific poets and spoken word artists. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and PEN America, alongside members of the global literary community stand in support of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities that have been targeted by rising hate and racism in recent months during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the July 2019 hearing for the ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) on the use of public land for new jails in New York City, a member of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) provided testimony. The ULURP process was being used to decide whether the land would suffice for the new jails, not to receive public opinions on whether those jails should be built—that decision had already been made by Mayor Bill de Blasio. The woman speaking was young and Nepali. She had a translator with her. The hearing would decide if certain pieces of land were alright to host new cages. As she spoke, she cried. As someone who had been abused at home, she had been rendered houseless because of a lack of Nepali language services to help her find support. She sounded angry and desperate—why were we at this hearing talking about building new jails when there weren’t even enough translators for women living on the street?

Two years ago, in the fall of 2018, I received an email from Critical Resistance with a call to action to “defeat jail construction.” At the time, it felt obvious: Why would anyone stand by and let the city invest more than 8 billion dollars in four new jails when the city’s housing crisis stared us in the face every day? Why would a city that had allowed the deaths of Kalief Browder, Eric Garner, Eleanor Bumpus, Kyam Livingston, Akai Gurley, and so many more, be given free range to lock up generations of New Yorkers?

Before the public gauntlet was thrown, I was angered by the glossy jail brochures passed out by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice at community meetings about the borough-based jail plan. Jails could be “a good neighbor,” the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice promised, citing concerns about parking, traffic, and property values as central to “architecture and design that minimizes street level impact.”

One year later, despite what seemed to me an obvious improbability, the New York City Council voted to build four new jails. At the time, and since then, they’ve sold this plan as the only way to close Rikers, synonymizing jail expansion with the closure of Rikers, New York City’s notorious penal colony. They’ve continued to promote this as the only solution, despite days worth of testimony, letters, public protest, reporting, and alternatives arguing that Rikers can be closed without building new jails, if only the city would choose to do so. Incarceration is always a policy failure, because it is the consequence of an anti-Black, murderous, extractive political economy. Reforms like new jails are no more than gilded cages. Read more on The Margins.

In Part Two of a discussion on South Asian diasporic organizing in the movement for abolition, Mon M. and Sharmin Hossain reflect on their histories and positionalities as South Asian abolitionists. From the fractured history of South Asian immigration to the U.S. to the reformist threads within South Asian anti-violence organizing, the authors discuss what kind of lessons and strategies are best deployed by South Asian communities in the U.S. as they stand in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and Dalit people working to end the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics of incarceration and policing.

Mon M.: I really admire all the organizing you’ve done in New York and within South Asian communities around the world. I feel that this conversation is a really pertinent one to what I’ve written in the first section of this piece for A World Without Cages because I feel like your experiences reflect of some of the things I’m trying to say around how people—particularly people of privileged positionalities, so class privilege, caste privilege, cis, able-bodied people—can organize against policing, against jails in the U.S. as part of the South Asian diaspora, or even as first-generation immigrants.

Sharmin Hossain: Yeah, thank you. South Asian Muslims don’t often get to reflect on our role and our unique histories around abolition, specifically because the history of abolition is deeply seeded in Black history in the United States. Black Muslims played such a major role in the Civil Rights movement, out of some of the first enslaved folks that were brought here, scholars estimate that 30 percent of them were Muslim. The resistance that we’re seeing from these communities at the margins of the margins are pieces that I’ve always been interested in, because as a Bangladeshi queer Muslim, I feel at the margins of the South Asian community, and the Muslim community. I’m excited to be able to tease out those ideas because we both aren’t necessarily scholars or academics, and it’ll be fun to talk through some of the things that we see as organizers be pertinent to how we do movement.

MM: In the first part of this two-part series, I say that there are three things that should formulate a base to a South Asian approach to abolition in the United States, and not worldwide. The first being the need to make transparent connections between movements and be in solidarity with the most oppressed from victims of U.S. imperialism and Global South movements; the second being the need for community self-determination and resources to respond to violence without relying on the state; and the third being the need to recognize and organize against false solutions when they’re presented to us, especially from “representation and diversity” to casteist narratives and reformist solutions.
In talking to you, I want to jump into each of these and get into the tensions that exist in these spaces when it comes to organizing against police or when it comes to gender-based violence.


SH: Yeah, I love the three critical points that weave together internationalism and how local movements need to be able to have abolitionist approaches in the ways we look at addressing, let’s say the military industrial complex, the ways in which our communities are facing an assault on immigration, and even connecting it to broader ecosystems of climate change. Because of South Asia’s unique history of caste apartheid and Islamophobic violence, a large majority of the most visible Indian people that were migrating here [from home] benefitted from their caste privilege and came here to settle in places like Boston and Texas, where we’re seeing a large population of dominant-caste Indian Americans. These networks are crucial to interrogate, but the hegemony of Indian Americans means other South Asian American experiences become invisibilized.

Take the example of the unique experience of Pakistanis after 9/11 for example, where thousands were registered within the NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration Sytem), a surveillance program that racially profiled Muslims from a certain age group from Muslim majority countries to register to be surveilled by the Department of Homeland Security. They were manipulated by the state to self-opt into this registration system, and consequently, thousands were deported, surveilled, or chose to self-deport as a result of harassment by the state. Read more on The Margins.

A reading of "If the Revolution has Come" by Quincy Scott Jones (read by Nina Sharma)
For George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain & all those who protest and fight.