Threshold, a program choreographed by Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan, is part of a multifaceted project organized by the Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative (AAVOT).  The initiative is a collaborative effort among UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Irvine that began in 2023.

Violence against Asian Americans has been part of a long history and pattern of Asian racialization and gendered violence. Dominant narratives approach anti-Asian violence as a unitary phenomenon resulting from nation-state exclusion, drawing a direct line from past exclusionary legislation to the recent surge of violence.  The predominant response has been to place a troubling emphasis upon the concept of hate and the designation of such cases of anti-Asian violence as hate crimes; a response that has resulted in a misguided call for more state-sanctioned surveillance and policing.

Such narratives and policies place under erasure a number of factors and structures that produce violence and the unforeseen harm and dire consequences for other BIPOC communities. The  focus on a unitary victim and perpetrator elides important differences of gender, class, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, and geographical location, and posits “Asian Americans” as a singular and homogeneous population, whose victimization and vulnerability can and must be properly documented and enumerated. A consequent policy response is to assume that this violence will end through more surveillance, increased police presence in Asian American neighborhoods, and the designation of disparate cases as hate crimes. As a result, anti-Asian violence tends to be most legible as a mere effect of individual prejudice, rather than as a condition of structures of systemic racial violence or global conditions of war, racial capitalism, and empire.

The initiative aims to support and showcase

• innovative scholarship and creative visions about the underexplored and multifaceted genealogies of anti-Asian violence, which go beyond these predominant narratives and problematic responses. 
• proposed remedies and solutions to anti-Asian violence that both open up new possibilities and are better attuned to heterogenous Asian American communities and the question of Asian American relationality with other BIPOC groups
• documentation and analysis of specific forms of community organizing or campaign building against anti-Asian violence
• relational critique through abolition feminist, decolonial, anti-carceral, or anti-violence political insights and practices
• cross-comparison analysis between the current wave of anti-Asian violence and violent attacks that surged after 9/11 directed against those who “appear Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern”
• strategies and problematics of healing, care work, and mutual aid practices
• speculative forms and imagined futures about diverse modes of sustaining livable Asian American communities
• visual arts, multimedia and performance practices that invite embodied engagement and reflexive thinking about anti-Asian violence

The initiative has a number of components including: a course this fall in Asian American Studies on “Re-viewing Anti-Asian Violence”; a series of talks by Professors Kandice Chuh and Chandan Reddy and artists Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong on anti-Asian violence in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender; a graduate student workshop at UCLA; a policy brief; a special issue of Amerasia Journal, a mini-exhibition here in the lobby of the Mondavi Center that focuses on this topic; and Threshold, two dance performances, Unbound and Two Doors, choreographed by Claudine Naganuma and SanSan Kwan, which will explore the kinetics of violence and resistance.  

During the height of COVID-19, a number of brutal videos and photographs circulated that supplement the statistics and reportage of anti-Asian incidents that escalated during the pandemic. Viewing the ceaseless image stream of crime scenes, victim mugshots, and portraits of grief on news streams and social media risks succumbing to a feeling of shock and alienation. Missing in these distanced encounters of violence are not only questions that fall outside the frame of these images, but also safe and empathetic spaces to process and learn about the context of these incidents, the care and intimacy to begin healing, and open-ended prompts to talk about dark subjects and awkward scenarios. 

In addition to making knowledge accessible and shared with a wider audience, the arts have been pivotal in disarming and enchanting, engaging and activating the viewer vis-a-vis movement and dialogue, photography and sculpture, film and video. The arts can imagine the future, help guide and illustrate next steps and/or reimagine possibilities.

Both racism and violence concern bodies. Bodies on stage and in movement are central to bring into the conversation on anti-Asian violence because they can elicit nuanced feelings and make visceral connections, which build complex relationships of mutual regard and genuine community. The arts invite us to get in touch, be attuned with all of our senses in ways that are a part of and apart from most academic scholarship. To include these creative components, to integrate the arts into our research is an imperative as it guards against indifference and requires that we be alert to contradictory and conflicting messages and revelations.

Both the exhibition in the Mondavi Center lobby and performances choreographed by Kwan and Naganuma serve as gathering spaces that will resist the fight and flight response to this topic of anti-Asian violence and begin the hard work of sitting with and taking in multiple embodied experiences to think about the relationship between Asianness and violence in unforeseen and enlivening ways.