Asian & Black Diaspora Cookbook
Asian & Black Diaspora Cookbook
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Project Overview
This artist's book embarks on an exploratory journey through the diverse and intersecting worlds of Asian and Black diasporic communities. It goes beyond a collection of recipes and stories to a transdisciplinary sensory atlas that delves into these communities' cultural, historical, and socio-political tapestries.
This book is a journey, a dialogue, and a celebration. It is an invitation to look beyond the plate, to see the stories, struggles, and triumphs woven into every bite we take and every tale we tell. Through this project, we aspire to contribute to a world where understanding and solidarity can flourish across communal lines.
Philosophy and Approach
Recognizing the profound role food plays in cultural expression and identity formation, this project utilizes culinary traditions as a primary lens to explore and celebrate the rich, complex narratives of Asian and Black diasporas. Our approach transcends conventional cookbook formats, aiming instead to weave a vibrant mosaic that integrates food and folklore. It surpasses the assemblage of individual threads and reveals a collective journey toward deeper understanding, empathy, and solidarity.
Objectives and Impact
The central objective of this project is to foster new paradigms of understanding and cooperation between Asian and Black communities. By sharing and celebrating each other's culinary and folkloric heritage, we aim to build bridges that transcend traditional boundaries and challenge systemic oppression. This book strives to be a conduit for dialogue, providing a space for voices often marginalized or misunderstood to resonate with power and clarity.
Narrative Structure
The book's structure is envisioned as an interplay of food experiences and storytelling. Each culinary creation becomes a portal into a larger narrative, revealing the interwoven strands of history, economy, and culture. These stories are experienced, tasted, and felt, each contributing to a deeper comprehension of the shared and divergent paths of Asian and Black diasporas.
Culinary and Cultural Exploration
Through this exploration, we aim to challenge and expand the understanding of what it means to experience food within and outside one's community milieu. The project invites readers to engage with food as a powerful storyteller and a symbol of resistance and resilience. It highlights food's crucial role in shaping narratives of identity, community, and resistance against systemic inequalities.
Anna Parisi (b. 1984) is an Afro-Brazilian interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer working with collage, sculpture, performance and video. She holds a BA in Communications and Filmmaking from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School of Design in New York. Her work has been presented in both North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Her practice is geared towards creating experiences for cathartic reflections and transformations. By provoking experiences and exchanges where vulnerability, self-reflection, and healing act as radical strategies to oppose systemic violence, Anna's work seeks to offer paths for healing and transcendence, as a gesture to offer back visibility, remembrance, dialogue and understanding to those that have been repeatedly silenced and erased. She is part of The Laundromat Project 2023 Create Change Fellowship, was the recipient of the 2021 Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity at Gallery Affero, the 2020 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship, and the 2019 Taller Creative Capital Artist Fellowship. Her work has been presented at Superchief NFT Gallery, Everywoman Biennial, Equity Gallery, Bienal Black Brazil Art, EFA Project Space, The Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Hunter East Harlem Art Gallery, La Mama, UrbanGlass, The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Smack Mellon, Westbeth Gallery, [BOX] Videoart project space in Italy, Musée D’Elysee in Switzerland, Akbank Sanat in Turkey, amongst others. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Maya is a Black urban farmer and foodways educator from Baltimore, MD (Piscataway, Cherokee, and Lumbee lands) who’s called Brooklyn, NY (Canarsee, Lenni Lenape lands) her home for over 10 years, with her family’s roots in the DMV, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. She's invested in creating accessible spaces for Black and brown people to learn about food and health that center their personal stories and food traditions. She believes that food education can be a vehicle for communities of color to engage with their history and health while tapping into their power for social change. Her interests in food have led her to earn a culinary arts degree, to apprentice at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz where she studied Ecological and Sustainable Horticulture, and to study community health at Hunter College and become a Build. Unlearn. Decolonize. and CoFED Racial Justice Fellow alum. When Maya isn’t farming she continues to combine her love of cooking, agriculture, science, and history by pouring her heart into Deep Routes and creating unpublished photography pieces for her personal project Seeds & Receipts. She’s also a former founding member of the Central Brooklyn-based culinary collective Beautifully Fed Food.
DaeQuan Alexander Collier is a Bronx-born filmmaker and writer whose work aims to document, respond, and reimagine the complexities of the human experience. Collier received a BFA in Film and Television Arts from the New York University (2018) and an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College (2021). His work has been screened and exhibited both domestically and internationally, as well as won a host of awards. Through his practice, Collier hopes to create engaging work that facilitates conversations about identity and its implications.
Sonja John is a queer, first generation, Bronx-based artist, educator, and curator. John's interdisciplinary practice explores cultural, botanical, and material hybridity through paintings, textiles, printmaking, and site- responsive installations that reference plant forms and vernacular architecture across equatorial zones. These motifs investigate diasporic longing and nostalgic fictions of the Caribbean built from history, memory, and family lore. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Her contributions to museum education have been featured at the RISD Museum and Hyperallergic. John has performed at Jazz At Lincoln Center and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her visual art has been featured on I Like Your Work Podcast, n+1 magazine, Seeing Color Podcast with Zhiwan Cheung and Them. John was awarded the ChaNorth Artist Residency Young Artist Fellowship Award in 2022, and received the General Fellowship residency award for The Studios at MASS MoCA in 2023.
Louise Yeung 楊浩怡 (she/they) strives to envision and build a better world as an urban planner and visual artist of the Hong Kong diaspora. Through printmaking and painting, Louise explores migratory relationships and collective memories among people, plants, and animals who transform new environments to call home. Louise’s creative practice is shaped by her vocational work in climate policy and organizing. Louise is a 2023 Bandung Resident, a program through MoCADA and Asian American Alliance for the Arts through which she is documenting Black and Asian traditions of herbal healing to foster new forms of community care. Louisse is also an Advisory Board member of the Octavia Project, which uses the creative power of speculative fiction, art, and science to engage femme and nonbinary teens in imagining greater possibilities for our future.
Born in Minna, China, and based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), Fei Li is an interdisciplinary artist whose artistic practice revolves around community-led and collaborative public rituals, drawing on ancient wisdom while addressing contemporary concerns to foster a more interconnected society. The essence of her work lies in challenging conventional forms, narratives, and Western frameworks by leveraging the transformative potential of alternative media and collective efforts.
Li is the awardee of numerous funded artist's residencies, fellowships, and grants, including the 2023 Create Change Fellowship of Laundromat project, the 2021 Milton and Sally Michel Avery Residency for a Visual Artist at Yaddo, the 2017 Jon Imber Painting Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center; City Artist Corps Grant and Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant. She founded the collaboration platform Accented Projects, which seeks to transcend boundaries, foster collective action, and catalyze social change.
Dr. Yamuna Sangarasivam is professor of anthropology and director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Nazareth University. She engages her interdisciplinary training in musicology, dance ethnology, cultural-political anthropology, transnational feminist and queer epistemologies and ontologies to inform her studies of terrorism, nationalism, resistance, and the politics of race. Her book, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism: A Speculative Ethnography of War (2021) was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by her parents and grandparents to honor an ever-evolving transnational sense of self rooted in Tamil Eelam along with an awareness of ourselves as ecologically interdependent living beings, her recent scholarly and artistic endeavors in the study of food cosmogonies invites her to journey into the fabulatory arts of culinary worlding to build solidarities across space and time.
Pacyinz Lyfoung, an Asian American poet, attorney, and activist, presents an intersectional narrative marked by her Hmong roots and dual French and American cultural heritage. Her trajectory from her birthplace in France to her growth and evolution in Minnesota offers a panoramic view of her life's journey.
Bilingual in French and English, Pacyinz carries the relics of her family's diasporic experiences imprinted in her linguistic finesse. This distinct heritage frames her artistic endeavors, colored by her steadfast journey to master her ancestral Hmong language. Her poetry has been her bridge to her family and community legacies, especially that of her paternal grandfather, Phagna Touby Lyfoung. The story of Touby and his family reflects the story of the Hmong People finding pathways to full integration into their homelands, whether the Kingdom of Laos or the United States: breaking new grounds, making the Hmong name sound far and wide, and being of service to their homelands is the legacy of Phagna Touby Lyfoung, who was bestowed the title of "Lord Whose Name is Heard from Far Away" by the King of Laos.
Pacyinz's involvement in artistic projects is characterized by a deep-seated delight and a belief in the transformative power of collective creativity to shape a more compassionate world. She is at an exciting juncture in her career, poised to publish her first poetry collection—fulfilling one of her late father's wishes. She is currently based in Washington-DC.
Weihui Lu (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Queens, New York. Using the framework of Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary context, her practice explores the immigrant experience through personal narrative, as well as the broader environmental and psychological implications of the modern landscape. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Trestle Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Tutu Gallery and Studio 9D, among others, and she has been awarded residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute, Transborder Art, Byrdcliffe Art Colony, ChaNorth, and Arteles Creative Center. Lu holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Alexander “Alex” Huaylinos is an arts administrator, cultural worker, scholar, and educator. He is a passionate advocate for paid internships, radical education, and multivocal narratives in museums and the arts at large. Prior to The LP, Alex worked in the Marketing, Communications, and Advocacy department at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts while providing critical support to the institution’s Internships and Venue Sales teams. He holds a B.A. in Anthropological Archaeology from CUNY with complementary training in Ecology and Data Analysis.
Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performing artist from Minneapolis, MN. She is a recipient of awards, fellowship, and residencies from the Loft Literary Center, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Twin Cities Media Alliance, Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art and Muslim Advocates, Strive Publishing, Wisdom Ways, Nicollet Lanterns, Write Like Us, and 826 MSP. Sagirah’s prose and poetry have been published by Mizna, Terrain.org, Winter Tangerine, Puerto Del Sol, Paper Darts, Juked, the Walker Art Center, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. In 2021 Sagirah was co-curator of the City of Saint Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project. She celebrates her life exploring poetry with the student-writers of Unrestricted Interest, a writing program and consultancy dedicated to supporting neurodivergent learners through creative writing. Sagirah’s children’s activity book Get Involved in a Book Club! is available at Capstone press. Sagirah is a poetry editor with Overtly Lit.