"All the messages from pop culture present Asian American as an apolitical thing.  It was really shocking and liberating to find out that actually, Asian American politics was rooted in radical organizing and rooted in grassroots arts movements."  -- Ryan Wong

This episode of Audio Interference focuses on Basement Workshop (active 1970-1986), an arts and political organization based in New York City's Chinatown that served as a hub for the developing Asian American movement.  Elena Levi speaks to curator and writer Ryan Wong, whose exhibition, Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York was presented at Interference Archive in 2013-2014.  The episode also includes portions of Ryan's talk at an event celebrating the release of the latest issue of Signal (http://s1gnal.org/), a journal of international political graphics and culture.

Ryan's article on Hyperallergic includes more information on Basement Workshop and other Chinatown arts organizations:
https://hyperallergic.com/330442/a-brief-history-of-the-art-collectives-of-nycs-chinatown/

More on Serve the People:
http://interferencearchive.org/serve-the-people-the-asian-american-movement-in-new-york/

Issue #6 of Signal:
https://justseeds.org/product/signal06/

This episode features the song "Yellow Pearl" by Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, "Charlie" Chin from the recording entitled A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, PAR01020, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.  (p) (c) 1973.  Used by permission.

Link:  https://folkways.si.edu/chris-kando-iijima-joanne-nobuko-miyamoto-charlie-chin/a-grain-of-sand-music-for-the-struggle-by-asians-in-america/american-folk-protest/music/album/smithsonian

Other music used includes "Artifical Intelligence" and "One and Only" by Ryan Andersen, courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Produced by Interference Archive.

Audio Interference 49: Ryan Wong and Basement Workshop

In Episode 18 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks back at the
Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement of the closing years of the Cold War, when the
Western Shoshone people, whose traditional lands were being contaminated by
the nuclear blasts at the US government's Nevada Test Site, made common cause
with the Kazakh people of Central Asia who opposed Soviet nuclear testing at
the Semipalatinsk site. Kazakh activists travelled to Nevada to join protests
at the Test Site, while Western Shoshone leaders travelled to Kazakhstan to
join protests at Semipalatinsk. This initiative eventually evolved into the
Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which as recently
as 2016 held an International Conference on Building a Nuclear-Weapon-Free
World in Astana, Kazakhstan, again attended by Western Shoshone leaders. The
story of indigenous peoples impacted by nuclear testing on their usurped lands
has come to us from several places around the world, including the French test
site at Gerboise Bleue in Algeria -- known to the local Tuareg nomads as Tanezrouft. Other examples are the Chinese test site at Lop Nur, on lands of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, and British testing on Aboriginal lands at Maralinga, in the Australian outback. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement provides an inspiring example of indigenous peoples and their supporters building solidarity across hostile international borders and superpower influence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Kazakh Folk Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-IjHVhbTo

Production by Chris Rywalt

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CounterVortex Episode 18: Legacy of Kazakh-Shoshone solidarity

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CounterVortex Episode 18: Legacy of Kazakh-Shoshone solidarity

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