Asian Arts Freedom School: Toronto

Asian Arts Freedom School

Iranian?
Vietnamese?
Bengali?

Asian*??

Asian Arts Freedom School

Because you're sick of being asked "Where're you from? No, where are you really from?" Because Asian is not just curry paste, John Cho, and keffiyeh scarves. Asian is not just being obscure one day and trendy the next, being quiet and well-behaved or being stopped every time you go to the airport or cross a border. Because you're sick of being profiled and harassed by the cops. Because feeling inauthentic is okay.

*Asian = South Asian, West Asian (a.k.a. Arab or Middle-Eastern), Southeast Asian, East Asian, Central Asian... mixed-race, adoptee, suburban, hood... just got here or been here since the 1800s. Asian stretches from the Philippines to Palestine, North China to Sri Lanka, Trinidad to Tibet, and all of it ends up in Toronto.

Every Wednesday from 6:00-8:30pm
February 3 - March 24, 2010
at Kapisanan
167 Augusta Ave. (in Kensington Market)

8 weeks of creative writing workshops
featuring the stuff they don't teach you in school:
- indigenous history and Asianness in Canada
- family secrets and migration
- Asian community organizing and activism
- how to wrestle with the headlines and win
- what we can make 'Asian' mean to Toronto

all workshops are free, have snacks and ttc tokens, and are run for asian* youth (aka asian folks under 29).

In choosing to use the term, ‘Freedom School' to describe our project, we give respect to the history of African-American resistance that gave birth to the phrase. We also chose to use it because of we believe learning about the histories we were never taught in school about Asian struggles and resistance, and learning how to tell our stories through writing and spoken word, is to search for and find freedom together.

asianartsfreedomschool@gmail.com [1]
youtube: radicalasians
myspace: asianartsfreedomschool