Event Details

Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd, Julie Thi Underhill, and other artists, activists and scholars, will lead a discussion on color and caste in the US and Asia in relation to US military and cultural dominance in the Pacific. A large part of this presentation and discussion will focus on art and forms of creative cultural production that pushes for and aids in decolonizing self and communities towards a more creative and egalitarian world.

Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd was born in Japan in 1955, shortly after the US occupation officially ended. His African American/Cherokee/Welsh father was an occupation soldier in Korea and Japan while Fredrick's mother — a Japanese/Chinese/Austro-Hungarian girl of the war-ruins was from an elite nationalist family in Japan. He received a Masters degree from a postcolonial/feminist-oriented social cultural anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 2001 and entered the PHD program immediately after to deepen his commitment to thinking liberation, social justice, and identity. He co-convened a conference in 2004 entitled: Kurdish Human Rights: Statelessness, Resistance and Survival. He has been speaking, consulting and writing about race, gender, sexuality and nationalism since 1978. He has written book reviews for the Pacific Reader in Seattle, Washington since 1995 and has been featured in various news and television segments speaking to multiracial issues in Colorado, New York and Washington state. He has been published in the National Japanese American Historical Society publications. He feeds his love of Asian and Latin foods, coffee, volleyball, TV shows, music and steam trains while working on a series of works of interstitial auto-ethnographies weaving collective memories of postwar gender and race issues of the Black-Pacific peoples, continuing from the Cold-War era into our present, entitled: Dream of the Water Children. Excerpts are currently featured on the Discover Nikkei web-journal.

Julie Thi Underhill is a poet, essayist, artist, photographer, filmmaker, and historian. In 1976 she was born in the U.S. to a mother from Viet Nam, a Cham-French war widow who’d evacuated during the Fall of Saigon. Julie’s American father was a civilian contractor during the war in Viet Nam, and her American stepfather flew Army combat helicopters in Viet Nam. Julie’s poetry, essays, oral histories, and photos have been published in 'Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader' (2004), 'Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace' (2006), 'ColorLines' (2006), 'Embodying Asian/American Sexualities' (2009), 'New American Media' (2010), 'Hayden's Ferry Review' (2011) and 'Newspace Center for Photography—Exhibitions 2002-2011' (2011). Her photography and essays are forthcoming in 'positions: east asia cultures critique' and 'Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art.' As a filmmaker, she received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences (UMass-Boston, 2005-06). She is a core member of Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and a managing editor for diaCRITICS. Underhill holds a BA (2000) from The Evergreen State College and a MA (2009) from University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a Chancellor's Fellow and graduate student instructor at UC Berkeley, where she is earning her doctorate in ethnic studies.