The symposium gathered academics and activists from across disciplines to hold dialogue on professor Gary Y. Okihiro’s scholarship in Asian American studies and ethnic studies.

Yolanda Wang & Fabeha Jahra

1:29 am, Nov 13, 2024

Staff Reporter & Contributing Reporter

Yolanda Wang, Contributing Photographer

The “Histories and Worlds Unbound” symposium gathered scholars, students and activists from across disciplines on Friday to honor the legacy of professor Gary Okihiro, a founding scholar of Asian American and ethnic studies, and to discuss the future of interdisciplinary scholarship on race and empire. Okihiro died on May 20 in New Haven. He was 78 years old. 

Hosted at the Humanities Quadrangle, the symposium interweaved poignant stories about Okihiro’s relationships with his studies, friends and colleagues with panels on the themes “Asian American Studies Then and Now,” “Scholarship Unbound” and “Third World Studies.” 

“Professor Okihiro had a profound impact on the lives of many students and faculty across a career that spanned more than five decades,” professor Daniel HoSang, an organizer of the symposium, wrote to the News. “He loved the time he spent at Yale in the last seven years and we felt it was important to honor him not only for the gifts he gave us here but all the work he did across his impressive career.”

Before his passing in May, Okihiro taught the popular Yale courses “Third World Studies” and “Fruits of Empire.” According to HoSang, he started planning the symposium along with professors Mary Lui, Rod Ferguson and Lisa Lowe in June, shortly after Okihiro’s passing.

During the symposium, Okihiro’s colleagues reflected on his long standing concern with the way his fields of study interacted with institutions like Yale.

“While [Okihiro] is certainly considered one of the founding contributors of Asian American studies and Ethnic Studies, he was simultaneously always interrogating the boundaries of these fields,” Lowe read in a statement preceding the second panel, “Scholarship Unbound.” “He was intently concerned about how institutionalizing fields that had emerged originally as critiques of university exclusions — Asian American, African American, Ethnic Studies, or Women’s Studies — might neutralize their critical force.”

Speakers at the symposium also honored Marina Amparo Henriquez-Okihiro, Okihiro’s spouse who died in August 2024. HoSang recounted Henriquez-Okihiro’s achievements as a historian and teacher who sought to preserve Hawaiian history and culture. As part of Okihiro and Henriquez-Okihiro’s legacy, University of Hawai‘i at Hilo offers an award in their name each year to a student who “has made significant contributions toward Hawaiian history and culture in the community.”

At the symposium, HoSang also announced the new Gary Okihiro Third World Studies Library with a group of students who worked together to organize the library. Possible Futures, a local bookstore, also sold a collection of Okihiro’s books at a book stand during the symposium.

While some books from Okihiro’s offices on campus and at his home in Hawai‘i were donated to the existing Gary Okihiro Library at the Asian American Cultural Center, a group of Okihiro’s former students sorted the remaining books into a collection housed on the third floor of the Humanities Quadrangle. Each book in the library is stamped with a quote from Okihiro: “A book is a living organism / Dissect— Probe— Discover.”

“While we were building the library, which we finished on Saturday, October 19, we were taking care to respect the order in which he’d organized his books,” Sofia Schroth-Douma ’24 said at the symposium. “Sometimes we were so careful about maintaining the order of the books that we imagined he might have laughed at us about it. We were really moved by the chronologies in his library and how the shelves showed lines of connection from one writer to the next, and even from one field or school of thought to the next. ”

The symposium concluded with a reception at the AACC, where attendees shared anecdotes about Okihiro, toured the Okihiro library and wrote messages in his memory to be collected in a scrapbook for his family.

Okihiro was born on Oct. 14, 1945, on a sugar plantation in Oahu, Hawai‘i.