Announcing the Afro-Asian Poetic Index

Sep 1, 2023
by Margaret Rhee, Dennica Pearl Worrell, Kate McDonough, Johann Yamin

We are happy to announce the official launch of the Afro-Asian Poetic Index, following the workshop & feedback session held on August 15, 2023.

The Afro-Asian Poetic Index is a public resource edited by Dennica Pearl Worrell, Margaret Rhee, Kate McDonough, and Johann Yamin. It includes over 60 initial entries of links, websites, and biographies gathering artists, activists, scholars, books, collections, and movements recognizing Afro-Asia as an artistic, social, and political act of resistance. 

The Index aims to historicize movement building, artistic, poetic, and political solidarities, and demarking the present to create speculative futures together. In this worldbuilding, we reconsider the fluidity of the color line to resist anti-Black and anti-Asian violence to demand intersectional and racial acts of solidarity, creativity, and care.

The Index is a living document that is built upon submissions from the community. It is always incomplete and continually in progress. While an accessible and historical resource, we also see this Index as a speculative one: An Index that not only historicizes, but reimagines and insists on a world not separated between divides.

The Index is developed as part of The Afro-Asian Poetic Pantry of Solidarities by Margaret Rhee, a project from The Bandung Residency 2023 by The Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) and the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4).

We are honored to include a foreword by Amy Andrieux, executive director of MoCADA and Lisa Gold, executive director of A4.

View the Index below, or at: https://tinyurl.com/afroasianindex

Submit entries to the Index at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeefu0LDUnR209-FjzcCH8LFc4099qWGe5SOsM1rniOXsUV8A/viewform