Christina Huang 00:00
Hello, my name is Christina Huang. Today's date is August 2, 2023. I'm located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. We are here today with Sunaina Maira. She is a professor of Asian American Studies affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program and the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Her research and teaching focuses on Asian and Muslim American youth culture, migrant rights, refugee organizing, and transnational movements challenging imperialism and settler colonialism. We are so happy to have you here today. Thank you so much. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Sunaina Maira 00:42
Sure, I am Sunaina Maira, and I think you did a great job introducing me.

Christina Huang 00:47
Awesome. Thank you. I'm so grateful to have you here today. I just want to make it really clear, because I really like the work you've done. And I look up to you so much in what you've done and what you have been doing. So, I wanted to just start by asking: What got you involved in Asian American Studies?

Sunaina Maira 01:05
Yeah, that is the best question right? Well, I think that, you know, when I was a student that was your age, I really didn't know about Asian American Studies. Because you know, back then, since I'm an OG, there were no Asian American Studies programs, especially in colleges on the East coast, where I was studying in New England. And so I only learned about Asian American Studies by the time I got to graduate school. I was very interested in second generation experiences and stories. And I realized, actually, that there was very little research on South Asian second generation experiences and so my research really drew me into Asian American Studies. And before I knew there was a field, I was starting to see the lack of work on South Asian diasporic communities in particular. So, I actually did go to the Asian American Studies Conference in Seattle and I remember that being a very formative time, because I was like "Wow, there is a field, there are people doing interdisciplinary research, they are interested in the same kind of political concerns that are motivating my work.” And I really was so excited to have found an intellectual home, but I was -- like many other scholars in my generation -- not in an ethnic studies graduate program. You know, there are still very few of them. And so I did feel really kind of out of sync and out of place, but I knew that what I wanted to do was ethnic studies work. So, I ended up being hired in a position at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1999, that was created to establish an Asian American Studies program. And that position was a tenure track junior faculty position. And yet, they wanted me to basically create an Asian American Studies Certificate. And it was because of student activism that was happening at UMass Amherst. So, we can talk more about that as we go along.

Christina Huang 03:05
Yeah, wow. That's a lot of engagement. It's so exciting to hear about how different people get involved and engaged. When you talk about this South Asian experience, I'm so curious about your own experiences as a South Asian woman. What does that look like when you are in these spaces? And what times do you feel visible and times do you feel invisible?

Sunaina Maira 03:30
Thank you so much for asking that, Christina. That is such a thoughtful question. I mean, I really feel like that question has not been asked of me in a long time and I really appreciate it. You know, I have to say, to be very honest with you, that I think in many cases I do feel that the work is not legible in an easy way. And what I mean by that is, I think by now South Asian American Studies has been validated as a field. I mean, you know, the President of the Asian American Studies Association currently is another scholar of my generation. We were both graduate students together and Dr. Pawan Dhingra, my colleague, the President, and I would go to the conferences together, and we would be one of like, three or four Desi scholars or junior scholars, and now he's the President.

And so, I think it's more that at UC Davis in particular, ironically, Christina, in Northern California where I've been working for the last 20 years. There's this very strange kind of illegibility and non-recognition of South Asian Americans within Asian American spaces. And what I have learned from my own students is that South Asians themselves sometimes don't identify as Asian American. And Asian Americans who are from East Asian or Southeast Asian backgrounds even don't necessarily recognize or hail South Asians as being Asian. Asian in Northern California is conflated with East and Southeast Asian. Whereas in New England, in the Northeast when I was working and organizing, because the communities were so small, we were really tight, we hung together, because there were so few of us in these predominantly white spaces.

So there’s this kind of paradox where… I was involved with the East of California Caucus, so there was a caucus that you've probably heard about by now in the AAAS, in the association, that was specifically to support the growth of these new Asian American Studies programs and initiatives. You know, there were hunger strikes happening at different campuses on the East Coast and the students at UMass Amherst, the way they helped fight for my line was they occupied the administrative building. They actually took over the administrative building in the center of campus at UMass Amherst. And they demanded that a line be created, that a certificate be created, that resources be created for the establishment of Asian American Studies. So in the late 90s, when I went to UMass Amherst, it was a very small population, but they were incredibly committed. And so, you know, I have to say in that context, I didn't feel there were any issues related to my being South Asian, because in fact, it was such a marginalized movement, you know?

Christina Huang 06:14
Yeah, that is so interesting. Because usually here, what most comes up when I talk to people about this, they usually talk about, “Oh, there's nothing on the East coast or the South. But there's a lot in California. But now what you’re saying is because of what is perceived to be Asian, that South Asian isn't encompassed in what people think about what it means to be Asian American. I think that's really interesting. I want to also ask if you've ever felt a gendered aspect of it. I feel like women have a lot of responsibilities or certain duties that are forced upon us. And what does that feel like to be in this field, doing all this community building and activism, as a woman?

Sunaina Maira 06:59
Yes, so I think that's also an incredibly important question. And I'm so glad you put that on the table. Because, you know, I don't think it's an accident sometimes that this sort of program building and service work is being done by Asian American women, faculty in particular. And my mentor, Gary Okihiro, who, you know, helped establish the program in comparative Ethnic Studies at Columbia, I remember him kind of warning me out of a lot of concern and kind of empathy about the attrition of Asian American women faculty, in particular, in academia as having one of the lowest rates of getting tenure. And he, I remember, was very concerned that I not be burdened with service work that is sometimes assigned to women because we're seen as being kind of caregivers and caring people.

But this continues to the- You know, one thing I want to add to the conversation, Christina, since you mentioned in my bio, right, that I'm affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program, is that one of the interventions I have tried to make since that kind of founding moment, which I think is perhaps important for your oral histories too, is to expand the boundaries of the field to not only include South Asians, but to include West Asians and also Southwest Asians. And so this was actually not something that was at all on the radar of scholars at that time, or even activists. The idea that Arab Americans, Iranian Americans, Turkish Americans, Armenian Americans are also Asians, right. I mean, that kind of understanding of the geography of Asia, is something that I have really been sort of engaged with, and really tried to fight for a more expansive and more capacious definition of Asian American Studies and who is Asian American, to also include people who are otherwise called Middle Eastern, which is a colonialist term, right?

Middle East is only Middle East when you are in London or New York, not when you're in Tokyo or Shanghai. And so I have really been working for the last 15 years or so in AAAS to create that. And the reason it goes back to this issue of gender and the burden of service is that West Asians, SWANA as they're called now: Southwest, Asian and North Africa. I don't know if you've heard that term out there. Students from these communities really struggle with censorship and backlash, and racism, anti-Muslim racism, political profiling, oppression of their movements and struggles. And so, I have really supported a lot of those students over the years, but because they, again, are not always recognized as Asian, I often get this, like, “What does this have to do with Asian American Studies? Why are you doing this service work? Why are these students flocking to your door?” And I think that is something that, you know, the field really has to reckon with.

Christina Huang 09:43
Yeah, thank you. I think that's the conversation in a lot of groups when they're organizing for Asian American Studies. How do you encompass these groups? Because you don't want to force the term Asian American on top of them, they want that autonomy, but then in leaving them out, you kind of leave them out of the movement. And it makes me think about the diaspora as a whole. Because in one of your books Desi in the House, you described a term called "Self-Orientalism” and how second-generation Asian Americans are mirroring back to mainstream American culture. In the book, you were talking about Indian culture -- but in the case of like Asian American culture as a whole, how sometimes our academia, we’re mirroring what a PWI expects or academia expects, and we lose the original intent of an Asian American Studies program. And I was wondering, how do we make sure that we fulfill the needs of our community, and represent the Asian American community and the diversity of the Asian American community, but not only focus on satisfying the needs of higher education?

Sunaina Maira 10:54
Yeah, I'm interested to go back and hear more about what you mean by that sense that, you know, we're fulfilling the demands of academia and not the community, but I think I do have a similar sentiment. I'm curious as to how you've experienced that or why you feel that Christina, which is what I think has happened in the last 25 years since I was first hired as this junior scholar at UMass Amherst with a shoestring budget and no faculty lines is that Asian American Studies has become institutionalized. And so there's a cost, interestingly, to that institutionalization. So, there's a price to be paid for that success. And what has happened with the institutionalization of Asian American Studies is it's become more professionalized, it's become more competitive, and it's also become more individualistic. And academia as a whole -- the job market is insane, right? I mean, it's so tough that I think the people who end up making it into faculty positions and get hired are the ones who, by definition, have been very successful at getting their own publications out and marketing themselves as building their own kind of individual agenda, but not necessarily working in movements, and not necessarily organizing on behalf of other people.

And so, I think we've come to a moment where I think, you know, Rod Ferguson has a great book about this, which is that the idea of difference or DEI has also now become institutionalized by the university. It's another metric, it's another checkbox for faculty. And so I think it's frustrating, I will be really honest with you. I think that for the last many years, I have felt a deep frustration that I don't think necessarily the founding commitments -- the Third World Liberation Front, those Third World commitments which came out of the anti-war movement, and the anti-imperialist movement and militant organizing -- are reflected in academic spaces, even in ethnic studies.

And I see this in particular, Christina, because one thing I also want to introduce, and I don't know if you are aware of this in my later work, is that as I was mentioning, I've been really interested in West Asian American Studies and movements. And the central question for West Asian American communities, or SWANA communities, is the question of Palestine. And the Palestine question has been viciously repressed in academia. And for a long time, it was something people didn't want to touch. Now, in the last seven to eight years, I would say it's changed and it's flipped. And so progressive Asian Americans, I feel, are now in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle. But there is a lot of anxiety because people don't want to be punished or disciplined by the administration. They don't want to experience any kind of political risk to their careers, but they still want to be seen as being pro-Palestine. And so we're in this kind of interesting moment, and I talk about it in my book Boycott! (The Academy and Justice for Palestine), which I have somewhere here on my shelf, which is that I think that these kinds of risky causes are ones that return us to the founding commitments of the field, because the Third World Liberation Front, in fact, was in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom movement.

Christina Huang 13:59
Yeah, that's really powerful. That's such a good point that I never thought about, that you brought up. So thank you for of going into that. I'm curious about your experience in this space that has been institutionalized. What did that look like at UMass Amherst? And then what did that look like at UC Davis?

Sunaina Maira 14:18
Yes. So I know that's probably like the heart of the issues you've been wanting to get into. And I was thinking about it, that I think at UMass Amherst, even though it was incredibly exhausting and it was challenging to try to establish an Asian American Studies program with so few resources, I felt that the work that I was doing was really validated and respected and I was part of a small but very cohesive group of graduate students and undergraduates who were all fighting for Asian American Studies. And I think because we were engaged in this struggle, we really hung tight. And so I did a lot of programming. I helped create a minor. I helped establish this kind of transnational Asian and Asian American Studies program. So that was our framework. We were trying to connect the Asian Studies faculty and courses and Asian American Studies. So that was actually quite visionary now that I look back at it, what we were doing with the help of other colleagues who had been there at UMass Amherst before me and Asian Studies and community activists. But it was very tiring and I realized the faculty actually didn't support Asian American Studies. The students at UMass were very progressive, and this is very common Christina. People talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. But it was not something that the administration ultimately was really supportive about. I mean, it was a concession to the students, because the students were so militant. And so, I had very little support, and I felt very isolated. And I got burnt out. I think this is always the script that happens.

And so, when I came to UC Davis, I think I felt very relieved, initially, because there was a program. There were about six faculty and had been around since the early 70s. The program at UC Davis, by the way, is the oldest Asian American Studies program after UC Berkeley and San Francisco State. So it was actually created the following year. It was not established as a follow up program, but there were Asian American Studies courses being taught at UC Davis, right after courses started being taught at San Francisco State, and at UC Berkeley. So, if you go to our department website, the UC Davis ASA website, you'll see the history there, and it's really a kind of path-breaking program. And it came out of community activists, like Isao Fujimoto, who was one of our founders, and he was very much like committed to interracial solidarity, very supportive, by the way, of Arab American activism too. He passed away a few years ago. And so I felt very excited about it.

But over the years, I want to be honest with you, I've come to realize, again, there's this cost to institutionalization. You know, programs become engaged in the competition for resources. They're competing with one another for funding. They're competing for faculty lines. It's about how many students you can put into your classes because only if you have more students will you get more funding. When will we get more FTEs (Full Time Equivalents) or faculty hires? And so how many majors do we have? So, it becomes about numbers, and I think this kind of corporatization of scholarship is incredibly frustrating, you know, for me. And I think many people also are frustrated with it, but everybody sort of plays the game, because that's how we get the money, you know?

Christina Huang 17:36
Yeah, I think it is really frustrating. I'm so sorry. As a faculty, when you're on your own at Amherst, it must be a lot because we don't really talk about faculty burnout or the things that they have to take on. What would you suggest? How do we move past this corporatization and industrialization of Asian American Studies into the original intentions of what the studies program is supposed to look like?

Sunaina Maira 18:04
You know, Christina, I've been thinking about this question for a long time. And I will be honest, I really feel like I've been beating my head against the wall. I think by now, the university is such a neoliberal university, right? I mean, it's become really privatized, even at a public university, such as UC Davis, where I teach. It's really just about, you know, we're talking about fundraising, can we get donors? Can we talk to rich Asians? Like really. Where are the rich Asians so we can get funding for our program because the university doesn't support us? And I’m like, So this is what we're spending our time doing. And of course, there's a practical reality. People want to have faculty, they want faculty to teach courses. If they have courses, then Asian American Studies can teach those courses. But I think we get kind of reduced to this corporate capitalist game, you know. And I think that, at the same time what I have felt at UC Davis is there's not a legibility of South Asian American Studies, ironically, and of West Asian American Studies. And so, anyone who is challenging the administration on censorship of Palestine is someone that's not popular as well [laughs]. And so, it's not something obviously- I didn't go into ethnic studies to win a popularity contest with the administration. You know, that was not my aim. But I think that, you know, people get anxious about radical scholar activists.

And so, I feel for me, what has sustained me personally, and which I hope will regenerate the vision of Asian American Studies, is always to have one foot in movement work and in organizing. So I've been an organizer of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign in the United States of the boycott of Israel, for about 12 years or so. And so I was one of the founding organizers of the US campaign for the academic boycott of Israel. The Association of Asian American Studies became the first academic Association In North America to endorse the boycott of Israel in 2013. I'm very proud of that. So, I think there are scholars -- clearly AAAS did that -- because there are still academics in AAAS who were willing to take that position and face the backlash, and I'm very proud of them. And so, I feel some solidarity there. But I think that increasingly, it's like being a fugitive scholar. You know, I feel this notion that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney expressed in their book The Undercommons is something I really resonate with. I feel like me, my friends, my comrades, the people that I identify with. We're all like, we're not the deans, we're not the provost, we're never going to be that and I'm very happy about that. We're the fugitive scholars who are trying to create these fugitive spaces for work in the cracks, you know, of this institution. [laughs]

Christina Huang 20:55
I think it's so interesting. You call it a fugitive scholar. Is there any way to bring that into the classroom? Because I feel like there's a way for something so important in these spaces, the relationship built between faculty or staff, and students. Yeah. And how do we continue to build up those relationships and build up something in the community with those relationships between faculty and staff?

Sunaina Maira 21:23
Yeah, I think that's very important. And I should say, by the way, I'm glad you brought that up. That is what sustains me. And I do you think that's one of the ways to challenge this corporatization and as you said, I like that term, the industrialization of ethnic studies. So I find the classroom to definitely be an invigorating space, and the students, I feel, at Davis, they really get it. West Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, or whatever. They all are students. They're from immigrant and refugee families, many of them are first generation college students They come from, like working class, lower middle-class families, mostly. And you know, they're very committed, and they're very transformed. So I feel like these are the students. They are the ones who have my back. They are the ones who are willing to take the risk. And, you know, Christina, I mean faculty might be struggling, but we have jobs, especially tenure track faculty. We have a certain level of security. Students are the most vulnerable class in the university. Even staff have jobs and salaries, right? Students are so vulnerable to Faculty Center, to administrative disciplining, to getting kicked out to the university, to getting penalized with grades. And so I really am indebted to all the student activists at Davis, and our students are really inspiring. I mean, I think that's what's kept me at Davis for 20 years.

Christina Huang 22:41
Yeah. When you talk about what sustains you, I wonder, how do you also navigate this space? You take up a lot, your schedule is packed to the brim always. How do you keep the ball rolling, while also looking after your mental health, preventing burnout, and setting boundaries? This is a big ask to do and it's constant work.

Sunaina Maira 23:06
Yeah, that's very thoughtful. That's a very sensitive question. Well, I will be honest with you, this is why even with the interview today, I was like, I can only do it for 45 minutes. Because I have to go to the body shop. It is the summer. I’m trying to meet these deadlines. And then I feel bad about it, because this is the work that I want to support them. I would love to talk for two hours. You know, this conversation is actually so nourishing for me. But I do think that it's important for Asian American faculty and faculty in ethnic studies to be able to say no, particularly to administrative asks, because I think that we get recruited all the time to provide this diverse face to university work. You know, with this whole institutionalization of DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – in the university. I don't know if some of your other interviews have talked about it, but now we have DEI committees and then we are asked to serve on the DEI committee and we're like, "Hello, we are DEI?! We've been doing this for 50 years with little rewards. And now you ask us to serve on a committee to show that DEI service? [laughs]” So I think the whole performativity of that and also the burden of service does wear people down.

And I think the cost of that -- it's not just about the boundaries, Christina, and saying no – is that I think it makes people lose patience with one another because everyone is fatigued. Everybody is stressed. Everybody is overworked. So, I think what happens is there's a scarcity of compassion. Sometimes people are feeling competitive, they're feeling unproductive, and then they turn on one another. It's like crabs in a barrel. And really our problem is not other faculty in ethnic studies. Our problem is the university, the system, the administration. But what I’ve felt over the years – in the last few years, especially I've been thinking a lot about my own future in academia, and whether this is something I still feel committed to, to be frank with you – is that, you know, the scarcity of resources has led to a scarcity of compassion and a scarcity of really progressive politics, because we end up still hustling for more funding, backing more students into our classroom, and sort of competing with one another and with other ethnic studies programs too.

Christina Huang 25:36
Yeah, I completely agree from a student's perspective, One thing I’m very fearful for a lot of organizations is that a lot of times the work is done so it's something to add to a LinkedIn page or to a resume or CV.

Sunaina Maira 25:49
Yeah.

Christina Huang 25:50
And moving away from the idea that we need to be the voices for our community.

Sunaina Maira 25:54
Yeah.

Christina Huang 25:55
That's something I think a lot about too so I think that was a really good point. I'm very glad that you brought that up. Do you have any advice for faculty or staff on how to, you know, compromise or negotiate or work with these largely nameless and faceless institutions?

Sunaina Maira 26:15
By the way, I don’t know about staff. I think staff have a very different position, Christina, I feel I can't speak for them. Staff are usually people who are not the heads or directors. They would be working for faculty or to support administrators. And they definitely need to be recognized. But yes, I can't speak for staff.

But I think in terms of working with the administration, I always feel like our job as faculty is to try to uphold the principles of ethnic studies, like I'm not here to support the brand of UC Davis. And so some years ago, for example, my colleague, Natalia Deeb-Sossa in Chicana Studies, and I did a project called the UC Davis Race Project and we uncovered the Third World Forum archive at UC Davis. UC Davis had a Third World movement also at the same time as SF State and UC Berkeley in the early 70s. There was this radical movement based on cross racial solidarity, internationalism and so we did an exhibit of the newspapers of the Third World Forum movement. We documented all the activism they were doing in relation to ethnic studies, the Vietnam War and later on, of course, the other wars: in Iraq, the struggle in Palestine, against mass incarceration, policing, the budget crisis, and ethnic studies and so on. And this was not popular with the administration. I mean, and then we got complaints from, you know, Zionist faculty because it was focused on Palestine, but I feel like our job is to challenge the status quo. My fault. I didn't enter the university to become a good citizen of a neoliberal academy. [laughs] So I think that is not necessarily a popular position, perhaps. And you know, for some faculty, I think it's a struggle. How do they balance moral convictions with this idea that we have to be loyal to the corporation, you know, to the university. But that's not my priority. My priority is for the students and the movement and the communities that I work for.

Christina Huang 28:13
That's so powerful, that you're not an obedient citizen of the university, you are here just to help the students and the community. I really like that quote.

Sunaina Maira 28:23
Can I just?- Thinking along that line if you like that idea. I don't know, if you know about this book that I co-edited with Piya Chatterjee called The Imperial University , you might want to check that out. Because in the introduction, we really develop this idea of that the university is kind of like the nation, and academics are kind of like the citizens. And you know, sometimes we're deported, we're not given proper papers, we can be excluded for being bad citizens, you know, much like immigrants can also be kind of deported. So The Imperial University might be a good resource.

Christina Huang 28:59
I love that. I want to write that down. I got another recommendation from someone I spoke with. And I have another book that I'm reading about these Asian American movements. So thank you, I love book recommendations. There’s something that I also think about a lot and I wanted to ask you about. So for us at UNC, students at UNC pushing for an Asian American Studies movement, a lot of our work has been inspired and supported by Black, Latino, and Indigenous Studies programs and scholars. So from your experience, what does solidarity and that community building look like for you?

Sunaina Maira 29:35
Yeah, you know, that's again, a topic [laughter] that I could talk about for three hours. What I will say just in brief, is that solidarity was the paradigm and context in which Asian American Studies was founded. It was founded on Third Worldism. In fact, the students as you know, Christina, they weren't fighting for ethnic studies. They were fighting for Third World Studies. And Gary Okihiro has a whole book about this, why there was this compromise that was made with the institution. So the point is that it was based on this kind of internationalist framework of joint struggle. What has happened in recent years – I don't know about your campus and your community – but I'm noticing in Davis, and among some of my students, that solidarity is become very fraught, and almost controversial. And I noticed during Black Lives Matter, for example, that some of my Asian American students were really anxious about even being in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. We had, you know, groups like Asians for Black Lives, and I have friends who were part of those groups here in the Bay Area, but my undergraduate students told me that because of identity politics, the fear of speaking on behalf of other people, cancel culture, it's a big thing.

You know, you are the social media generation. When I was organizing initially, you know, we were not doing our organizing on social media, you know. And so I think there is a lot of anxiety around solidarity. And, you know, of course, solidarity just can't be transactional. It's not just quid pro quo, you know, it has to be transformative. There's deep solidarity, there's more tokenistic solidarity. But the whole idea of solidarity now is so fraught, even allyship. I use the word ally, you know, in my writing about my work on the war in Yemen, and you know, with Arab and Muslim American communities, and someone almost called me out and was like, “allyship, that's a very fraught term, can you really use that term?” And I'm like, the point is, we stand with other people in their struggles, you know, against oppression. And so if we do not do that, and we just stay at home because we're afraid of cancel culture, we are allowing ourselves to be complicit, I think. But I think the identity politics has become really intense. This is what I noticed. And the Asian students feel like there was some debate about like, African American students didn't really stand with the AAPI community when there was anti-AAPI hate, and then in Black Lives Matter we couldn't really speak up for them, because we're not Black. And I don't know, it sounds very messy, you know?

Christina Huang 32:06
Yeah. So what's the best way you think people can get involved with all this? It's so nuanced. There's so many components to it. So from your experiences how should students be getting involved? And how should they be speaking out?

Sunaina Maira 32:21
I think, you know, Christina, it's very simple. I feel everyone has to be willing to make a mistake. It's not going to be easy, right? I mean, no one goes into this kind of work, to get medals and plaques. I mean, I have gotten so few awards from my books [laughter] and I’m like I don't care. I didn't do it to get an award from some association. I know my work, and I know the principles on which it's based. And so I think that when it comes to political activism or solidarity or standing up for other people, to be willing to say, it can be tough, there might be people who don't like it, but you have to be true to your convictions, and also be willing to learn. That's the point of transformative solidarity is that you learn. I've been doing a lot of work in the last couple of years in solidarity with my Iranian leftist friends in the context of the uprising, the women's uprising in Iran, and sanctions against Iranians here, and policing and surveillance and so on, and I am learning so much. It's a very humbling experience. These are people who have been fighting around these issues for like 50 years. And so, to me, that is what one has to open oneself up to, right, that I may not always have the answers, that I might make mistakes, and then you have to get up and you have to do it again the next day, you know?

Christina Huang 33:38
Yeah, thank you. That's really good advice. So just to be mindful of our time, there's two minutes left. And I want to let you have the last few minutes just to say anything else that you may want to say or forgot.

Sunaina Maira 33:56
I think we've covered a lot of ground and got to the heart of the issues. I just want to say that I hope that – because you know, I know you're trying to create this archive of oral histories – I think that the moment that people are working in right now, even because of all the resources, ironically, as we've said, is a challenging one. I hope these stories can be helpful in terms of thinking about what is appropriate for this moment, because you know what happened? I feel like we can't rest on like, the golden days, right? I mean, I think sometimes I worry that my students might start romanticizing the Third World Liberation Front. Like that was then. This is now. We're in a different moment, right? We can't go back to that moment. It laid the foundation for what we're doing. It's a beacon of political clarity and vision and inspiration. But we are in a different moment of US Empire, we’re in a different moment of global capitalism, we’re in a different moment of the neoliberalization of the university. We have to think about what is it that we can really do now. And you know, frankly Christina, it may not be in the university at all. I mean, there's also this exodus of people from academia in the last years I'm noticing. My colleague Robyn Rodriguez – she’s left – she has become an independent scholar and consultant. Like people are also leaving – they're saying We reject this system. And that might be something you might see more of.

Christina Huang 35:21
What a powerful way to close. Thank you so much for speaking with me. I think I've learned so much from you in just speaking for 37 minutes, I've learned so much from you and I'm excited to read The Imperial University and hopefully reach back out to you again sometime soon to have another conversation possibly. But yeah, I want to thank you for your time and all your knowledge that you've given us.