She Who Has No Master(s)

About the Organization:

SWHNM centers creativity and care for Vietnamese and SE Asian diasporic womxn and nonbinary writers and artists through engaging in collaborative writing and art processes, and creating opportunities for cross-diasporic relationship-building. As a collective of Vietnamese and SE Asian writers, poets, performers, and scholars engaging with questions of diaspora, marginality, and refugee-immigrant subjectivity, we use our collaborative artistic practice to enact a poetics of engagement and a community of repair and possibility.

The Issue:

A 2018 New York Times study of racial bias in literary publishing surprised even its own researchers: a stunning 95% of the 7,000+ books sampled in the study were written by white authors.
Too often when books by Asian American women writers are published, they are memoirs of arrival and successful integration, appeals for inclusion made to a white-readership that ultimately affirm–rather than assess, challenge or augment–American values.

Such exclusion is a profound human tragedy, particularly in the wake of the Anti-Asian rhetoric and violence sparked by Covid-19. This issue presents a double challenge for Vietnamese women and nonbinary writers, who are marginalized not only in American publishing at large, but also within Asian American (and our own Vietnamese American) literary circles that pay greater attention and offer more opportunities to Asian American male writers.

Art and literature are not only a means by which to humanize what may otherwise be a mere demographic, but literature allows voices and community to form around shared experience, by reflecting culture, history, and shared humanity. The lack of access/attention paid to Vietnamese women and nonbinary writers and artists is to the detriment of our societal understanding at large, but also especially impacts the health of SE Asian women/nonbinary individuals in particular, who suffer from alienation, isolation, invisibility, and a sense that our stories are not as important as those of others.

While it is not in our power to change the entire landscape of the American Publishing Industry, SWHNM’s activities serve to create a safe, equitable, collaborative community for Vietnamese womxn and nonbinary writers. We emphasize collaboration and care as practices that may support and foster the creative voices of Vietnamese and SE Asian womxn and nonbinary writers and artists.

The Solution:

SWHNM forges a path through such roadblocks by creating a nurturing space for collaborative art practices, and mentorship opportunities designed for and led by women and nonbinary artists of the Vietnamese and SE Asian diaspora. The centering of this perspective is important because in most educational settings the focus on subject matter and perspectives of women/nonbinary SE Asian diasporic women is marginalized, if not totally unaddressed. In creating educational spaces that center these viewpoints, we create a nourishing space in which aspiring writers can see themselves, explore, embrace their particularities, and create more expansively.

Launched in 2022, our first mentorship program awarded 4 tuition-free mentorship opportunities to Vietnamese and mixed-race Vietnamese women and nonbinary writers. Mentees received intensive one-on-one consultations from mentors, tailored to individual needs, with the program culminating in a public reading event showcasing the mentees reading with their mentors, hosted by The Poetry Project. We wish to continue our mentorship program annually as a tuition-free (or low cost) offering, in order to ensure accessibility for those who might not be able to afford a degree program. It is also important to us that we offer equitable pay to our mentors for their teaching labor.

We are also a collaborative arts collective. By emphasizing collectively-produced works, we seek to literally include community in our artwork — in contrast to the individualist focus of mainstream art and publishing philosophies. In doing so, we also suggest a way to think about gender as it unfolds within collective experience — interrogating the “feminine” experience through a diasporic lens. Including image-text works, video poems, photography, poetry-art installation, performance, chapbooks, literary translations, and interdisciplinary, multilingual, polyvocal works, we have published poetry in Poetry, BOMB, AJAR Journal, and performed at venues such as Black Mountain Institute, SF Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, American Library in Paris, and others. We have exhibited poetry and visual art at George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery and in the Jade Wave Rising exhibit, curated by Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA).

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.