APARRI is thrilled to have collaborated with The Immanent Frame on a special forum titled “Asian American religions: Everywhere, all at once”! Consisting of 12 essays written by APARRI members, this series highlights the immensely vast and complex landscape of Asian American religions. As Dr. Carolyn Chen and Dr. Tammy C. Ho write in the introduction to the series, “[W]e suggest that Asian American religious life and communities are in fact ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’: located throughout the nation, defying laws of coherence with proliferating possibilities, yet too often invisible or disregarded at the margins of scholarly work on race and religion in the United States.” The essays in this collaboration push back from those margins to assert the epistemological necessity of critical analyses of Asian American religions.
From Dr. Rupa Pillai’s reflection on Guyanese Indo-Caribbean Hindus, to Dr. Melissa Borja’s exploration of Hmong American religious identification, to Dr. Jane Hong’s examination of Asian American evangelicalism, our contributors point toward the radical diversity and dynamism of Asian American religious life. These essays powerfully suggest that the study of Asian American religions can challenge and transform dominant scholarly paradigms—including a Black-white racial paradigm, a Christian-non-Christian binary, and Western definitions of religion. In the end, they remind us without a doubt of the radical potential of Asian American religious life.