Creative Arts School in a Liberal Arts College: The Drama Program at San Francisco State College

Angel Island poetry refers to Chinese poems carved on the barrack walls of the US Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, which was in operation from 1910 to 1940. An estimated 50,000 Chinese were processed and detained during that period there and left their words, recording a dark chapter of racial exclusion in history. These poems were written in the classical style of Chinese poetry and were discovered by California State Parks ranger Alexander Weiss in 1970, who contacted his teacher George Araki from San Francisco State College. Araki brought the site to the attention of the community and invited San Francisco photographer Mak Takahashi to photograph these poems. Today, around two hundred poems from the Angel Island barracks have been deciphered and published in various places, though many still remain indecipherable. The Angel Island poetry sources include the Jann and Yee collections, Mak Takahashi’s photographs, Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) rubbings, poems published in various Chinese newspapers, and the findings of poetry consultants commissioned in 2003 by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation for an evaluation. In this article, the Angel Island poetry more specifically refers to two editions of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, edited by Him Mark Lai (who passed away in 2009, between publication of the two editions), Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, since most scholarship has derived from these two books. The first edition of Island was self-published in 1980, which set up a model of editing and presenting Chinese-language material, consisting of a historical introduction, 135 poems in Chinese and English, excerpts from thirty-nine oral-history interviews, and twenty-two photographs. Island went into a second printing in 1983 and was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1991. The second edition of Island, published in 2014, combines all 135 poems into one section and expands the Chinese poems by adding those on the walls from the immigration stations at Ellis Island in New York and Victoria, British Columbia. Yung and Lim rewrote the historical introduction and replaced the excerpts of oral histories in the first edition with twenty full profiles and stories, with new translations, correction of errors in the first edition, and more photographs. Island possesses a unique place in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, US immigration history, and American literature classes.

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Counter College: Third World Students Reimagine Public Higher Education

History of Education Quarterly ◽

10.1111/hoeq.12134 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 55 (4) ◽

pp. 413-440 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Angela Ryan

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

San Francisco ◽

Ethnic Studies ◽

Educational Institutions ◽

Critical Study ◽

Education History ◽

Public Higher Education ◽

The Past ◽

State College ◽

San Francisco State College

In 1969, the discipline of Ethnic Studies emerged and was implemented at a handful of colleges throughout the country, most notably at San Francisco State College where the first School of Ethnic Studies was established that year. The idea of devoting space within traditional educational institutions to the study of a particular race or ethnicity has existed since at least the 1920s when Carter G. Woodson proposed Negro History Week and encouraged the study of African American history. While Black Studies is thus the oldest of such fields within American education history, its establishment within higher education is tied to the establishment of the larger discipline of Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies encompasses the critical study of racial and ethnic histories and cultures and it incorporates a wide variety of methodologies. The course of the discipline throughout the past forty years has resulted in a variety of approaches to this study, thus generalizing about the field as it exists today is complicated. One thing that may be said about Ethnic Studies in its current iteration, however, is that it bears little resemblance to the proposals that ushered it into existence.

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