Tuesday Apr 22, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
A scholar and activist’s brilliant socio-political examination of Asian Americans who refuse to assimilate and instead build their own belonging on their own terms outside of mainstream American institutions.
In this hard-hitting and deeply personal book, a combination of manifesto and memoir, scholar, sociologist, and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie transforms the ways we understand race, class, citizenship, and the concept of assimilation and its impact on Asian American communities from the nineteenth century to present day.
UNASSIMILABLE opens with a focus on the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), the first Asian ethnoburb in Los Angeles County and in the nation, where she grew up. A suburban neighborhood with a conspicuous Asian immigrant population, SGV thrives not because of its assimilation into Whiteness, but because of its unapologetic catering to its immigrant community.
Mabute-Louie then examines “Predominantly White Institutions With A lot of Asians” and how these institutions shape the racial politics of Asian Americans and Asian internationals, including the fight against affirmative action and the fight for ethnic studies. She moves on to interrogate the role of the religion, showing how the immigrant church is a sanctuary even as it is an extension of colonialism and the American Empire. In the book’s conclusion, Bianca looks to the future, boldly proposing a reconsideration of the term Asian American for a new label that better clarifies who Asians in America are today.
UNASSIMILABLE offers a radical vision of Asian American political identity informed by a refusal of Whiteness and collective care for each other. It is a forthright declaration against assimilation and in service of cross-racial, anti-imperialist solidarity and revolutionary politics. Scholarly yet accessible, informative and informed, this book is a major addition to Ethnic Studies and American Studies.
About the Author.
Bianca Mabute-Louieis an award-winning sociologist, speaker, and activist completing her PhD at Rice University, where she researches the intersections of race, religion, and politics. She is published in top academic journals as well as in public outlets like Elle. Mabute-Louie has been featured on CNN, ABC, and in Time and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. She lives in Houston.
About the Moderator.
Malavika Kannan is a Gen Z Tamil American writer. She is the author of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES (forthcoming Henry Holt 2026), a campus novel set against the apocalyptic background of the pandemic. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida growing up amid a crisis of racialized gun violence, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women’s March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Her debut YA novel, ALL THE YELLOW SUNS (Little & Brown 2023), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida, drawing from these experiences. She is also a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. Her other creative mediums are cartoons — she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity — and cooking; she’s the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes. Malavika has been featured by Seventeen Magazine and Good Morning America, and she graduated from Stanford University in 2024.