No-No Boy Public Concert— Free!

No-No Boy is performed by Erin Aoyama and Julian Saporiti—it is a multi-media concert illuminating untold stories of Asian American displacement and exile through oral history, film, and folk songs.
Taking inspiration from interviews with World War II Japanese Incarceration camp survivors, his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War, and many other stories of Asian American experience, Saporiti has transformed his doctoral research at Brown University into folk songs in an effort to bring these stories to a broader audience. Alongside Aoyama, a fellow PhD student at Brown whose family was incarcerated at one of the 10 Japanese American concentration camps, No-No Boy aims to broaden the historical narratives and understandings of these particular periods of U.S. state racism, racial hysteria, and imperialism, and convey through their work the legacy and reformulations of these kinds of violences. They do this through multimedia concerts, community outreach, classroom visits and workshops that help their audience explore and engage the intersection of artistic practice and research.

***The “No-No Boys” were Japanese-American men and women who during WWII refused to swear allegiance to the US government or be drafted while their families and friends were locked away in concentration camps. John Okada’s 1957 novel No-No Boy remains a classic piece of Asian-American literature.***

Even more about the No-No Boy Project:
Promotional trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch v=1z4J9avL400&t=79s
Website: nonoboymusic.com
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