Open letter by AALF partners & participants ( link):
OPEN LETTER TO THE SMITHSONIAN – July 17, 2023
To Secretary Lonnie Bunch, Undersecretary Kevin Gover, and Acting Director of the Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) Yao-Fen You:
As partners and co-organizers of the 2023 Asian American Literature Festival (AALF), we are writing to condemn the cancellation of this year’s festival and call on the Smithsonian to be accountable for the harms this cancellation has caused.
On July 5, only one month out from the festival scheduled for August 4-6, some of us received a brief message from Acting Director You, stating that AALF had been canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances.” When we reached out in shock, confusion, and distress to APAC staff on the festival planning team, we were told that staff were not allowed to speak to us about the cancellation.
The next day, on July 6, we sent a letter to you, the Smithsonian Secretary, Undersecretary, and Acting Director of APAC, asking that the cancellation be overturned. We cited the lack of basis for this decision, the immense costs incurred, and the significance of the festival to our community during this unprecedented time. We received no response.
On July 13, we began receiving individual offers of partial honoraria from the Acting Director, still with no explanation for the cancellation.
On July 14, The Washington Post reported on the cancellation, including an official statement from the Smithsonian alleging that the festival was canceled due to failures in preparation by the planning team. We must rebut this immediately: from the partners’ perspective, everything was on track; we had no concerns with putting on our programs in a month’s time. In fact, many of us have participated in AALF in years past and have returned due to our confidence in working with this planning team. The article itself confirms that the allegations are false.
In the days following the publication of The Washington Post article, there has been much public outrage in support of the festival and its organizers. However, the cancellation has also been taken up and co-opted by anti-affirmative action agendas—we must rebut this immediately as well. We denounce such efforts as deeply racist and anti-Black, and reaffirm the festival’s foundation in solidarity with all communities of color.
As of today, July 17, we still have not directly received any explanation for the cancellation from the Acting Director or Smithsonian leadership.
We want to be clear: for the organizations planning the festival and the 130+ participating artists this year, the cancellation causes real damage, both immediate and long term. The immediate financial costs are immense, as outlined in this growing document. The festival in previous years has created an unprecedented opportunity for Asian American and Asian diasporic writers to build community and reach new audiences; the cancellation is detrimental not only to the careers of these artists and the futures of these organizations, but also to the wider literary community and the Asian American community as a whole. Since the previous festival in 2019, the Asian American community has experienced increased anti-Asian violence, with trans and nonbinary Asian Americans in particular under siege. The cancellation of the festival compounds the violence our community has experienced. The Smithsonian is not only dismissing our work; it is eliminating the opportunity for our community to come together to grieve and heal. The material losses resulting from this cancellation are significant, but the losses to our spirit are just as meaningful.
The way the cancellation has been executed—unilaterally, hastily, unprofessionally, callously—is also completely unacceptable. In this decision and its execution, there has been a flagrant lack of accountability for the harm caused.
We also want to be clear that the Asian American Literature Festival does not belong to the Smithsonian. Started as a collaboration between Smithsonian APAC, the Library of Congress, and Kundiman in 2017, AALF has grown into a collective of arts organizations, publishers, and individual artists devoted to stewarding Asian American literature as art form and communal ecosystem, grounded in an ethos of co-governance and care. It is the only festival of its kind, and it belongs to the entire collective, as well as the communities to which we are accountable.
The Smithsonian’s unilateral decision to cancel the festival, withdrawing its funding and logistical support, is antithetical to the festival’s core values and abandons its ethical foundation. The decision is a costly reminder of the wide-reaching damage one institution and one person can do when allowed to make unilateral decisions, and that no one person or institution should have the power to harm so many people.
That includes harm to APAC staff. We are deeply concerned that the Smithsonian’s statement unfairly blames the festival planning team and deflects attention away from the true problems here: the Smithsonian’s unilateral decision-making and the harm it has caused. Blaming the festival planning team also compounds the ongoing hostile and abusive labor conditions that APAC staff face, first brought to many partners’ attention by a Change the Museum post in January and then privately confirmed by staff. While we don’t know if the most recent Change the Museum post about the Smithsonian on July 14 refers to APAC, the conditions are strikingly similar. We are outraged that these labor conditions have not been meaningfully addressed by Smithsonian leadership.
Additionally, we are deeply troubled to discover that a driving factor behind the festival’s cancellation might have been the Smithsonian’s desire to censor trans and nonbinary programming. A program intended to celebrate trans and nonbinary authors, as they face unprecedented levels of violence, book bans, and anti-trans legislation, was set to take place at the festival. The Washington Post article reported that the Acting Director instructed the planning team to submit a report under Smithsonian Directive 603 to identify potentially sensitive or controversial content, which she received on July 5. The timing of the cancellation, hours after the submission of that report, which noted the trans and nonbinary program, raises disturbing questions. We condemn in the strongest terms any attempt to censor any part of our community, especially our deeply vulnerable trans and nonbinary members. There is no Asian American community without its trans and nonbinary members; there is no Asian American literature without trans and nonbinary writers.
The Smithsonian and the Acting Director have broken our trust. We have worked with the Smithsonian in this partnership to create AALF because of long-running, mutually respectful and caring relationships with APAC staff. The Smithsonian has taken advantage of those relationships and the trust built from them. We no longer have faith that the Institution will be ethical in its partnerships. This cancellation communicates to us that the Smithsonian does not feel accountable to partners and community, does not work collaboratively, and does not care about how it harms people, particularly communities of color. The cancellation, its unprofessional execution, Smithsonian’s bad-faith public statement, and APAC’s egregious labor conditions make it clear that we cannot work with APAC under its current leadership, nor can we work with the larger Smithsonian with current APAC leadership in place.
We make the following demands to begin any process of repair:
- Retraction of the public statement blaming festival planning staff, and a real explanation for the festival’s cancellation.
- Full honoraria to all organizations and artists as promised, and housing at the Eaton DC hotel as promised for those who must keep their plans to travel to DC for the days the festival was scheduled.
- Immediate resignation by Acting Director Yao-Fen You and immediate implementation of a staff-driven search for a new permanent director who can begin to repair trust with community and partners.
Update 7/25/23: We are aware that a search was opened on July 21; we demand staff inclusion on the committee as well as new interim leadership between now and the start of a permanent director.
- Under new APAC leadership, AALF rescheduled for a future date in 2024, with full funding and logistical support promised for this year’s canceled festival.
Update 7/25/23: The Smithsonian is now claiming the cancellation was in fact a “postponement”—if this is true, we demand a clear timeline and immediate MOUs put in place with festival partners in good faith.
- Under new APAC leadership, adoption of more transparent and collaborative decision-making processes for AALF as a community-oriented program. Any major decisions, including especially cancellation, must involve good-faith consultation with central partners.
- Assurances that the Smithsonian supports trans and nonbinary writers in the form of providing funding and logistical support to hold the Trans and Nonbinary Reading Room as a stand-alone event at a later date in 2023.
To learn ways you can support our demands right now: link.
LITFEST ACTION TOOLKIT – updated July 26, 2023
Since the release of our open letter to the Smithsonian on July 17, the Smithsonian has continued to peddle lies and deflections, citing new logistical “failures” of the planning team and claiming “postponement” of the festival. Their sorry/not-sorry statement from July 20 addresses none of the concerns and demands outlined in the letter.
On July 21, the Smithsonian quietly posted the job listing for the permanent director of APAC. We are concerned about the lack of transparency around the posting’s release and that this clandestine move may even be a formality to install Acting Director Yao-Fen You permanently.
We have updated our calls to action in response to their ongoing refusal to engage us in good faith. It is insultingly clear that they expect our outrage to simply fizzle with time.
Returning & new supporters: please consider taking the following actions to demand transparency and accountability from Smithsonian leadership.
- Email Smithsonian leadership responding to their new deflections and reiterating our letter’s demands. They have not addressed a single one of them.
Here’s a template you can use. Emails may be directed to:
– Secretary Lonnie Bunch, SmithsonianSecretary@si.edu
– Undersecretary Kevin Gover, goverk@si.edu
– Acting Director of APAC, Yao-Fen You, youy@si.edu - Comment publicly on the Smithsonian’s statements on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to condemn their non-apology.
- Share the job listing for the permanent director of APAC far & wide and demand transparency around the search process. Tag the Smithsonian so they know we’re watching.
Sharing via Instagram: please tag @smithsonian, @smithsonianapa, @aalfcollective
Sharing via Twitter: please tag @smithsonian, @smithsoniansec, @smithsonianapa
We also encourage you to reshare @aalfcollective’s IG post on the job listing. - Co-sign the open letter if you haven’t already.
Use this form to add your name to the letter. We encourage you to include any institutional/organizational affiliations, if desired.
- Follow @aalfcollective on Instagram for updates on the situation.
Note to our community: In the days following the publication of The Washington Post article on 7/14/23, we noticed that the festival’s cancellation was also taken up and co-opted by anti-affirmative action agendas. We unequivocally denounce these efforts as deeply racist and anti-Black, and we reaffirm the festival’s foundation in solidarity with all communities of color. This call to action does not in any way condone those efforts, and if you see this toolkit being used or shared by conservative parties, please notify us at aalfcollective@gmail.com.
For those in the DC area, attend GHOSTED WORLD: An Uncancelled Asian American Literature Festival this weekend, August 4-6! More info here.
And follow @aalfcollective on Instagram for news and updates!
