About
The Blasian Bay Area Archive is a collaborative, student-driven digital mapping and archival project that explores the San Francisco Bay Area as a unique site of Afro-Asian cultural mixing, memory, and movement. Centering queer and femme encounters, the archive challenges rigid identity categories and instead celebrates the vibe, rhythm, and everyday moments that shape Afro-Asian life in the Bay.
Created by students from San José State University, the archive features oral histories, visual culture, music, and performance analysis that document Afro-Asian cultural production, solidarity, and co-resistance from dance floors to drag shows, boba shops to nail salons, the archive documents how Afro-Asian exchanges have shaped and been shaped by the Bay Area’s distinctive cultural landscape.
The Blasian Bay Area Archive is a living project—an interactive space for uncovering and imagining what AfroAsian belonging has looked like, sounded like, and felt like across generations in the Bay. The archive invites community members to submit stories, photos, and memories of Afro-Asian connection and creativity.
People
Apryl Berney (she/her): Faculty Coordinator
Apryl is a friend, scholar, and YMCA cycle instructor interested in how friendship and community inform creativity and collaborative cultural productions, especially among teenage girls whose youth culture and friendships are often dismissed as fake, inauthentic, or trivial. Through the Blasian Bay Archive + Mapping Project, Apryl is eager to highlight a matrilineal lineage from rhythm and blues singer Sugar Pie De Santo to hip hop artist Saweetie of Blasian femme musical artists from the Bay Area where Black and Asian collaboration has generated unique aesthetic and political possibilities.
Diya Agrawal (she/her): Logistics Coordinator
Diya is a political science student at San José State University. With a strong interest in local government and voter mobilization, she has worked closely with various campus partners to promote democracy in San Jose and Bay Area. She hopes to further all of these efforts by pursuing a PhD in public policy with a focus on uplifting minority voices in policymaking. Diya is also a passionate disability advocate and researcher whose work focuses on examining the realization of disability justice and equity within public and political spheres,
Nick Szydlowski (he/him): Digital Scholarship Librarian
Nick Szydlowski is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, where he is the work lead for the library’s Digital Scholarship Services department and an active contributor to King Library’s Digital Humanities Center.
Katrina Nguyen (she/her): 2025-26 Media Coordinator
Katrina graduated in 2026 with a degree in Business Marketing. Her childhood passion for creative expression led her to pursue a career in visual communication in the hope of bringing a discerning eye to the arts and humanitarianism. Utilizing visual arts and intimate storytelling, Katrina aims to pay homage to the overlooked issues and heritages rooted within the Bay Area. From the shared spaces between Black and Asian cultures, the friendships, and the creative collaborations, she hopes to decentralize the negative normative to propose a living and thriving interconnectedness of Black and Asian communities.
Archive Advisors
Seulghee Lee (he/him)
Seulghee Lee is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. In 2025, Lee became the first faculty member tenured by the Department of African American Studies. He is currently a McCauslnd Faculty Fellow and a Pearce Faculty Fellow. Lee is the author of Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State University Press, 2025), and he is co-editor, with Rebecca Kumar, of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). In addition to his graduate and undergraduate mentoring, he teaches for TRIO Upward Bound. As a community-engaged scholar, Lee serves as Vice Chair of Board of Directors of South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, as well as on the steering committee of Make Us Visible South Carolina, the education committee of the Columbia SC Branch NAACP, and, from 2021 to 2025, the AAPI advisory committee of the South Carolina Comission for Minoirty Affairs.
Rebecca Kumar (she/her)
Rebecca Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College. She specializes in cinema and visual culture with an emphasis on global queer and feminist film. She also has scholarly interests incomparative ethnic studies, particualrly Afro-Asian relations, and the emerging field of Brown Studies. Dr. Kumar's published work appears in Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film, and Art; Early Modern Black Diasporia Studies; The Scholar & Feminist Online; liquid blackness; Refactory: A Journal of Entertainment Media; and the Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Race. She is co-editor of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture. She is currently working on a series of essays on constructions of browness since 9/11.