FEATURING: Urayoán Noel, Carolina González and Manan Ahmed

The second event in The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Counterculturalists series highlights some of the rebels and bohemians of color who are often erased from histories of the left and the avant-garde.

Watch a clip from American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, the new documentary film about 98-year-old Detroit-based Asian American activist legend Grace Lee Boggs.

Poet Urayoán Noel—author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam—talks about avant-garde poet Pedro Pietri, the Nuyorican Movement co-founder who called himself a reverend, donned black robes and carried a large collapsible cross. (He died, he said, in the Vietnam war.) New School Professor Carolina González links together Puerto Rican labor activist Bernardo Vega and Afro-Trinidadian essayist C.L.R. James, one of the central intellectuals of post-colonial Marxism and the African diaspora.

Learn about the man Edward Said called “the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa”—Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad.

Columbia University Professor Manan Ahmed talks about this anti-nationalist scholar who was once tried for conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger.