Elijah Kuan Wong

"I have found that there are no diamonds to be discovered in the amerikan excavation - only semi-precious trauma"
- Elijah Kuan Wong
"Can the subaltern speak?"
-Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Representing Queens, NYC since the first trimester, Elijah Kuan Wong graduated from the historic Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in Ethnic Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, and Asian American Studies. Elijah Kuan Wong focuses on the resurrection of Amerika's chorus of ancestral voices. Writing and performing since 14, his mission in music has been further crystallizing with every passing day - a mission to hunt down the sites where Amerika's true power trafficks, entering those energetic currency hot-spots, and disrupting the flow of power in this Top-Down Prison-state system to which we salute.
Elijah's music combines chant, prayer, song, oration, spit, meditation, and slam poetry together: a convergence of histories and emancipation theory.
Elijah Kuan Wong is the first recipient of the Robert L. Zimmermann Scholarship. The Robert L. Zimmerman Scholarship is awarded to an undergraduate entering the third or fourth year of study who demonstrates financial need as well as a high probability of academic success. Preference is given to students who are concentrating in philosophy, which was Zimmerman’s area of scholarship.
In 2005-2006, he conducted ethnographic research on the ghettoized ethnic community's memory that culminated into a paper entitled, "Who Remembers Vincent Chin?". Spending a semester walking through NYC's historic Chinatown, Elijah interviewed guerilla-style a large cross-section of residents, numerous shopkeepers, pedestrians, buddhist nuns, community activists, old-timers, new immigrants, and youth. Positioning Vincent Chin as a point of departure, Elijah began to unearth deep material connections between the post-9/11 police presence/occupation of Chinatown and the ramifications of the coerced de-politicization of Asian-America: a de-politicization that typically gets misread as an apolitical-ness. It is wherein trauma, terrorism, and neo-colonialism meet that most of all draws Elijah into The Modern Amerikan Civil War.
Elijah also debuted his experimental performance "The Re-Womb-Ing" in December 2007 at Sarah Lawrence College. Part group meditation, part seance, part American history re-visited, "The Re-Womb-Ing" sought to affect a radical re-claiming of lost metaphorical limbs in the ideal of psycho-spiritual healing.
On May 1st 2008, he debuted "Ballistics" an avant-garde spoken word performance based in part on Deleuze's philosophies of The Cut, at Sarah Lawrence College. "Ballistics" criss-crosses again and again the beginnings of The United States with the Sean Bell shooting, killing, and verdict.
On May 16th 2008, Elijah staged the follow-up to his project, "The Re-Womb-Ing" with his latest multimedia project, "Reconstruction: Angel Island". Taking note that perhaps the former was premature in even suggesting that one can be reborn innocently into this White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal (1st) world, Elijah Kuan Wong knew that if there was a re-birthing there would have to be a re-haunting. Using a laptop, a mobile projector, a stereo boom box, and prints of the original Chinese graffiti poetry carved into the walls, the West Coast's historic Angel Island (where thousands of early Chinese workers were detained for years) opened up its static murmurs to a post-millennium post-9/11 world.
He also won the Nuyorican's slam on 3/26/08 and 3/28/08, and is a 2008 Nuyorican semi-finalist.
Elijah is currently curating the new "Witchdoctors and Assassins" reading/open mic series at the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW.org) in NYC.
He has had the chance to philosophize with, perform for, or share stage with:
Alanis Morissette
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ishle Yi Park
Sonia Sanchez
Carlos Andres Gomez
Amiri Baraka
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
Ciara Miller
Saul Williams
Aja-Monet
Margot Malia
FM Supreme
Jyroscope
Oveous Maximus
Komozi Woodard
Brenda Stokely
Una Chung
Performed at:
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Asian American Writers' Workshop
The Bowery Poetry Club
Silk Road Cafe
Bar 13
Sister's Uptown Bookstore
Water Street Lounge
New World Stages
Hairitage Lounge
Downtown Uptown Cafe
SUNY Purchase
Sarah Lawrence College
City College of New York
New York University
Emory University
Hunter College
Philippine Forum
The Afrikan Poetry Theatre
Brooklyn Borough Hall
Rikers Island
In the spring of 2008 he also recorded the score for the short film "Roundtrips", by independent fil-am filmmaker Emmelle Israel. "Roundtrips" explores the inner voyages of thought, expectation, and waiting that surrounds any trip as monumental as one that takes you back "home" - a home that may be yearned, a home that may be fiction.
Elijah Kuan Wong is an experimental performance artist who understands that in order for the revolution to finally come there must be full commitment towards a bare-knuckle consciousness-raising brawl from the depths of Amerika's Id.
For booking info send an email to:
[email protected], with "Booking" in the subject.