Guest Recital: Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama

No-No Boy is a multimedia concert featuring the songs of singer/songwriter Julian Saporiti. These songs, inspired by his doctoral research at Brown University, as well as his experiences growing up as a Vietnamese-American in Tennessee, are complemented by stories he has collected set against a backdrop of projections displaying archival photographs and films.

This performance shines a light on diverse but interconnected Asian-American experiences: the many lives of WWII Japanese Incarceration camp survivors, refugees from southeast Asia, waves of immigrants, and kids in middle America making sense of a hyphenated identity. Saporiti is joined on stage by singer and fellow Brown PhD student Erin Aoyama, whose grandmother was incarcerated during World War II in a Japanese-American concentration camp in Wyoming. Together, they tell stories, sing songs, and show films to share their research in a unique and captivating way.