In a recent article (2021), Sue-Im Lee observes a rising phenomenon in Asian American formal criticism: the proliferation of aesthetic concepts such as “opaque, transparent, fragmented, linear, nonlinear, discordant, or lyrical” (690). This pivot away from legibility, assimilation, and (positivist) representation in Asian American Studies follows foundational work on inscrutability in Black Studies, such as Édouard Glissant’s conceptualization of opacity in Poetics of Relation. As Lee and other scholars such as Tina Post observe, literary studies scholars increasingly direct their attention to the opaque or inexpressive over aesthetic modes that are more readily available for apprehension: opacity instead of transparency, fragmentation instead of linearity, discordance instead of a locatable and locutionary lyrical self. 

The inscrutable turn is expressed through recalcitrant silences, abstract visuals, or formally disorienting textual coordinates that elude or flatly reject known categories of recognition. In Black Studies, this is evinced in recent monographs such as Tina Post’s Deadpan and Phillip Brian Harper’s Abstractionist Aesthetics. Within the field of Asian American studies, this “inscrutable turn” can be sensed in Sunny Xiang’s analysis of racial (un)intelligibility in the “long cold war” as well as Vivian L. Huang’s attention to performances of inscrutable surfaces. 

This seminar is interested in how the inscrutable turn takes on multiple forms across disciplines, and how inscrutability, as both aesthetic mode and method, might direct us to rethink the politics of representation not as a means of rescue or reparativeness, but as historical forces that render our political agency ambiguous, recalling the fraught reticence that a historical subject’s “complex personhood,” to borrow from Avery Gordon, insists on, out of uncertainty or even shame. To that end, this seminar rejoins Glissant’s call for minoritarian subjects’ “right to opacity,” resisting “transparent” modes of legibility to account for experiential affects and racial meanings more queasy (Anne Cheng) or withholding (Post). How do we read when the aesthetic object forthrightly refuses being perceived? What does it mean to read a historical subject inscrutably–to honor her right to opacity while also historicizing her subjectivity? What does it tell us, on a methodological level, that we increasingly look to the taciturn rather than the openly expressive? 

Although this panel is organized by Asian American studies scholars, it has become clear that, increasingly, literary scholarship across race and ethnic studies, such as Mariana Ortega’s work on carnalities (following Barthes), engages inscrutability. As such, we invite various approaches to inscrutability–interpreting it not only as formal or expressive minimalism, but also modes of excess that overwhelm immediate legibility. 

Abstracts of 250-300 words and bios of 100 words or less should be submitted to the ACLA site by Oct 2, 2025
https://www.acla.org/seminar/7b46eab8-7531-42c9-a138-904ec9b8c3cc

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