This panel explores how Asian American literature, film, and television depict the diasporic struggle to assimilate, resist, and reconstruct identity within spaces and places in the United States. Spaces and places here refer to the urban/suburban/rural, the home, institutions, transitory spaces like highways, but also the lack of space, moments of displacement, and the absence of place. Where do we as readers and audiences find the Asian American physically? What are the affordances of such spaces and places in their construction of the Asian American individual? We welcome submissions that consider when and where Asian Americans can or cannot exist within the diasporic canon.

Moreover, this panel investigates how space and place is established through both the narratives of (im)migration and the multigenerational family. How do Asian American literature, film, and television imagine, visualize, produce, reify, and/or resist racializing constructions of space for the Asian/American subject?

We invite papers that are interdisciplinary and engage with, but are not limited to, the following:

Asian American movement through, around, and in space

Affinity spaces or ‘ethnic enclaves’

Gendered Asian American space

The home as a contentious (re)generational space

The erasure, rupture, and destruction of Asian American space

Borders and hyphens as locations of Asian American existence

Working and laboring for/in spite of Asian American space

Spatial maintenance and care