Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019). Yet Asian/Asian American travelers today embark their transnational and transpacific journeys for reasons beyond “reconnecting with their homelands,” thanks to unprecedented convenience of movement, global capitalism, (over)tourism, and new technologies of connection and socialization. Instead, their journeys are now defined by eclectic forms of leisure and privilege, pleasure and pain, adventure and self-exile, obligation and exploitation, post-war and contemporary geopolitics—introducing new erotics and ethics of mobility.

This panel attempts to examine the undertheorized figure of queer Asian/Asian American travelers (queer in every sense of the word) represented in contemporary Asian/American literatures, where they are differently racialized and sexualized in the strangely familiar Asia. We invite papers addressing (but not limited to): tourism and travel writing, travel by refugees, empire and its legacies, queerness, brownness, Asianness, ethnoracial passing, minor feelings, politics of leisure, etc.

Please send 250-word abstracts and brief bios to Kam Tou Pang, University of Macau (kamtou.pang@connect.um.edu.mo) and feel free to contact for any inquiries and ideas.