This panel seeks papers that interrogate Asian American injury as a recurring motif and rhetoric in literature and media. Recent Asian American scholarship and aesthetic/cultural production have promoted the political utility of minor affects (Sianne Ngai, Cathy Park Hong), new discourses and praxes of collectivity and community (“cut fruit diaspora”; the emergence of “Wasia” and “Wasian meetups”), and sentimental identification through commodities and commodification in the current moment of late-stage capitalism (Crying in HMart; Ocean Vuong’s inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club). How might investments in Asian American injury uneasily intersect with anti-Blackness, class hierarchies, institutionalization, global capital, neocolonialism, cultural nationalisms, and colorism? Following scholars such as Rey Chow, Summer Kim Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Dylan Rodriguez, this panel invites panelists to query Asian American alterity within and against the contexts of neoliberal, multiculturalist, neocolonial, and recuperative logics. Rather than “reckoning with” Asian American aesthetic and identitarian projects based in injury, how might a rhetoric of “wrecking,” or, to reference Lee, “staying with the damage that spoilage creates,” be more reparative, generative, and politically viable? 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

#StopAsianHate

Wasia

Cut fruit diaspora

Ethnic enclaves/suburbs/strip malls

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

Severance by Ling Ma

Asian American dystopias or utopias

Yellow Face by RF Kuang

Ocean Vuong’s interview with Oprah

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Asian supermarkets

No No Boy by Frank Okada

This panel is presented in-person at NeMLA that will convene from March 6-9 in Newport, Rhode Island. For more information, please feel free to go to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22509