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"The Diversity Requirement" takes on anti-neoliberal criticisms of the post-2008 US university as emblematized by quit lit, the essay genre in which tenure-track hopefuls announce that they are leaving academia, as deracinated yet totalizing theories that ignore how racism structures institutional contingency and academic precarity, even when the diversity requirement is a norm. This article responds by turning to the Asian American campus novel, a generic category not readily deployed because of the recurrence of universities in literary and lived model minority narratives. Taking Asian American institutional racialization as representative of the ambivalence that subtends contingency, "The Diversity Requirement" connects the author's experience as contingent faculty and as staff of the campus diversity requirement to readings of Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel (2010) and Weike Wang's Chemistry: A Novel (2017) through the figure of the Asian American student teacher, the apt pupils within liberal whiteness who lack expertise or experience and yet are tasked with teaching responsibilities for diversity without full access to institutional power. In doing so, this article theorizes ambivalent contingency—a mitigated agency and constrained privilege from within institutional contingency that reflects contradicting intersections of power within and beyond the individual—as a strategy for surviving the institution without reproducing its logics of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating "Asian America" and "Asia" in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most "Asiatic" genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the "real" genres of race and neo-Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-raciallyidentifying North American designers--Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee-- and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums--The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian Ameri- can Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015). The publication of these four compendiums within the span of a year signals a pivotal moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies, one that both recognizes the institutional gains of the field and addresses the (in)compatibilities between the field's theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices. This article considers the centrality of ethics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethical alienation--signaled both by the figuration of "comfort women"/military sex slaves/halmoni and our own estrangement from it--can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature. By attending to the field's consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to "comfort women"/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of "complex personhood" (Gordon 1997, 4-5) and as an interdisciplinary "term of analysis and history rather than personhood" (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]