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Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi's queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women's community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh's utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the little-known experiences and memories of Korean 'guestworker' nurses who 'twice migrated'; first moving to Germany and then migrating to the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extended, repeat interviews with four former nurses, their stories underscore how little is known about this wave of Korean migrant women, specifically, and why they decided to migrate, where, and how. The findings highlight how these women were agents of their own mobility, seeing the opportunity to migrate to Germany as the means by which to acquire independence and autonomy as young women. Further, their stories showed how twice migration to the US was not always experienced as a positive and more advantageous destination, particularly for the women. Instead, it was presented as a choice that many were forced to make, often because it was seen to benefit their spouses or children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia's diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community's dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi's queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women's community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh's utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn in Asian American studies to questions of Indigeneity and settler colonialism is of recent vintage considering that in the 1910s, Thind and Ozawa both grappled with their vexed relation to the figure of the native. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While considerable attention has been given to the ways that parents contribute to undergraduates' success, far less attention has been given to what these students do for their families, variation in students' provision of help, or the consequences of giving. Drawing on 61 interviews with Asian American college students from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds, this paper extends conventional understanding of families and college by analyzing the financial assistance and translation support Asian American undergraduates give their parents. Using a trichotomous model of class—comparing disadvantaged, advantaged, and ambiguous students—I show that class disadvantage motivated students' helping, advantage deterred it, while the ambiguous fell in between. Culture (i.e., filial piety) and a broad view of family (i.e., siblings' contributions) also influenced students' help. Finally, based on interview data combined with partial support from analysis of participants' grade point averages data, I demonstrate that helping had positive and negative implications for students' college experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnographic essay and curation of visual notes and illustrations sheds light on the transformative power of visual notetaking as Asian American art practice. I focus on the influence the field of Asian American studies has had on my life in developing my critical consciousness and the way in which my activist practice remains grounded in sharing Asian American stories through creative forms of Asian American literature such as visual notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer a specific example from our programmatic research and teaching praxis during the COVID-19 anti-Asian hate pandemic period. We demonstrate how Asian American Studies community-centered knowledge coproduction and narrative generational wealth investment can address critical experiences of young learners from underrepresented, religiously-diverse populations through content that supports culturally sustaining child development and challenges disparately impactful realities of racism, misrepresentation, and systemic Western biases which undermine their health and wellbeing. Focusing on religious themes in relation to child development was not an explicit intention of our collaboratively developed storybook project titled, Hira Makes a Sound. Nevertheless, centering a women-led, intergenerational Nepali immigrant story in both our process and final product necessarily led to foregrounding religious, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of diasporic family and community life that are essential to coping and development for the fictional lead character, Hira, and her loved ones. Robust story data themes—paradoxically grounded in the ether of a shared Gurung worldview—provide generative lessons for researchers, educators, artists, and community advocates who work with or need to account for the lived experiences of young learners within religiously diverse, multi-generational immigrant family households and community ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"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]

In this article, I examine the construct of parental home or maher in my native language Marathi—as a social, emotional, cultural, spiritual, physical, and lived construct. Maher informs my struggle to comprehend the construct of home and its relationship to displacement, loss of familiarity, nostalgia, and the liminal. I juxtapose my experiences of being a newly married woman of Indian origin in the United States, with my experiences of being a new graduate student in a reputed North American university—both simultaneous life events. This article is an autoethnographical reflection on my negotiation of my marital and academic landscapes where I found my identity and ontological orientations challenged. The borderlands that resulted from geo-familial displacement and ontological displacement in academia intersected to create vantage points and liminal spaces that allowed me to explore, re-orient, and assert my ontological roots that are informed by Indian philosophy—specifically, the Advaita Vedanta approach. This article explores the power of art as research and the process of art-making as a process synchronous to researching to explore identity in the making. [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]

Through Our Eyes, Hear Our Voices is a virtual photovoice project that documents the impact of COVID-19 on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Quantitative studies on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 are still emerging, but they do not reveal qualitative experiences of a racialized pandemic exacerbated by political leaders labeling it "China virus." As a qualitative participatory action research approach, photovoice is an ideal archival and pedagogical tool to capture the lived experience of AAPI communities. However, we had to adapt photovoice to a virtual research environment. We did so by adopting a variety of digital learning and information sharing platforms. In addition, we enlisted community-based organizations who are providing essential services for underrepresented communities to serve as research mentors for university student researchers. Finally, given the historic nature of the pandemic and the underrepresentation of AAPI experiences in mainstream archives, we emphasized the importance of students as co-producers of archival knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold's essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as "disinterested." I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature "matters"; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address how walking as a curatorial practice of storying a neighborhood facilitates an irreducible politics of place occurring as affective intensities at various registers, where everyday movements entangle with spatial enactments of racism. Working with theories of assemblage and immanent movement, I examine walking narratives in San Jose Japantown, California (U.S.), a historic, ethnic neighborhood historically subjected to U.S. government and banking practices of "redlining" and Japanese American incarceration and dislocation to prison camps. As an analytical method, assemblage requires attention to movement: material elements of arrangement, the relations they require, new arranging and arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated. I examine spatial racism as an assemblage, analyzing its affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation through memorialization, community activism and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our speculative ethnography of Chinese student experience in the United States during COVID-19 weds the tradition of speculative fiction (exemplified by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler) and digital autoethnography. The study is two-pronged: First, we articulate/map the methodological merits of speculative and digital autoethnography as particularly conducive to the crisis context of COVID-19 and its accompanying social isolation; second, we deploy said methodology within a population of nine Chinese students "trapped" in the United States during the COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Arif Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region's transformation into a "model region of globalization." Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism's drive to simultaneously homogenize and fragment the world, a condition he termed "global modernity," had not only restructured the Asia-Pacific region so as to meet the demands of a new flexible mode of production, but also transformed knowledge production about the world, giving way to an endless splintering of knowledge that reinforced the logics of global capitalism and foreclosed any possibility for radical critique. Drawing on Asian American studies, Pacific Studies and Indigenous Studies, which emerged in the Asian-Pacific borderlands between social activism and the academy, Dirlik called attention to the local as the primary site of inquiry and advocated for radical scholarly and activist approaches grounded in a "critical localism" against the hegemony of global capitalism. This paper explores how Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region generates the possibility for crafting what the anarchist sociologist Philippe Corcuff describes as "fragile epistemologies" of the plural social global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Man from Beijing depicts ethnic Chinese workers on the US transcontinental railroad, a literary development that challenges the linguistic boundaries nominally associated with Asian American Studies. Of equal importance, I argue, is the way Mankell expands the cartography of Nordic Noir to encompass capitalism's old-new frontiers in China (PRC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals for Global Asias as an emerging field that "bridges" Asian studies and Asian American studies should attend to the residual debris of older understandings of global bridging work. This response explores two motifs for speculating about what bridging work in Global Asias could be: stars, as understood in terms of interimperial constellations, and sandbars, as a metaphor for more local, coalitional, and temporary aggregations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on the philosophy, principles, and practices animating Global Asias scholarship to consider how this conceptual rubric shifts the ways in which we approach the subjects, objects, methods, and praxes of the academic study of Asia. Structurally dissonant as an epistemological project, Global Asias encourages scholars to acknowledge the institutional designs and disciplinary practices that currently organize and make legible work on Asia and its diasporas while simultaneously highlighting the limits of, and points of noncontact between, the broader infrastructures (including area studies, ethnic studies, diaspora studies, and the disciplines and interdisciplines) under which such work has traditionally been organized. In addition to offering a conceptual topography of Global Asias, this essay proposes three praxis-oriented concepts—relational nonalignment, structural dissonance, and imaginable ageography—that enable Global Asias as a tactical and evolving approach to the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas, one which actively resists the drive toward "critical consolidation" that often results from academic paradigm work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how an Asian/American woman leader-scholar (and others un/like her) have processed the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other types of racialized violence in and out of the academy by drawing on the analytic frameworks of Orientalism and racialized sexualization. This critical autoethnography involved synthesizing traumatic reflections into concept maps by drawing from the content of author-generated poems, e-mails, institutional statements, and journal entries based on a series of critical incidents that occurred between March 15, 2021 to March 22, 2021, as well as over the past several decades. She describes how many leaders at White-dominated institutions of higher education have perpetually dishonored Asian/Americans and other BIPOC faculty, staff, and students through their in/actions, mis/behaviors, and mis/deeds before, during, and after the Atlanta Massacre March 16, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about the contributors to Contemporary Literature, including Stephanie Burt, Henry Ivry, Julia C. Obert, Joshua Pederson, Molly Slavin, and Timothy Yu. Topics discussed encompass various literary themes such as contemporary poetry, climate crisis, colonial cities, postcolonial literature, moral injury, and Asian American studies.

In 2021, Illinois became the first state in the United States to require that K-12 students learn about Asian American history. Illinois achieved this when lawmakers passed House Bill 376 (H.B. 376), colloquially known as the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act. H.B. 376 received praise for being the first legislation of its kind, and its passage inspired similar bills in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Given the bill’s influence, it is imperative to consider its language and utility. This critical policy analysis specifically investigates lawmakers’ employment of the term “Asian American.” The analysis ultimately argues that H.B. 376 is a necessary first step in breaking centuries of silence and dislocation for Asian Americans; however, the bill advances a social definition—or sociopolitical understanding—of “Asian American” that is potentially harmful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]