Search

A timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity's olfactory disparities.The Smell of Risk outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity's differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists'response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. In each instance, Hsu demonstrates the violence that air maintenance, control, and conditioning enacts on the poor and the marginalized. From nineteenth-century miasma theory theory to the synthetic chemicals that pervade twenty-first century air, Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence.

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author's ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective.Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry and Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, Racial Asymmetries employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural StudiesThe Exquisite Corpse ofAsian Americaaddresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or socialconstruction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists,authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engagingnovels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. andinternationally—such as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let MeGo or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of BodyWorlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons—RachelC. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthumanecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. Sheunpacks how the designation of “Asian American” itself is a mental constructthat is paradoxically linked to the biological body.Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard forreading Asian American texts, Lee inaugurates a new avenue of research onbiosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on theliterary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergentscales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects.She establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy betweenAsian American studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), biocultures,medical humanities, and femiqueer approaches to family formation, carework,affect, and ethics. In pursuing an Asian Americanist critique concerned withspeculative and real changes to human biologies, she both produces innovationwithin the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to otherdisciplines.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. Beyond the Nation considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. Ponce elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, Ponce proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.