"Tender Data: Reading for AfroAsia with Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019) and Netflix's 'Striking Vipers' (2019)"
How do our definitions of Asianness shift when they intersect with representations of Blackness? What does it mean to critically engage with Asian futurity and Afrofuturism? And what exactly is AfroAsia? This talk activates questions like these in part by turning to Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019), a poetry collection that plays with Techno-Orientalist stereotypes and experiments with the boundaries between human and machine. In this talk, by reading Choi alongside Charlie Brooker and Owen Harris’s “Striking Vipers” (2019) – an episode of the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror on Netflix – I make a case for the reading of Asian American and African American studies together as a literary and pedagogical framework that resists rigid field delineation, decenters whiteness, and makes the speculative nature of race more apparent.