"Feeling Onwards: Model Minority Affects in Contemporary Asian American Literature"
My talk locates the materiality of glass in Kogonadas indie film Columbus (2017) and Ling Mas post-apocalyptic zombie novel Severance (2018) as a channel for affective alienation that stretches beyond Asians as both enablers and victims of global capitalism. My current book project, Feeling Onwards, works at the intersection of institutional critique, affect theory, and formal analysis to analyze several well-received works of contemporary Asian American literature. I argue that recent Asian American literatures emphasis on upwardly mobile, model minority subjects represent a critical impasse for Asian American studies discourse, which continues to disavow the model minority subject as politically dispensable while gravitating toward subjects of historical trauma and pain as politically expedient. My project identifies four affective models in key works of contemporary literature including sourness, paranoia, alienation, and happiness which allow Asian Americans to feel onwards, conceiving of minoritarian subjectivity and survival in more expansive ways beyond the negative.
