Introduction

How do we make sense of Asian racialization in this current era, one which has regularly been described as “the Asian Century”? How and when does “Asian” operate as a specifically racial category, and how does that specificity tell us something about the current conjuncture? What can this focus on Asian racialization contribute to our collective efforts to defunction racism? This talk addresses such questions as it occasions reflection on the organizing principles, aims, and horizons of contemporary Asian Americanist critique.

Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh is professor of English and American studies and coordinator of the American studies certificate program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and is affiliated to the Africana studies program.

She joined the The Graduate Center in 2010 as a professor in the Ph.D. program in English, and as a core member of the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award. She is co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), and has published in Public Culture, American Literary History, Social Text, and the Journal of Asian American Studies, among others. A monograph titled “The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man’,” will be published by Duke University Press. Chuh was the 2017-18 president of the American Studies Association, and participates in the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. Her current research focuses on Asian racialization in the era of globalization. From 1996-2010, she was a faculty member in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was affiliated to the Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program and was recognized for teaching and mentoring excellence.