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Animate Impossibilities: on Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, and the Humanities City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, and the Humanities Frances H. Tran Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1244 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ANIMATE IMPOSSIBILITIES ON ASIAN AMERICANIST CRITIQUE, RACIALIZATION, AND THE HUMANITIES by FRANCES H. TRAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 FRANCES H. TRAN All Rights Reserved ii Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, and the Humanities by Frances H. Tran This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ ________________________________________ Date Kandice Chuh Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ ________________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Duncan Faherty Roderick A. Ferguson Robert F. Reid-Pharr THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, and the Humanities by Frances H. Tran Advisor: Kandice Chuh This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Lisa Lowe, and Stuart Hall to illuminate the ongoing violence of institutionalized racism that manifests through the disciplining of certain kinds of bodies and modes of thought in the humanities. The three main chapters examine the “interdiscipline,” the “archive,” and the “digital,” respectively, as potent sites of humanistic knowledge production that determine specific configurations and hierarchies of difference, value, and legitimacy. In particular, I elucidate how these hegemonic knowledge formations constrain, at times even counter-intuitively, the dynamic energies of a field like Asian American studies. By demonstrating how this field operates in relation to the ways in which minority difference has been and continues to be regulated and iv compartmentalized, I aim to shed light on contemporary practices of racialization in the academy. Moreover, recognizing the double-bind Asian American studies occupies by inhabiting the very institutional structure it aims to critique, this project explores how we might facilitate the undisciplining of the field to invigorate the critique of racialized power that has historically organized its practices. Undisciplining figures in this dissertation as a conceptual process, an invitation to contemplate ways of structuring and producing knowledge in difference from our received arrangements of knowledge. Undisciplining also gestures toward the rebellious acts of students who organized protests during the late twentieth century that resulted in the establishment of Asian American studies and related interdisciplines. This project invokes such histories of undisciplined activity to reflect on and continue the radical thinking they enacted. Central to this process of undisciplining Asian American studies, I argue, is a serious engagement with aesthetic and cultural productions that are not immediately or only legible as “Asian American.” For this reason, I turn to the science and speculative fictions of Karen Tei Yamashita, Charles Yu, Patricia Powell, Nicci Yin, Yong Ho Ji, and Mary Ann Mohanraj, among others. I demonstrate how these authors and artists create affective imaginaries that depict material conditions of racialized inequality in different dimensions, landscapes, and historical contexts that enable readers to reflect on present injustices. As such, I illustrate how they participate in “world-making,” both constitutive of the worlds we live in and capable of generating alternative worlds; these texts create conditions of possibility not only for illuminating processes of racialization, but also make perceptible new ways of thinking and forms of embodiment, relationality, and solidarity. Therefore, in contrast to a genre study of science and speculative fiction, this project mobilizes the speculative acts these authors and artists perform as themselves methodologies for re-imagining how Asian American studies can v inhabit the academy differently. My dissertation, in short, aims to create space for realizing “animate impossibilities,” alternative arrangements of knowledge that can attune us to how the humanities can be restructured to attend to social and material inequality. vi To my twin—this could not have been written without you. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE TIME GIVEN with Warmth and Love This is my thank you letter to the people whose support has been invaluable to the thinking, shaping, and completion of this project. As insufficient as words always are, I say them here nonetheless to thank you for the time you have gifted me. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to Kandice Chuh, my advisor, who believed in this work from the beginning, who understood my vision even before I found the words to articulate it. Thank you for treating me as an interlocutor and for giving me the courage to do the research I believe in. You are a model of critical generosity and, yes, forceful encouragement, that I aspire to through my own teaching and scholarly work. I am also grateful for the incisive comments and insights I received from my committee: for Duncan Faherty who was there before the beginning, who I still credit for taking me down this path and whose unfaltering advocation of my research helped sustain me and this project through this long journey; for Robert Reid-Pharr who taught me about the care and craft of writing through his elegant words, for pressing me to do my own theorizing and to find my critical voice; for Roderick Ferguson who took me on as a student during a busy transition in his life, whose scholarship has been an inspiration and constant touchstone for this project. This dissertation has also benefitted from the engaged responses it has received among other intellectual communities. Above all, I remember with fondness my participation in the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, the dialogues with Susan Buck-Morss, Gary Wilder, Uday Singh Mehta, Anthony Alessandrini, Sujatha Fernandes, David Joselit, Colette viii Daiute, Amy Chazkel, and many others who have been there to see the development of my work since that first year. You have taught me about the challenges, pleasures, and possibilities of what it means to be in a truly interdisciplinary space. A special thanks, here, to Kaysha Corinealdi for her comments and eloquent reframing of my ideas in chapter two. I have also been grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute, where the ideas that now shape chapter one have been enriched by the suggestions of Donald Pease and my fellow colleagues in the seminar. The communities I found during presentations at the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association conferences have provided immeasurable confidence and fortification to continue pursuing this work. The following scholar-teachers have impacted this project in both large and small ways: Caroline Hong, Seo-young Chu, Jesse Schwartz, Karen Weingarten, and Richard McCoy who were early proponents of my scholarship; Laura Kang, Jack Halberstam, Anita Mannur, Peter Hitchcock, Nico Israel, Stephen Hong Sohn, Brent Hayes Edwards, Karen Shimakawa, Josė Muñoz, Alexandra Vasquez, and Janet Jakobsen, who I met along the way and whose comments and ideas have impacted this project more than they know. Here, I must say a heartfelt thanks to Nicci Yin for allowing me to incorporate her beautiful art, which I only realized belatedly speaks in multivalent ways to the project I have undertaken. A number of peer communities provided the encouragement, support, and energy needed to take this dissertation to the end. I am eternally grateful for the co-conspirators I have found through the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color initiative, among them, Chris Eng, Melissa Phruksachart, Kristin Moriah, Donatella Galella, Stefanie Jones, Kristina Huang, Maryam Parhizkar, Timothy Griffiths, LeiLani Dowel, Makeba Lavan, and others. You have taught me the joys of being part of a collective and the bittersweet feelings of what it means to leave and let ix go. My thanks especially to the participants in the dissertation working group Kandice
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