CAALS is pleased to announce CFPs for AAAS 2024!
April 25-27, 2024, Seattle, WA

Panel Title & Description 

Emotional Asians: Theorizing the Affective Landscapes of Asian America After 2020  

2020 was an emotional year for diasporic Asians in the U.S. The anti-Asian hate crimes that swept the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic stirred up a mix of emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness. These affective states are revealing of the ongoing legacies of state-sponsored discrimination, persecution, and exclusion that have come to define Asian American unbelonging. Today, in a post-2020 cultural landscape, these feelings of unbelonging have quickly given way to a rush of newer emotions that, while promising, have the potential to obfuscate all the messiness of the past few years. We have experienced radical joy as Asian Americans continue to find visibility and success in mainstream cultural institutions like Hollywood as well as in the literary marketplace; we have felt collective empowerment through Sandra Oh’s highly publicized claim that today is a time to be “proud to be Asian”; and we have vicariously identified with narrative expressions of unhappiness in Netflix series like Beef and of unabashed self-assertion in buddy flicks like Joy Ride. 

This panel invites papers to take this growing range of Asian American affect in a post-2020 cultural landscape as a critical opportunity to interrogate the changing ways that Asian Americans and Asian Americanness come to be narrativized, imagined, inhabited, affirmed, and even regulated in the U.S. It asks: what emotions do we see emergent in Asian America? What do these emotions reveal socially, culturally, and politically about not just the state of Asian Americans but also shifting state attitudes toward Asian Americans? Does this purported expansion in the affective range of Asian American emotionality reproduce the colonial logic of capitalist productivity that undergirds model minority stereotyping under racial capitalism, or does it serve decolonial means? Does seeing these emotions as “new” overlook their longer histories in ways that enable the dangerous kinds of institutionalized forgetting that perpetuate colonial violence? What would a counter or alternative affective politics look like either among Asian Americans or in coalition with other BIPOC communities? 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and an abbreviated 2-page CV to Leland Tabares (ltabares@coloradocollege.edu) by Friday, Sept. 22.