The CAALS Essay Prize was established in 2013 as an annual award to recognize the best paper on Asian American literature and culture presented at a CAALS-sponsored conference or panel. Since then, the award has expanded to encompass essays presented by CAALS members at the virtual conference, AAAS, or ALA. To meet this growth, CAALS now recognizes two award categories: a student award and an academic award.
2024
Winner of the CAALS Academic Essay Prize: Dr. Susan Thananopavarn for “The Story Politic: Envy and Racial Impersonation in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface”
The committee was impressed by this paper’s engaging and incisive writing and its nuanced critique of liberal multiculturalism in the publishing industry. Situating R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface in relation to contemporary trends in publishing, such as #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices, Thananopavarn illustrates how the novel complicates discourses of racial authenticity and literary freedom. Through its compelling close readings and careful engagement with theories of envy and impersonation, the paper turns our attention instead to the ugly feelings engendered by liberal multiculturalism’s commodification of identities. The committee found this to not only be an insightful reading of Yellowface, casting light on a hotly debated novel, but a compelling analysis of the urgent issues surrounding the cooptation of Asian American identities in our present moment.
Winner of the CAALS Student Essay Prize: Katarina Yuan for “Caution, Orcs at Play: Asian Racialization in Dungeons & Dragons”
The committee was impressed by Yuan’s innovative take on gaming and game play, as Yuan analyzes a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons—a nerdy classic of the 1970s that is enjoying a moment of contemporary resurgence. Bringing Asian American studies to bear upon this fresh archive, Yuan’s spirited reading of Dungeons and Dragons underlines its racialized politics. The committee found Yuan’s suggestion to adopt the subversive strategy of embracing queer play by “playing Asian to racially queer orcs” particularly noteworthy, as this counterhegemonic move argues for a politics of resistance in the seemingly innocuous domain of a fantasy game.
2023
Winner of the CAALS Academic Essay Prize: Dr. Jennifer Cho for “Techno-Orientalist Domesticities: Short Circuits in Machine Labor in After Yang and The School for Good Mothers”
Cho’s is a sharp, astute paper whose strong analytical edge provides exciting new avenues and definitions of techno-Orientalism. We applaud how forcefully Cho situates her literary readings within the historical context of the Page Act to formulate a compelling argument for how techno-Orientalism become domesticated into the multicultural family and enacted in the gender politics of the modern family home. Indeed, the committee agreed that the deftness with which Cho develops the literary, theoretical, and historical strands of her argument sets her work apart – this paper seemed less like a conference paper and had all the polish of something ready for publication. Cho’s work elucidates her findings so clearly that her argument remains accessible while complex, the kind of scholarly contribution one is delighted to come across from any field.
Winner of the CAALS Student Essay Prize: GJ Sevillano for “‘Where the Throat Met the Heart’: Food Queer Intimacy, and Filipino-American Consumption in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart”
Sevillano’s essay is a fresh and exciting take on the intersection between queer intimacy and food studies. In particular, Sevillano’s careful analysis extends existing work on culinary fictions, pushing the implications of it to analyze both queerness and labor. The committee was delighted to note that Sevillano’s argument was not only cohesive and organized, but employed traditional literary methodologies to advance analysis that nevertheless felt interesting and new. In this sense, Sevillano’s work is all the more commendable for the ways that it innovates from within common literary methodologies. As a conference paper, this work is especially impressive for how judiciously it selects passages of Castillo’s novel for close reading, while maintaining an even development of each reading into an original addition to the overall argument. Organized, interesting, and clear, this paper makes a notable contribution to current scholarly work on Elaine Castillo and the kinds of directions that food studies can take.
2022
Nancy Carranza for her piece “The Violent Inheritance of Empire: Narrating and Navigating Contested Psychic and Physical Spaces in Peter Bacho’s Entrys“
The committee felt that this is a sharp paper with solid argumentation and a nuanced theoretical engagement with postcolonial and critical militarism through clear and concise reasoning. We applaud how forcefully Carranza develops her argument about how the violence of disavowed histories related to US military violence in the Philippines intersects with U.S. settler colonialism. The deftness with which Carranza develops the literary, theoretical, and historical strands of her argument sets her work apart. Her work makes an important intervention in postcolonial, mixed-race studies, and critical militarism in investigating “the national psychic schism that result from the disavowed histories of colonial oppression and violence.”
Annabelle Tseng (Honorable Mention) for her submission “West of Where?”: Unmaking and (Re)mapping in C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold
Tseng’s essay is a fresh and exciting take on Gold Rush narratives through the lens of settler colonialism and indigenous studies. It brings Indigenous studies in conversation with Asian American Studies in raising questions of the complicity of Asian American settlers in the colonial violence against native peoples and the ongoing dispossession of their land. Asian American Studies can sometimes tend to be too enmeshed in nationalist frameworks around what Rachel Lee has argued as “railroads and internment.” However, Tseng’s theoretical argument about “remapping” has a lot of potential, offering an important perspective on how migration elides other violences experienced by Indigenous peoples. On the whole, Tseng’s work made us want to read C. Pam Zhang’s novel and the committee exhorts her to develop the piece further to make a significant contribution to Asian American Studies.
2021
Alex Howerton for his piece “Obsolescence as Futurity: Anna Liu’s Radical, Sanctuary Present”
“We considered the submissions in terms of insight and originality of argument, quality of writing, strength of argumentation, the topic’s relevance to Asian American literary studies, and the author’s voice. ‘Obsolescence as Futurity’ was theoretically sophisticated and rich. The author was sensitive to both the political nuance related to undocumented belonging, as well as sustained in their analysis of the poetics and literary merit in Anna Liu’s work. We want to recognize how the author is bringing attention to Asian American poetry, which is an underappreciated form in Asian American literary studies”
2019
Toni Hays, “Speculative Hybriscapes: Thinking Race Through Continental Arrangements”
2018
Kai Hang Cheang, Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Riverside, “The Textual Remediation of the Visual in Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel: Toward an Ethic of Representing a Collective Asian American History”
Yuan Ding, Ph.D. candidate at University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, “The City and Its Refugees: The Geopolitics of Non-Places in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West.”