Chad Shomura
Assistant Professor
Actions
Chad Shomura is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. His research interests include political thought, affect, biopolitics, new materialism, and ecology. His recent publications are in Capacities To: Affect Up Against Fascism, Theory & Event, American Quarterly, and Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. Chad's current book project, A Life Otherwise, examines minor assemblies of life that upset the good life. His website is chadshomura.com
Topics
Through the Queer Diasporic Gaze
Film contributes to the exclusionary shape of dominant publics in the United States. The camera is frequently used to police communities and create propaganda for corporations and the state. This can entrain Asian Americans toward assimilation and reproducing US nationalism and cisheteronormativity. How might queer Asian diasporic communities use film to counter-surveil and betray the male and western gaze? How might film generate counterpublics around nonnormative Asian and Asian American narratives?
Spanning documentary, memoir, coming of age family drama, fantasy, and magical realism, these authentic and brave short films from queer emerging directors of the Asian diaspora (Pakistan, China and Vietnam) show how to hold each other and ourselves in ways that nations and institutions cannot. Told with a tender gaze and breathtaking visuals, these films explore healing in the aftermath of immigrant and refugee experiences, domestic and sexual violence, and homophobia. They lovingly and vibrantly unveil landscapes and emotionscapes rarely seen in mainstream Asian American film and unearth possibilities and practices of care, survival, chosen family and alternative futures.
Following the screenings will be a discussion with some of the filmmakers, moderated by Jess X. Snow and Chad Shomura.
Short films:
Retrieval by Fatimah Asghar
Will You Look At Me by Shuli Huang (Queer Palme at Cannes 2022)
Little Sky by Jess X. Snow
In Living Memory by Quyên Nguyen-Le
After Anti-Asian Violence: Art, Affect, and Abolitionist Futures
Anti-Asian violence has long been a pressing but typically overlooked issue. Its appearance as a matter of concern in dominant publics during the COVID-19 pandemic has been partial and fleeting. This limited attention has shaped public feelings toward Asian/Americans. Sympathy and grief, where they have appeared, have been temporary and politically inefficacious. Asian/American lives remain expendable within the dominant US public sphere. Urgent questions are raised by the disconnects between a fleeting, limited dominant public and the kind of sustained counterpublic needed for meaningful sociopolitical change: What historical and sociopolitical conditions enable the ongoing devaluation and destruction of Asian/American lives? What exactly does anti-Asian violence seek to destroy? How have artists responded to the erasure of Asian America in/by dominant publics? What might Asian/American spaces of grief and healing look like?
This panel presents scholarly and artistic projects that develop a sustained engagement with anti-Asian violence. A. Naomi Paik will describe the relations between anti-Asian violence and mass shootings in the US to settler colonialism in the Second Amendment and call for abolitionist responses. Chad Shomura will treat anti-Asian violence as the destruction of what Asian America could be and, in doing so, develop Asian American affect beyond minor feelings, racial melancholia, and disaffection. James McMaster will examine artists and artworks that have sought to make space for Asian American grief in the pandemic era, specifically by seeking recourse to gardens as both actual and metaphorical sites of respite and release. Jess X Snow will share poems and a personal reflection about how a community mural in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a queer Pan-Asian narrative film, futurism and friend intimacy can help us heal from anti-Asian violence and form cross-cultural coalitions that challenge white supremacy and settler colonialism. Collectively, panelists tell a multi-faceted story about anti-Asian violence and creative ways to move through grief and arrive at a place of collective possibility.
Chad Shomura
Assistant Professor
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top