Heejoo Park
Postdoctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University
Actions
Heejoo Park is a Humanities in the World Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State University affiliated with the Global Asias Initiative. She completed her doctoral studies in English at the University of California, Riverside. Currently, she is working on her first book project, Speculative Refractions: Migrant Aesthetics of Asian and Latinx Americas. This project explores aesthetic strategies of resistance in works of speculative fiction by Latinx and Asian American writers.
A Roundtable on Asian American and Latinx Relational Methodologies
In the spirit of “strange affinities” that Grace Kyoungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson posit as sites of coalitional politics, this roundtable explores relational methodologies that critically link Asian American and Latinx scholars, cultural producers, and activists. How do we develop coalitions beyond a priori categories of identity while simultaneously accounting for the material conditions? How can we further disentangle relational race studies from liberal-colonial epistemologies? Moderated by Susan Thananopavarn, the speakers of this roundtable will discuss the stakes and strategies for cultivating commons at the intersections of Asian American and Latinx studies, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, Anti-Asian and Anti-immigrant violence, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. To begin, Robb Hernández focuses on the neon sculptures of Patrick Martinez produced in this historical juncture, which serve as urban palimpsests of systemic violence, resistance, and renewal. Next, Chloe Huh Prudente discusses the challenges of interdisciplinary research, sharing the development of her project that reinstates Asian diasporas in the Americas as an integral part of global history. Long Le-Khac moves us beyond the human/nonhuman divide, envisioning a relational mode that fully accounts for racialized systems and their violence, as in the case of sugar in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting. Considering the inextricable link between speculative fiction, race, and world-building, Heejoo Park explores the development of Chicanx/Latinx and Asian futurisms. Finally, Justus Peña Berman discusses the emergence and afterlife of Asian American and Chicano social movements between 1968 and the present, situating Third Word Left as a complex model of relationality.
Speculative Uses of Asian American Illegibility
What are the uses of Asian American literature and culture in relation to “Asian America” as a structure and marker of difference? How does the study of Asian America in speculative fiction remain useful to the scholarly enterprise of Asian American Studies in the 2020s and beyond? This panel explores these questions to determine how the genre of speculative fiction imagines alternatives to structures of state-sanctioned legibility. Through a reading of diverse forms such as novels, films, anthologies, and television shows, this panel explores how legible conceptions of an Asian American identity can be queered, disrupted, and speculated. In other words, our engagements with speculative fiction, to think with Kandice Chuh, imagine otherwise relations to each other through kinship, whether familial, communal, or writerly. Speculative fiction often takes on common tropes but is read as an uncommon or minor literary or cultural text. Taking on the wide range of speculative genres – fantasy, alternative history, science fiction, cyberpunk, and more – this panel seeks to disrupt the legibility of these forms by engaging with Asian American cultural objects that similarly reject notions of a legible Asian American identity. Is “Asian America” itself a speculative fiction? More broadly, this panel explores the usefulness of this minor genre to generate conversations on how speculative Asian American fiction, and more broadly, speculating future literary and cultural engagements in Asian American Studies can imagine illegible forms of human and more than human relations outside of or through the family, the canonical text, and the nation-state.
Heejoo Park
Postdoctoral Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University
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