Julia H Lee
Professor, UC Irvine
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Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of The Racial Railroad (NYU Press 2022), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2018), and Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African- and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (NYU Press). She is also a co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She teaches courses on Korean American experience, Asian American popular culture, Race and urban space, and Asian American literature.
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Coughing on Asians during COVID-19
This paper provides an overview of the shifting cultural representations of Asians in the United States through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Asians have long been vilified as forever foreigners and contaminants or extolled as efficient laborers and docile political subjects, the pandemic brought into sharper relief how misalignment and contradiction define Asian racialization in the US. Through readings of a selection of Asian American and Asian diasporic works, including the K-pop group BTS and Weike Wang’s novel Joan Is Okay (2022), I argue that the contranymic quality that defines Asian racial difference is crucial for understanding Asian racialization in an era of high-tech spectacle and the globalized movement of objects and biological material.
Asian American Literature Online: Social Media and Contemporary Literary Cultures
This roundtable brings together scholars and community members to discuss how discussion of Asian American literature on social media, especially but not limited to Instagram ("Bookstagram") shapes contemporary Asian American literary culture. How do readers, authors, and publishers interact? What kinds of literary criticism and scholarship occur online, outside academic spaces? How does social media change conversations about Asian American literature, or even markets for it? Panelists will share experiences of creating their own book social media accounts, observing broader conversations, and interacting with others online. We aim for this session to incorporate significant conversation with the audience.
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