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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Author-meets-Academics: A Roundtable on Nuclear Family by Joseph Han
Joseph Han’s 2022 novel Nuclear Family interrogates the constructed nature and material permanence of militarized borders by imagining the DMZ border between North and South Korea as a physical barrier that extends beyond death. When Korean American expat Jacob is possessed by his grandfather’s ghost in South Korea, his attempt to cross the DMZ has profound implications for his family in Hawaiʻi and for the geopolitical relationship between nation states. This roundtable gathers scholars of Asian American studies to engage in a conversation with the author about the significance of Nuclear Family for Asian American studies scholarship and teaching. We ask: how does the novel’s exploration of what Grace Cho terms “hauntings of the Korean diaspora” demonstrate war’s capacity to exceed temporal and geographic boundaries, exerting a material and affective force in present-day diasporic experiences? What can we learn from the novel’s place-based navigation of immigrant relations in Hawaiʻi and how settler colonialism in the Pacific is inflected by compounding U.S. militarism in the Pacific and Asia? Finally, thinking toward the novel’s pedagogical use, we ask how we can incorporate Nuclear Family into our classroom teaching - how might it both supplement and expand the already rich body of Asian American literature on war and diaspora?
Asian American Settlers and the Neo-Frontier Narrative
This paper represents an attempt to define an emerging sub-genre of contemporary Asian American literature that I am tentatively calling the Asian American neo-frontier narrative. These works portray the stories of Asian American or Asian diasporic characters as they move the nineteenth-century American West – from Missouri, to North Dakota, to Idaho, to California – and encompass a number of overlapping modes of storytelling, including historical fiction, the western, speculative or antirealist fiction, young adult fiction, and graphic narrative. As one might expect, all of these works critique the exclusionary and violent foundation that the myth of the American “frontier” was built on, providing counter-narratives that deliberately confound the nationalist and generic conventions associated with that space. The specific focus of this paper will be to analyze how these representations of the “frontier” as a space that is foundational to histories of anti-Asian violence and exclusion are in tension with the “frontier” as a space of indigenous extermination. The question that I attempt to answer is: what happens when the Asian American imperatives to grapple with nationalist structures of memorialization come up against the histories and dispossession of settler colonialism? I suggest that in disrupting the claims of the historical, these neo-frontier narratives do not confront the Native American presence in the “West.” This refusal risks transforming their own anti-historical approaches into the examples of a liberal, multiculturalism that they seek to counter.
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