Despite its commitment to inclusion, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and social justice, Asian American studies has been defined by certain “disciplines, ethnoracial groups, and diasporic processes” that “by extension, decentered others.” This panel offers case studies of narratives that fit poorly in those defining paradigms, providing a space to tell stories of Asian American experience that have otherwise been excluded, silenced, or omitted.

Each panelist shares a misfit narrative that cannot be easily assimilated into the dominant conversations in Asian American studies. As a whole, the panel pools these experiences and findings in order to illustrate how the successful institutionalizations of Asian American studies as an academic discipline and Asian American productions as a cultural category have led to the exclusion of certain narratives and interpretations of Asian American and transpacific experience.

In her paper, filmmaker, educator, and media presenter Crystal Kwok discusses the experience of screening her 2022 film Blurring the Color Line on the festival circuit and at cultural events in the US and Asia. The documentary reconstructs a lesser known history of a Chinese American merchant community in the Jim Crow South and their relations with the Black community. Although the film content attempts to break boundaries and bridge divides by illuminating entangled Black and Chinese American histories, Kwok shares how the compartmentalization of the curated festivals and distribution platforms actually reduce the possibility for inter-ethnic dialogue. Ultimately, what was meant to be a provocation to dialogue became an echo chamber for like-minded audience members and discussants that have been channeled through institutionalized categories.

Kim Park Nelson theorizes about multiversity: a concrete lived experience of Asian adoptees that remains an abstraction for the rest of Asian America. Park Nelson explains that the absence of the “life that could have been” is always present for adoptees, a narrative they cannot simply elide despite not fitting their present circumstances. Park Nelson analyzes how adoptees seek to resolve that multiplicity through the practice of birth search using direct-to-consumer genetic testing services.

Alan Williams finds evidence of the will to institutionality in his discussion of Tondemonai—Never Happen! (Soon-Tek Oh, 1970), a puzzling example of an Asian American queer cultural production that has been omitted from the canon. Performed by the famed East West players and the first commercially-produced play depicting the Japanese American incarceration, Tondemonai cannot be made representative of 1970s Asian American cultural production despite being at a “center” of it, because that would contradict the paradigmatic Asian Americanist critique of the era as beset by homophobic cultural nationalism.

While the dominant paradigm of Asian American film and media studies has been narrative scarcity and the struggle for authentic visibility, Jason Coe asks whether Asian America, East Asians in particular, are actually overrepresented in the global mediascape. Analyzing the popular Netflix streaming series Beef as an example of (East-) Asian American narrative plenitude, Coe investigates whether the political burden of Asian American representation has lifted and, if so, to what end.

Our research finds that regardless of whether Asian American Studies can fit these narratives into its dominant conversations, they exist and serve as proof of an Asian America broader than the academy’s account of it. Instead of a fault-finding mission, we share these misfit narratives in hopes of forging new pathways to engage in dialogue between our various disciplines, with Asian American studies as a whole, and in ways that invite participation from the communities we serve.