Affect has been an increasingly important topic within Asian American studies. Racial melancholia, minor feelings, ugly feelings, shame, and disaffection have been treated as key, if not defining, aspects of Asian America due to profound experiences of exclusion, loss, trauma, and alienation. It is worth critically examining presumptions behind Asian American affect studies about subjectivity, emotional expression, and politics to see how the subfield might continue to develop in the 2020s and beyond.

To undertake that endeavor, this panel focuses on feelings and affective structures that have been under-theorized: nostalgia, yearning, and joy. Yasmin Yoon explores how, in a post-1960s neoliberal racial order, the Asiatic is made and remade through nostalgia in an analysis of Pamela Lu’s novel Ambient Parking Lot and the aesthetic genre of citypop. Annabelle Tseng describes how Asian American yearning makes room for possibilities undefined by the trauma of loss and displacement by examining Ling Ma’s short story collection Bliss Montage and Celine Song’s film Past Lives. Chad Shomura elaborates joy as denied to but persistent in Asian America by engaging the racist, sexist backlash against tidying guru Marie Kondo. The panelists show nostalgia, yearning, and joy to be strange Asian American affects, for they are not grounded in subjectivity, strong emotional display, or expectations of proper feeling. Instead, they work in the key of architecture and mood, the subtle and the subdued, and ethereal, persistent force. In short, the panel traces Asian American affects that are more distributive than centered, more diffuse than grounded.

Rather than calling for nostalgia, yearning, and joy to be centered in the field, the panelists honor their minor status as affective undercurrents. This enables us to see Asian America as too diffuse for the dialectics of exclusion/inclusion, periphery/center, and fragmentation/wholeness that often frame scholarship in the field. The panel contributes fresh starting points to better understand Asian American racial form, literary and cultural production, theory, and politics.