Anti-Asian violence has long been a pressing but typically overlooked issue. Its appearance as a matter of concern in dominant publics during the COVID-19 pandemic has been partial and fleeting. This limited attention has shaped public feelings toward Asian/Americans. Sympathy and grief, where they have appeared, have been temporary and politically inefficacious. Asian/American lives remain expendable within the dominant US public sphere. Urgent questions are raised by the disconnects between a fleeting, limited dominant public and the kind of sustained counterpublic needed for meaningful sociopolitical change: What historical and sociopolitical conditions enable the ongoing devaluation and destruction of Asian/American lives? What exactly does anti-Asian violence seek to destroy? How have artists responded to the erasure of Asian America in/by dominant publics? What might Asian/American spaces of grief and healing look like?

This panel presents scholarly and artistic projects that develop a sustained engagement with anti-Asian violence. A. Naomi Paik will describe the relations between anti-Asian violence and mass shootings in the US to settler colonialism in the Second Amendment and call for abolitionist responses. Chad Shomura will treat anti-Asian violence as the destruction of what Asian America could be and, in doing so, develop Asian American affect beyond minor feelings, racial melancholia, and disaffection. James McMaster will examine artists and artworks that have sought to make space for Asian American grief in the pandemic era, specifically by seeking recourse to gardens as both actual and metaphorical sites of respite and release. Jess X Snow will share poems and a personal reflection about how a community mural in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a queer Pan-Asian narrative film, futurism and friend intimacy can help us heal from anti-Asian violence and form cross-cultural coalitions that challenge white supremacy and settler colonialism. Collectively, panelists tell a multi-faceted story about anti-Asian violence and creative ways to move through grief and arrive at a place of collective possibility.