In Asian American literary, performance, and cultural studies, inscrutability has offered a potent way to rethink the tropes of Asian American subjects as illegible, disaffected, and perpetually foreign. Rather than bury these tropes as forgotten relics of the past, inscrutability takes seriously how these racist configurations continue to structure our present, and more importantly, how it is transformed into an aesthetic that questions the very ideal of nationhood undergirding these stereotypes. Inscrutability, then, illustrates the value of refusing to be read, refusing to perform normative affection, and refusing antiquated notions of assimilation.

This panel recognizes the ways in which African American Studies scholarship on illegibility, fugitivity, and invisibility have influenced theoretical recuperations of illegibility in Asian American Studies and the role aesthetics play in understanding racialization more broadly. We turn to Glissant’s “opacity” as an example, as well as his Black Caribbeanist reformulation of totality which makes possible this juxtaposition. If colonial dominance demands transparency, Glissant's answer to the challenge at hand for racialized and oppressed peoples is the “right to opacity.” A way of reading which does not defer to the lucidity of the self in Glissant resonates with and in Asian American formulations of inscrutability in ways that warrant attention. Glissant does not advance a homogenizing universality, but a mode of Relation that recognizes the complex diversity in/of being. Glissant advances a "poetics of Relation," with regard to the search for depth, which is to say a poetics is what makes possible a recognition of the self as unknowable.

In thinking about inscrutability and opacity together, we do not seek to reinforce rigid categories that essentialize a difference between Asian American and Caribbeanist thought, but to assume an archipelagic mode of thinking that decentralizes a white western intellectual tradition. What are the ways Asian American formulations of inscrutability resonate with and distinguish itself from Édouard Glissant’s opacity. How does that distinction inform our current modes of inquiry? How do Asian American theorists use African American aesthetics of illegibility to conceptualize inscrutability? We consider opacity through K-beauty formulations of glass skin and its connection to chemical warfare and medical violence, literary minimalism as an animation of Asiatic femininity, chronic skin conditions and racialized disability, and the metaphor of disappearing bodies.