In meditating upon the political question of “what makes a grievable life?”, Judith Butler makes an affective observation: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.” Obviously, there is no shortage of sources of grief, heightened in the era of COVID-19, but as scholars like Anne Cheng, David Eng, and Shinhee Han have observed, the Asian diasporic subject bears a particular claim to melancholia reflective of a historical context of disavowal and invisibility on one hand, and model minoritarianism on the other. As panelist Takeo Rivera has recently written, “Asian American subjectivity becomes itself through its own undoing.” But what, precisely, constitutes this undoing, situated at the intersection of grief and desire? The papers in this panel contend that this undoing is not only characteristic of the deconstructive instability of Asian American subjectivity so called, but an undoing of epistemological boundaries and methodologies. We thus turn here to Asian American artist-scholarship within performance studies to consider Asian Americans “undone by each other.”

The papers in this panel all share a common investment in the role of arts-scholarship in an Asian America of grief and desire. In doing so, these presentations combine critique and arts practice to explore various modes of intimacy and unbecoming, dissolutions of subjectivity, and unintuitive affects emerging from the legacies of war, exploitation, and marginalization. Through various hybrid ways of knowing and seeing, this panel aims to broaden the space for Asian diasporic communitas, allowing arts practice to provide vulnerabilities and interventions beyond the logocentric. From installation and exhibition to playwriting and video, this panel explores Asian American undoing from multiple media, affects, and diasporic origins. To survey what has already been undone provides us with the materials and methods for engaging with different surfaces of Asian American artist-scholarship.