Vivian Lei
PhD student in Literature
New York City, New York, United States
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2nd-year PhD student at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
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Visceral Archives: Labor, Intimacies, and Relational Racial Formation in Global Asias
This panel examines the material, corporeal, and textual traces of imperial labor, racialized bodies, and violent intimacies in the unconventional archives of Global Asias. Keeping in mind its formations across multiple imperial and transnational networks, we understand Global Asias as a critical lens that foregrounds both geographical crossings and temporal entanglements. Turning to what we call visceral archives – encompassing ornamental objects, corporeal writings, medical memoirs, and fabulative fiction – we show how these sites of embodied and affective relationality both register and reconfigure asymmetrical processes of race-making across Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. We further interrogate the inherent violence of colonial archives, considering how researchers’ own visceral encounters may reshape queer alterities to the archive and open possibilities beyond established genres and periodizations.
We see our orientation towards the archival methodologies as both an extension—and a possible re-evaluation—of recent conversations in Asian American studies. Emerging from American countercultural movements in the 1960s, Asian American studies as a field has historically centered the ideological formation of the United States and its internal racial hierarchies as its default object of critique. However, as Lisa Lowe (2015) argues, grappling with the intimacies of imperial networks requires scholars to attend to their lineages in various local, regional, and transcontinental contexts. By foregrounding violent intimacies, visceral archives, and suppressed transhistorical relationalities, we hope to further problematize the disciplinary naming of “Asia America” and uncover forms of resistance that still remain underdiscussed within the field’s current formation.
The four papers spanning histories and geographies demonstrate our inquiry into how relational racial formation can be approached through visceral materials and from a perspective that moves beyond U.S.-centrism. Yunning Zhang’s paper examines a talavera poblana planter from colonial Mexico to argue that chinoiserie functioned as a racialized aesthetic technology, encoding transpacific regimes of bondage and liminal Afro-Asian intimacies. Vivian Lei’s paper examines Jamaican writer Patricia Powell’s 1998 novel The Pagoda to show how archives are not self-contained, sanitized sites of knowledge production, but are instead permeated by the “sweat” of otherwise erased or silenced subjectivities. Tianyun Hua’s paper examines wartime diaries in the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I to reveal how emotional labor on the battlefield and inter-racial intimacies interrupted the racialized military chain. Cautioning against uncritical celebration of Afro-Asian solidarity in the Global South, Kun Huang’s paper critiques the racialization of African bodies and diseases in the archives of Chinese medical aid missions.
The Compromised First-Person(s) in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species (2018)
Emily Jungmin Yoon’s 2018 poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species meditates on the limitations and potentials of the first-person “I” in redressing the sexual, racial, and species-level violences entrenched in 20th-century Korean/American history. This paper argues that Yoon’s disarticulation of the “I” from a unitary, coherent subjective position arises from her questioning of the assumptions of humanism. While she proposes, “A theory: special to our species, this grape-bell has to do with speech. / Which separates us from animals,” she also explores how such a theory of the human readily excludes the experiences of Korean women, who achieve historical recognition not through their active voices but rather through their violated bodies. Weaving together the testimonies of former “comfort women” and her own experience as an Asian immigrant woman in America, Yoon compares the women’s bodies to “the limbs of trees,” “gravel,” and “a fresh new spice to taste”—objects marked by their malleability for use or disposability. If these women’s exclusion from humanity is valued on their (in)capacities to objectify, make use of, and speak for, how should one understand Yoon’s use of the “I” throughout this collection? This paper analyzes how the “I” personifies a spectrum of characters historically rejected from the perimeters of humanity, encompassing the surviving “comfort women” as well as azalea flowers and whales. Conceiving them as compromised first-person(s) that never attain full capacities of the human, Yoon negotiates what disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim terms “unbecoming human,” in which “embodying objecthood, surrendering agency, and practicing powerlessness may open up an anti-ableism, antiviolence queer ethics of proximity.” Ultimately, This paper argues that these compromised first-person(s) reformulate the Korean/American women’s struggle for historical redress, carving out new possibilities for human and non-human entities to relate to each other and cultivate modes of care that override the constant imperative to exploit inherent in a theory of the human.
AAAS Annual Conference 2025 Sessionize Event
Vivian Lei
PhD student in Literature
New York City, New York, United States
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