Wednesday, September 20 | 6:00 – 7:15 PM
Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability
Register Here
Join us for a virtual dialogue on Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Duke 2022)! Featuring author Vivian L. Huang (she, they), assistant professor of Communication Studies specializing in race and performance studies at San Francisco State University, and respondent Evan Sakuma (he/they/she), PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley whose work queerly interrogates Asian American forms of kinship making.
Sponsored by Boston University’s American and New England Studies; College of Fine Arts Dean Harvey Young’s office; English; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Location: Virtual
ABOUT SURFACE RELATIONS
“Surface Relations traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity.”
The introductory chapter is available for free at:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1899-5_601.pdf
ACCESSIBILITY & ACCOMMODATIONS
Captions and self-descriptions will be provided. Per BU guidelines, please contact ihowen@bu.edu three weeks prior to the event (August 31) to request other accommodations needed to support your full participation.