American Quarterly Special Issue: The Chinese Factor

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This roundtable, sponsored by American Quarterly, features contributors to the Fall 2017 special issue of the journal, which expands existing paradigms for comprehending the rise of China discourse vis-à-vis the place of the United States in the world. As the media war during and after the 2016 US presidential election season made clear, the persistent iteration of the Yellow Peril discourse reproduces and reifies China as a threatening and monolithic alterity. As such, this dominant discourse often erases and obscures heterogeneous genealogies, critical contestations, and translocal formations within and across China, Asia, the Pacific, and beyond. The essays featured in this special issue expand our critical understanding of the United States’ schizophrenic imaginings of China and their implications, as China has risen from the ashes of the Cold War to this moment of neoliberal precarity as the United States’ greatest creditor, supplier, and contender for hegemony. As the United States’ premier object of love and hate, China has functioned as a key historical, material, and cultural force in the U.S. effort at remaking itself in response to the shifting world order. To illuminate what lies beyond accepted scholarly and popular narratives about this formation, the essays in this special issue draw upon less familiar or new cultural and historical archives and analytical frameworks. In their ambitious endeavors at mapping openings onto alternative routes of knowledge, cultural, and social formations as well as political affiliations within and beyond the orbits of empires, these essays also actively facilitate self-reflexive dialogues between American studies, critical ethnic studies, and Asian studies.

This roundtable features six of the essay contributors who are included in the special issue. Their essays cover a wide variety of topics that address the complex dimensions and effects of “the Chinese factor” in American imagination. In their presentations, the contributors will reflect on how their work is in conversation with the broader themes of the special issue.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Yu-Fang Cho, Miami University

Panelists

• Neda Atanasoski, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Eric Covey

• Daryl Maeda, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Shuang Shen, Penn State University

• Lily Wong, American University

Comment

• Yu-Fang Cho, Miami University