Imperial Surplus: Dissent in the Visual and Material Remainders of Power

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel contends disparate connections, uneven sedimentations of imperial governance, and consequences of debris can provide generative possibilities for recharting spatial and temporal entanglements of “relational histories” across Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Recent invocations of the region have often been framed by global economic shifts and neoliberal capitalism, but we suggest attending to the living and non-living refuse of imperial contact, failed projects of state-based social protection, and capitalist market -- what remains and how those remains dictate quotidian life -- are critical to making connections that may not be readily visible.

Shifting our attention to the material and immaterial forms of empire, we envision how the confluence of transpacific engagements might broaden the horizons, methods, and scales of analysis of imperial governance and the practices of dissent produced by redundant populations generated in its wake. Material and immaterial forms of empire are manifest in the practices that produce war waste, visual culture, urban occupations, labor migrations, autobiographies, and memorializations that bear possibilities for dissent and yield new futurities. Simultaneously, we recognize how unexpected places, spaces, and objects are lodged, embodied and expressed are always already racialized, as well as gendered; yet also present speculative and material possibilities for dissent, refusal, and resistance to such imperial projects.

Davorn Sisavath turns to the continued violence of military waste material to reveal how scrap metal in Detroit and Laos are linked through the circuits of empire. Trung Nguyen studies how Vietnamese artists use materials left behind after the Vietnam War to present a reading practice of historical atrocity that differ from dominant progress narratives accompanying intervention. Anthony Kim witnesses the queer, life-affirming practices trafficked in through comparative sites of social dissolution in the visual culture of contemporary Black and Asian film. Rachel Lim analyzes dissent among South Koreans, Korean Americans, and Korean Mexicans and the reproduction of unequal power relations in the imagination of a global Korean diaspora.

Together, the papers attend to the following questions: How do cultural texts produce pedagogies of dissent to imperial projects in Asia and the Pacific?; How might the afterlives of material objects complicate the topologies of imperial terrains?; and How do the aesthetics of dissent both challenge and respond to the pedagogical imperatives of imperial power?

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Simeon Man, University of California, San Diego

Individual Presentations

• Intimate Lighting: Queer Urban Aesthetics in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night - Anthony Kim

• Places of Dissent: Looking Beyond Ruins and Decay - Davorn Sisavath, California State University, Fresno

• Post-War Visuality: Afterimages and Images After the Corpse - Trung PQ Nguyen, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Hemispheric Korean Americas: Diasporic Refusal among Korean Descendants in Mérida, México - Rachel H. Lim, University of California, Berkeley

Comment

• Simeon Man, University of California, San Diego