Geneaologies and Geographies of Anti-Asian/Asia Violences

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The impetus for this roundtable is the urgent need for a more expansive framing of anti-Asian violence, one that draws to the surface how prevailing narratives are irredeemably hitched to the dominant logics of recognition, rights, visibility, respectability, and the recuperation of social value. Bringing together critical voices that collectively address the logics and limits of anti-Asian violence, this roundtable will trouble the US-centric liberal discourse of “hate,” a framing that has proven quite recalcitrant in structuring prevailing understandings of anti-Asian violence. In particular, this dialogue will interrogate the problematic conflation of hate and violence by re-situating anti-Asian violence within the longer histories of settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism in which it has been forged.

As part of its intervention, the roundtable will attend to the multiple and different ways the geopolitical formation of Asia and Asianness is located in relation to the production of modalities of violence. The roundtable will examine how American Studies provides an invaluable vantage point for interrogating normative iterations of ant-Asian violence and at the same time, the roundtable will examine how a textured consideration of anti-Asian violence complicates the theories, methods, and project of American studies. Participants will do so by addressing and dialoguing together on the interconnections between issues, such as gendered violence, labor, carcerality, and a politics of solidarity. The dialogue will be based on the following questions, which are not meant to be exhaustive nor prescriptive but rather, an invitation or provocation:

• How is anti-Asian violence implicated in settler-colonial, postcolonial, and imperialist projects? What modalities of violence emerge when displacing the concept from the prevailing rubric of hate?

• Framing ‘Asia’ and its diasporas as fraught geopolitical formations, what kinds of linkages can and should be made between the Anti-Asian violence formative to various Asian diasporas and the political and social struggles against state-sanctioned violences that occur across the Asian region? How do we think about migration, labor, and carework as sites of contestation within these linkages?

• How do we trace and analyze the relational genealogies of Asianness and violence as grounded in the geographies of racial capitalism? For instance, what is the analytical pertinence of its articulations with anti-Blackness, capitalist accumulation, indigenous dispossession, militarization, and the ethno-nationalist ideologies of caste and global Islamophobia.

• Given these considerations, how do we conceptualize and engage with notions of complicity, responsibility, and refusal? How are they part of the configuration of possibility for transnational solidarities and movement-building in this current conjuncture?
Ultimately, the roundtable aims to move beyond familiar iterations of “Asianness” and “violence” and open up new visions for ways forward.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Dylan Rodriguez, University of California-Riverside

• Susan Thomas, Syracuse University

Panelists

• Tony Tiongson, Syracuse University

• Danika Fawn Medak-Saltzman, Syracuse University

• Edward Nadurata, University of California-Irvine

• Shebati Sengupta, University of New Mexico

• Soham Patel, University of North Carolina at Chapel H

• Elena Shih, Brown University

Comment

• Dylan Rodriguez, University of California-Riverside

Biographical Information

Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih is the author of two books: Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehabilitation, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press), and White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Racism of Anti-Trafficking (Routledge). Recent op-eds about her research and organizing as a core collective member of Red Canary Song appear in the New York Times and Providence Journal.

Soham Patel is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose work focuses on radical migrant histories, with a particular emphasis on the South Asian diaspora. His scholarship has appeared in Asia Shorts, CounterPunch, Ethnic Studies Review, Journal of Asian American Studies, and ReOrient: Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. He teaches courses on U.S. imperialism, radical internationalism, and social movements. His current book project, A Man Without a Country: Eqbal Ahmad and the Third World, explores the overlooked history of South Asian radical intellectual Eqbal Ahmad and his engagements with anticolonial thought and social movements across Africa, Asia, and the United States. Soham holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Starting Fall 2025, he will be an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Susan Thomas is an educational anthropologist and Associate Professor in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University. Her work focuses on migration, global education, and South Asian transnationality. She has written on questions related to debt, precarity, educational migration, race and caste violences, and the politics of resistance within South Asian diasporas. Thomas’s scholarship has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. She is also the author of the book, Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University (University of Chicago Press).

Edward Nadurata is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine with Graduate Emphases in Medical Humanities and Asian American Studies. He was an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow for 2023-2024 and a Visiting Fellow in the University of the Philippines’s Third World Studies Center. His research is on care, retirement, and aging in the Philippines amidst sustained labor migration and the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies and Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. He received his M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA. His work can be found in Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation, Amerasia, and in forthcoming volume Genealogies of Anti-Asian/Asian Violence, from Fordham University Press.

Danika Medak-Saltzman is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and faculty affiliate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and the Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice at Syracuse University. Her work spans American Studies, pop culture, Indigenous studies, feminist futures, disability studies, transnational Indigeneity, comparative settler-colonialisms, as well as media and visual cultural studies. Her current book project examines the transnational movement of American colonial policies–particularly in the case of Japan—and deploys a critical Indigenous studies lens to consider how what she calls the “specters of colonialism,” that function to hide the human cost of colonialism, help to obscure what she describes as the “inter-imperial intimacies” animating global colonialism in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Medak-Saltzman has published widely, placing articles in American Quarterly, The Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, Studies in American Indian Literature, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Critical Asian Studies, Feminist Formations, and most recently in the new feminist journal Gatherings. Alongside Iyko Day of Mount Holyoke College, Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. of Syracuse University, and Shanté Paradigm Smalls of NYU, Medak-Saltzman is co-editor of the “Critical Race, Indigeneity and Relationality” book series for Temple University Press. Medak-Saltzman is also co-PI on a National Science Foundation grant (through the NSF’s Arctic Social Sciences Division) with PI Chie Sakakibara of Syracuse University where they are working on a project called “Indigenous Northern Landscapes, Visual Repatriation, and Collaborative Knowledge Exchange” that is currently in its second of three funded years.

Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a job at the University of California, Riverside since 2001. He is Distinguished Professor in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021 and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream.

Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. He received his PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego in 2006. His current project, tentatively titled Archives of Comparative Racialization and the Problematics of Comparative Critique, constitutes a critical engagement with the emergent scholarship on comparative racialization and more broadly, the emergence of critical ethnic studies as an intellectual and political project. He is co-editor of the anthology titled Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation (Fordham University Press, 2022; co-edited with Rick Bonus); co-editor of a special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies exploring the perils and possibilities of comparative critique (Fall 2015; co-edited with Danika Medak-Saltzman); author of Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-hop Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); and co-editor of Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse (Temple University Press, 2006; co-edited with Edgardo V. Gutierrez and Ricardo V. Gutierrez). He is also co-editor of the “Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality” book series (Temple University Press, 2016-present; with Danika Medak-Saltzman and Iyko Day). The book series showcases comparative studies of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity in projects that take a self-reflexive approach in their deployment of relational frameworks and analytics.

Shebati Sengupta (they/she) is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Their dissertation focuses on Asian American embodiment during COVID-19, relating the corporeal experiences of state violence and mutual aid to performances of US sovereignty. Her research interests include speculative fiction, Asian American futurisms, and poetry, which they understand as ways of theorizing alternate worlds and ontologies. At UNM, Shebati is a TA for the WGSS Program. Previously, she has taught Intro to Politics in Popular Culture and Intro to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They also developed and taught the first iteration of Intro to Asian American Studies ever offered at UNM. Right now, Shebati is the co-graduate student representative for the Association for Asian American Studies Feminisms Caucus. In the past, they’ve held fellowships at Roots, Wounds, Words, for speculative fiction; VONA, for poetry; and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Shebati was also the 2024 Garlic Poet Laureate for the Toronto Garlic Festival, where she learned a lot about her favorite allium.