Alt-Right Asians

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

How does the figure of the “alt-right Asian” help us understand what kind of America in which we are living? Since emerging in the mid-2010s, the “alternative right” and its ideologies have risen to mainstream prominence, enabled by years of unfettered ethnonationalist, eugenicist, and incel disinformation. While many of the identifiable groups associated with the alt-right collapsed due to organizational floundering and failure to actualize a “white ethnostate,” a hallmark of the alt-right was an embrace of its nonwhite, and, in particular, its Asian American supporters. While railing against liberal multiculturalism, alt-right Asians continuously deploy their own identity politics against criticisms of Western chauvinism and white supremacy. This roundtable dissects some of the emergent, reactionary Asian/American actors and coalitions that have formed in the wake of the alt-right’s seeming collapse or resurgence. Starting from the premise that the alt-right is neither a singular nor unified movement, this roundtable brings together scholars and community activists to discuss how the term, “alt-right,” nevertheless consolidates the anti-homeless, anti-Black, and transmisogynistic rhetorics that have come to characterize both neoconservative and neoliberal Asian American political formations.

Responding to the theme of “late-stage American empire,” this roundtable asks how both multiculturalism and its backlashes figure into our perpetual end-times. Building on Jodi Kim’s assertion that the multiple ends of (American) empire are “incomplete, full of contradictions, impossibilities, and at times certain failures,” this roundtable considers the paradoxes by which alt-right Asians have structured the vulgar acceleration and precision of empire. Each roundtable participant will discuss a different stream of alt-right Asian American formation and its relationship to real estate and gentrification, tech industries, the carceral state, and social media platforms. In this roundtable, we seek to think creatively and collectively about how to lay bare the collusion of Asian American identitarian and alt-right ideologies, and, to undermine (if not eliminate) the conditions that make the “alt-right Asian” possible.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Mariam Lam, University of California-Riverside

Panelists

• Christopher J Lee, Emerson College

• Jasmine Ehrhardt, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Ren-yo Hwang, Mount Holyoke College

• Toshio Meronek, Journalist

Biographical Information

Panelist: Christopher J. Lee is an assistant professor of Queer Studies at Emerson College. Their writing is published or forthcoming in The New Inquiry, Women and Performance, the SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking. They currently serve on the board of the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), a coalition of Southeast Asian young people, queer and trans youth of color, and survivors of state violence organizing against policing, detention, and deportation.

Panelist: Jasmine Ehrhardt is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their work has appeared in Journal of Visual Culture and Afterimage.

Panelist: Ren-yo Hwang is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. Their scholarship examines late twentieth-century carceral technologies, abolition, transformative justice, and QTBIPoC antiviolence activism and visual cultures of resistance. They currently serve on the board of Dignity Power Now and are a member of the anticarceral support network Trans Advocacy Group (TAG).

Panelist: Toshio Meronek’s collaboration with activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary (Verso Books), received the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, and will soon be available in Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Their writing has also appeared in Al Jazeera, The Nation, Them, Truthout and Vice News, and they host the weekly podcast Sad Francisco, covering solutions to neoliberalism's worst innovations.

Moderator/Chair: Mariam B. Lam, PhD is Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, faculty in Comparative Literature, and cooperating faculty in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. Her academic research centers on arts and cultures, media development, diaspora and globalization, gender and sexuality, trauma, minoritization and academic disciplinarity.

Respondent: Sharon Luk is currently an associate professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Geographies of Racialization at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living beyond Captivity (2018, University of California Press).