This seminar aims to assess and augment contemporary frameworks of Asian American racial formation through prisms of in-group relationality. Inspired by recent attention to questions regarding Asian American life and possibility under the frameworks of inscrutability (Vivian L. Huang, Sunny Xiang), mediation (Feng-Mei Heberer), and administered affects (erin Khuê Ninh, Jeffrey Santa Ana), we are interested in how Asian American literary and cultural discourses thematize  Asian American sociality against and beyond anti-Asian conditions through community, collectivity, and intimacy.

We are particularly eager to read proposals that take on a comparative and/or interdisciplinary approach to our topic, including questions of comparative racialization and transpacific Asian racial formations. We also invite papers that engage Asian American and other minoritized discourses from standpoints of intramural relation, including but not limited to critical engagements with Asian, Asian American, and/or people-of-color

- interpersonal intimacy and/or its failures;

- inscrutability, opacity, legibility;

- accessibility and inaccessibility;

- conviviality, filiality, kinship, solidarity;

- enclave, provincial, regional intimacies;

- relating the text and reader;

- contemporary cultural production;

- political alliance and people-of-color consciousness;

- reinterpretations of canonical texts and figures.

Please contact Emily Yoon (eky@umbc.edu) and/or Seulghee Lee (seulghee@mailbox.sc.edu)  with any questions ahead of the submission deadline.