Over twenty years ago, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Race and Resistance claimed Asian American studies was stuck in a “model minorities” vs. “bad subjects” binary when evaluating the objects of its inquiry. Haunted by the specter of the model minority, Asian Americanists sought to reject this and see themselves and cultural figures in their work as “bad subjects,” or those who openly resist assimilation, leading to the commoditization of difference. Similarly, Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise addressed how the commoditization of difference and Asian American literature among the university sustained multicultural nationalism and transnational capitalism, then calling for a “subjectless discourse” that centered critique over an essentialist identity-based paradigm of authentic representation. Reconsidering subjecthood in wake of scholarly trends that have prioritized non-representation and decentering the subject, we seek to reinvigorate and build on prior Asian Americanist discourses about subjecthood by expanding their scope to the level of global Asian cultural production via themes of misanthropy, unruliness, inconvenience, ambivalence, and other socially troublesome states.We linger with how these states index not non-relation but a dense entanglement with the social itself–one inspired by feminist/queer theorists like Sara Ahmed (The Cultural Politics of Emotion) and Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings) who study the culturally-specific nature of the feedback loop between emotions and their circulation among the public sphere as affect in-and-through racialized objects, bodies, and spaces. Engaging such feelings and relations, we explore how Asian/Asian American creatives trouble familiar models for apprehending subjecthood and subjectlessness. Taken by recent provocations like Vivian Huang’s centering of “inscrutability” to study minoritarian aesthetic and affective modes that “negotiate formal legibility with sociopolitical “viability” and Summer Kim Lee’s sustained attention to the “spoiled” (to those “shorn parts, discarded for the sake of repair”) this seminar asks how we can:

• Note the critical labor of withdrawn subjects without reducing it to repair of racial trauma; value reservation as neither apolitical or assimilatory
• See uncertainty, refusal, and even arrogance as rich for critiquing social norms without necessarily redeeming the subject
• See the resurgence of genres like popular memoir and literary satire as illuminating tensions of address, legitimacy, and audience
• Probe how such tensions manifest across filmic and televisual works and their reception, along with “low brow” internet culture
• Value constraint and limit when theorizing subjecthood without making such traits synonymous with violent binarism