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 foundational Asian Americanist debates about subjecthood via misanthropy and its others: resentment, asociality, rigidity, reservation, self-indulgence/pity, idleness, and isolation.

We linger with how misanthropy and its kin 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 communities. Engaging such unsavory feelings/relations, we explore how contemporary Asian American creatives/commentators trouble familiar models for apprehending “Asian American” 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• Note the critical labor of withdrawn subjects without reducing it to repair of racial trauma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 resentment, bitterness, and even arrogance as rich for critiquing social norms without necessarily redeeming the subject
• See the resurgence of genres like memoir, such as Michelle Zauner’s bestselling Crying in H Mart, and literary satire, such as Tony Tulathimutte’s polarizing Rejection, 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 isolated, parochial spaces for spatial-inflected affects in and of themselves and not as sites requiring corrective representation among the whole
• Value constraint and limit when theorizing subjecthood without making such traits synonymous with violent binarism