Speaker: Paul Nadal, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University
Moderator: Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, Visiting Scholar, WEAI, Columbia University
This paper reinterprets Asian American literature as a literature concerned with the art and practice of logistics, the set of contingent space-making techniques undergirding the global distribution of commercial goods. Comparing two pre-1965 Asian American texts, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), it reads how their thematic preoccupation with narrating a bounded ethnic self depends on an idiosyncratic practice of literary character: namely, the figuration of racialized personhood through a distributed network of logistical supply chains that was historically ascendent in the US during the early Cold War. Alongside archival research into the history of Cold War logistics, I show that “literary character” in Bulosan’s and Wong’s canonical Asian American memoirs arises out of a midcentury crisis of personhood that logistics as a social practice produced in its attempt to systematically disaggregate and diffuse all of social life into a number.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
