How are Asian American and Pacific Islander bodies figured across different media—in contemporary novels, poetry, and visual arts? How do the transits and residues of US empire across the Pacific inform these representations? This panel investigates texts that center AAPI bodies and their varying materialities, wherein racialized bodies take on other-than-human forms (i.e., paper, digital, textual, watery, earthy, animal, etc.). The panel aims to explore how these embodiments are shaped by the residual and ongoing violences of US empire and/or war in the Pacific. In dialogue with the NeMLA theme of “(R)evolution,” the panel inquires after the material transformation of racialized bodies and their potentially radical, imaginative ways of being and becoming—pushing the normative bounds of race, gender, and “humanity.”

This panel invites work that attends to Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural forms, including but not limited to analyses of literature, photography, film, and other visual arts. Papers that employ ecocritical, new materialist, and/or affective approaches that center race as a site of inquiry are welcome. Papers that foreground Native and Indigenous epistemologies are also welcome.

This panel investigates texts that center Asian American and Pacific Islander bodies and their varying materialities, wherein racialized bodies take on other-than-human forms (i.e., paper, digital, textual, watery, earthy, animal, etc.). The panel aims to explore how these embodiments are shaped by the residual and ongoing violences of US empire and/or war in the Pacific.