Imagining Elsewheres: Speculating the Asian Diaspora in North America, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Lee, Su Young
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 16, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Nancy Tuana, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Tina Goudie, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Claire Colebrook, Major Field Member
Christian Haines, Major Field Member
Jooyeon Rhee, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- Asian America
Asian diasporas
speculative - Abstract:
- “Imagining Elsewheres: Speculating the Asian Diaspora in North America, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand” develops “elsewheres” as a concept to rethink approaches to studying the Asian diaspora. Reinterpreting Kandice Chuh’s renowned call for Asian American studies to imagine itself otherwise, I argue Asian Americanist critique and other Asian diasporic scholarship can imagine themselves in many elsewheres and see themselves anew. If Asian America dominates media and literary representations of Asian diasporas in the West, which still shape other nations’ attitudes towards their Asian communities, I ask how often Asian America looks to other “Asian Elsewheres.” By de-centering but also recognizing the fruitfulness of engaging with Asian America as a point of reference, I look to fictional narratives with concerns that may feel familiar to Asian America but emerge from non-US locations—whether they materialize from other countries like Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, or they imagine an America drastically reshaped. While the description of “elsewhere” usually means something insignificant, unfamiliar, or geographically distant, I argue elsewhereness as method emphasizes the relationalities between Asian diasporas that imagines a cross-disciplinary political formation against globally circulated forms of anti-Asian racism, especially through the affordances of “speculative” fiction. Reimagining alternative groupings of conversations from traditional categories of knowledge and cultural production based on geography or the nation-state, this project explores how understandings of the Asian diaspora might be reconfigured around temporary and event-based affiliations, such as Japanese civilian internments during World War II, affective experiences, such as the cognitive dissonance created through the model minority myth, or more-than-human entanglements, such as the assumptions of invasiveness shared between anti-Asian narratives and nonhuman species.