Summer Kim Lee
University of California, Los Angeles, English, Faculty Member
- Dartmouth College, English, Faculty Memberadd
What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these... more
What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these questions, articulating the political desires for Asian American representation, recognition, and inclusion, while at the same time remaining wary of how such desires reiterate liberal multiculturalist dis courses of assimilation and inclusion. A growing body of interdisciplinary work in Ameri can studies, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies, and sound and popular music studies has addressed the historical emergence, visibility, and representation of Asian Americans in popular music. This work has become less con cerned with finding out what "Asian American popular music" is and more interested in how Asian Americanist critique can be rooted in minoritarian listening practices so that one might consider the myriad ways Asian Americans-as professional and amateur per formers, musicians, virtuosic singers, karaoke goers, YouTube users, listeners, critics, and fans-actively shape and negotiate the soundscapes of US popular music with its vi sual, sonic, and other sensorial markers of Asian racialization.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This introduction offers contingency as a framework for Asian American and minoritarian world-making in the face of ongoing crisis, precarity, and violence. During the time of a pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, the uprisings... more
This introduction offers contingency as a framework for Asian American and minoritarian world-making in the face of ongoing crisis, precarity, and violence. During the time of a pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, the uprisings calling for the abolition of police and prisons, and a public reckoning with the safety, support, and “diversity” of staff, students, and faculty within the academy, how have contingency plans become critical, necessary sites for building feminist and queer of color affiliations and coalitions beyond the scope of institutionality? How is Asian American performance the site where such contingencies and their emergent relations are acted out and made possible? Contingency plans are made to be used during the perceived exceptionality of a crisis and so rarely used. Yet in the current moment, they have come to constitute everyday life, not as solutions, but as the place from which we express dissatisfaction and a desire for something more. What relations can and has contingency given form, dimension, and weight to, across differential, entangled histories of crisis, empire, and capital? Here, we offer frameworks for this issue’s navigation of the promise of institutionality, disciplinary formations, and the forging of connections through practices of relationality, care, and interdisciplinarity.
Research Interests:
Review of Cynthia Wu, Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).