Books

Published

Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford UP, 2023) unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about “speech”: that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Refiguring Speech revisits the scene of speech’s ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment.

In Progress 

Realisms at the Brink: The Victorian Novel and Chinese Contemporary Film compares novels by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy with neorealist films by Chinese “Sixth Generation” directors–among them, Lóu Yè, Jiǎ Zhāngkē, and Wáng Xiǎoshuài. Realisms at the Brink conceptualizes Chinese neorealist film as a genre experiment that shares many “controls” with the Victorian novel. Both register similar historical forms-in-motion at human scale, such as industrial capitalism, urbanization, new global markets, resource extraction, and the rise of migrant labor. Situated within the recent turn towards “world” and “peripheral” realisms, this new project also decenters the nineteenth century Anglo-European novel as the premier object for leftist literary criticism. 

On Being Quiet: Asian Americans and the Death Drive considers a vital, under-theorized dimension of Asian American quietness by expanding existing work on Asian American racialization and psychoanalysis to account for binds on speech that emerge at the intersection of liberalist cultural imperatives in the U.S. and unacknowledged impact of twentieth century historical violence on the Asian continent on Asian diasporic families.