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 

On Being Quiet: Resisting the Talking Cure in Asian America (under contract with Bloomsbury) takes on controversial understandings of Asian Americans as quiet–and politically quietist–by alternatively theorizing “quiescence” (via Jean Laplanche reading Freud’s death drive) as a self-preservative adaptation amid specific binds on speaking wrought at the intersection of anti-Asian racism and unmetabolized Cold War era historical violence across the Asian continent.

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.