Aimee Bahng | Pomona College (original) (raw)

Articles and Book Chapters by Aimee Bahng

Research paper thumbnail of #BlackLivesMatter and Feminist Pedagogy: Teaching a Movement Unfolding

Book Chapters by Aimee Bahng

Research paper thumbnail of The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture

Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020

The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacifi... more The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Oceanic studies. In particular, following Lisa Yoneyama’s model for examining “decolonial genealogies of transpacific studies,” such a reevaluation emphasizes interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and, above all, a reckoning with settler taxonomies of intellectual production as vital to the continued use of the term. Beginning with a review of key scholarly interventions into the “settler colonial grammar of AA/PI,” this article relates the US histories and logics that first produced the categories “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” and brought them into categorical relation with one another. These historical entanglements between diasporic and Indigenous movements across and through the Pacific, can be understood through cultural analysis of literary works that reconfigure transpacific studies around Oceanic passages and Pacific currents highlighting an Indigenous-centered regional formation. Rather than allowing transpacific discourses to dismiss the Pacific Islands as distant or remote “islands in a far sea,” such an approach recasts the region along the lines of what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa formulates as an interconnected “sea of islands.” It concludes by considering the ongoing harm produced by settler epistemologies of possessive liberal

Papers by Aimee Bahng

Research paper thumbnail of Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction

Journal of Asian American Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Speculative acts : the cultural labors of science, fiction, and empire

Research paper thumbnail of Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification

Journal of American Studies, 2015

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical ... more In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fictionSalt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.

Research paper thumbnail of Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Melus, Dec 22, 2008

Page 1. Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of K... more Page 1. Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Aimee Bahng University of California, San Diego I will outnumber you. I will outbillion you. I am the spectacle in the forest. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Queering The Matrix: Hacking the Digital Divide and Slashing into the Future

... perpetuation of the species, and the conflation of these procreative demands with the raciali... more ... perpetuation of the species, and the conflation of these procreative demands with the racialization of Zion ... Landscapes of sexuality get mapped onto the already-racialized spaces of the films. ... restricted to virtual Matrix spaces, positing queerness as a sort of synthetic sexuality.8 If ...

Research paper thumbnail of The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture

Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020

The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacifi... more The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Oceanic studies. In particular, following Lisa Yoneyama’s model for examining “decolonial genealogies of transpacific studies,” such a reevaluation emphasizes interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and, above all, a reckoning with settler taxonomies of intellectual production as vital to the continued use of the term. Beginning with a review of key scholarly interventions into the “settler colonial grammar of AA/PI,” this article relates the US histories and logics that first produced the categories “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” and brought them into categorical relation with one another. These historical entanglements between diasporic and Indigenous movements across and through the Pacific, can be understood through cultural analysis of literary works that reconfigure transpacific studies around Oceanic passages and Pacific currents highlighting an Indigenous-centered regional formation. Rather than allowing transpacific discourses to dismiss the Pacific Islands as distant or remote “islands in a far sea,” such an approach recasts the region along the lines of what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa formulates as an interconnected “sea of islands.” It concludes by considering the ongoing harm produced by settler epistemologies of possessive liberal

Research paper thumbnail of Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction

Journal of Asian American Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Speculative acts : the cultural labors of science, fiction, and empire

Research paper thumbnail of Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification

Journal of American Studies, 2015

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical ... more In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fictionSalt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.

Research paper thumbnail of Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Melus, Dec 22, 2008

Page 1. Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of K... more Page 1. Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Aimee Bahng University of California, San Diego I will outnumber you. I will outbillion you. I am the spectacle in the forest. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Queering The Matrix: Hacking the Digital Divide and Slashing into the Future

... perpetuation of the species, and the conflation of these procreative demands with the raciali... more ... perpetuation of the species, and the conflation of these procreative demands with the racialization of Zion ... Landscapes of sexuality get mapped onto the already-racialized spaces of the films. ... restricted to virtual Matrix spaces, positing queerness as a sort of synthetic sexuality.8 If ...