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Foreign Literature Studies by Andy Wang
Cultural Studies, 2017
This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its mom... more This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its moments of emergence and the projects it strives to accomplish with recent updates. While it is inevitable that a survey of this nature is doomed to be cursory and selective, it hopes to delineate and address the predicaments of cultural studies in and from Taiwan and the struggles therein, as it strives not only to get its voices heard, but also to chart a critical path towards the decolonization of our consciousness.
Conference Presentations by Andy Wang
This panel explores variegated conditions and people’s responses to the neoliberal changes in Eas... more This panel explores variegated conditions and people’s responses to the neoliberal changes in East Asia. In the past decades, East Asia has been experiencing a very condensed and extensive neoliberalization, but its processes and structural changes have been differently implemented and materialized in different cities and districts. Although per capital incomes gradually increased in many parts, the intensive neoliberalization could not provide solution to polarization of populace. The failure of the neoliberal reform not only resulted in growing economic inequality, but also made people discontent with the current changes.
This panel discusses the diverse ramification of neoliberal changes to people and their variant responses such as their cooperation, negotiation, contestation or resistance against the structural changes. It considers both people’s predicaments in urban and rural areas, and the public movements including the Sunflower movements in Taiwan, and the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong. In so doing, this panel aims at understanding multiplicity and contradiction of people’s conditions under neoliberalization, which it refers to the states of precarity. Understanding of people’s precarious states would be critical with capturing the characteristics of the neoliberal conjuncture in East Asia. The neoliberal conjuncture in East Asia would demonstrate both continuities and ruptures in relation to neoliberalization of the other parts of the world. Meanwhile, the efforts of exploring the neoliberal conjunctures of East Asia will contribute both to indicating that there are different paths to the modes of modern livings (or predicaments) and to providing useful resources for theorizing multiple modernities in the world.
Sinophone Articulations by Andy Wang
Book Reviews by Andy Wang
Transpacific Approaches to Asian/American Studies by Andy Wang
Trans-Asia as Method, 2019
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2019
Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in... more Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. The defector/refugee figure often rests upon a transpacific passage from Asia to North America and is embedded in the inter-Asian history of the Cold War. The co-mingling of transpacific and inter-Asian factors provides us with a comparative lens to view the transnational minority formation of the Asian American in relation to borderland subjects such as the North Korean defector/refugee and the Joseonjok (Korean Chinese) who have remained invisible to them until now. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.
Intrigued by the question of diasporic return, this article is concerned with the cultural politi... more Intrigued by the question of diasporic return, this article is concerned with the cultural politics of what I call “homecoming stories” of the Vietnamese diaspora. In order not to be confused with the imaginary returns that have been practiced in many Vietnamese-US writings, such as Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge (1997) or Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted (2001), this article focuses instead on Vietnamese-US narratives about the experience of physical returns by looking at Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala (1999) and Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams (2005). Understanding that ethnic memoirs are not to be read only as testimonies of war and personal traumas, this article argues that these two texts represent what critic Rocio G. Davis calls “relational life writing” that aims to intervene in the contested terrains of trans-Pacific memories and geopolitics. It further argues that Pham's and Lam's homecoming stories not only reconfigure the “refugee subjectivity” of Vietnamese diaspora but also recast Asian American studies in diasporic contexts by taking the aspirations and concerns of Vietnam seriously, although their journeys “home” are by no means patriotic returns but only temporary visits. These return narratives are significantly framed in the contentious memories of war and survival and are triangulated in the complex relations between the United States, Vietnam, and Vietnamese America. Via a critical reading of Catfish and Mandala and Perfume Dreams, this article seeks to engage with the ongoing conversations about transnational Asian American studies by working through the issue of Asian-US relations.
Cultural Studies, 2017
This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its mom... more This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its moments of emergence and the projects it strives to accomplish with recent updates. While it is inevitable that a survey of this nature is doomed to be cursory and selective, it hopes to delineate and address the predicaments of cultural studies in and from Taiwan and the struggles therein, as it strives not only to get its voices heard, but also to chart a critical path towards the decolonization of our consciousness.
This panel explores variegated conditions and people’s responses to the neoliberal changes in Eas... more This panel explores variegated conditions and people’s responses to the neoliberal changes in East Asia. In the past decades, East Asia has been experiencing a very condensed and extensive neoliberalization, but its processes and structural changes have been differently implemented and materialized in different cities and districts. Although per capital incomes gradually increased in many parts, the intensive neoliberalization could not provide solution to polarization of populace. The failure of the neoliberal reform not only resulted in growing economic inequality, but also made people discontent with the current changes.
This panel discusses the diverse ramification of neoliberal changes to people and their variant responses such as their cooperation, negotiation, contestation or resistance against the structural changes. It considers both people’s predicaments in urban and rural areas, and the public movements including the Sunflower movements in Taiwan, and the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong. In so doing, this panel aims at understanding multiplicity and contradiction of people’s conditions under neoliberalization, which it refers to the states of precarity. Understanding of people’s precarious states would be critical with capturing the characteristics of the neoliberal conjuncture in East Asia. The neoliberal conjuncture in East Asia would demonstrate both continuities and ruptures in relation to neoliberalization of the other parts of the world. Meanwhile, the efforts of exploring the neoliberal conjunctures of East Asia will contribute both to indicating that there are different paths to the modes of modern livings (or predicaments) and to providing useful resources for theorizing multiple modernities in the world.
Trans-Asia as Method, 2019
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2019
Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in... more Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. The defector/refugee figure often rests upon a transpacific passage from Asia to North America and is embedded in the inter-Asian history of the Cold War. The co-mingling of transpacific and inter-Asian factors provides us with a comparative lens to view the transnational minority formation of the Asian American in relation to borderland subjects such as the North Korean defector/refugee and the Joseonjok (Korean Chinese) who have remained invisible to them until now. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.
Intrigued by the question of diasporic return, this article is concerned with the cultural politi... more Intrigued by the question of diasporic return, this article is concerned with the cultural politics of what I call “homecoming stories” of the Vietnamese diaspora. In order not to be confused with the imaginary returns that have been practiced in many Vietnamese-US writings, such as Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge (1997) or Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted (2001), this article focuses instead on Vietnamese-US narratives about the experience of physical returns by looking at Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala (1999) and Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams (2005). Understanding that ethnic memoirs are not to be read only as testimonies of war and personal traumas, this article argues that these two texts represent what critic Rocio G. Davis calls “relational life writing” that aims to intervene in the contested terrains of trans-Pacific memories and geopolitics. It further argues that Pham's and Lam's homecoming stories not only reconfigure the “refugee subjectivity” of Vietnamese diaspora but also recast Asian American studies in diasporic contexts by taking the aspirations and concerns of Vietnam seriously, although their journeys “home” are by no means patriotic returns but only temporary visits. These return narratives are significantly framed in the contentious memories of war and survival and are triangulated in the complex relations between the United States, Vietnam, and Vietnamese America. Via a critical reading of Catfish and Mandala and Perfume Dreams, this article seeks to engage with the ongoing conversations about transnational Asian American studies by working through the issue of Asian-US relations.
The introductory chapter to Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia, edited by Chih... more The introductory chapter to Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia, edited by Chih-ming Wang and Daniel PS Goh
The Sunflower Movement that took place in Taiwan in spring 2014 has been an epochal event for Tai... more The Sunflower Movement that took place in Taiwan in spring 2014 has been an epochal event for Taiwan, China, and East Asia. Many critics identified China as the most important factor for triggering the movement, while others emphasized the internal contradictions of economy, politics, and culture within Taiwan as reasons for its outburst. Although the Sunflower Movement has been treated as Taiwanese resistance to political and economic integration with China under the framework of free trade and the World Trade Organization, few have considered the discourses of neoliberalism surrounding and instigating it as the conditions of subjectivity in which Taiwanese youth apprehend their place and future. In the Sunflower Movement, neoliberalism is prominently associated with worries about the future, where college students on the verge of entering the job market feel ambivalent about their career prospects and life choices. These young people feel a sharp sense of deprivation and a strong anxiety about Chinese competition. How do we theorize such anxieties about the future in relation to neoliberalism as a structure of feeling, and such anxious subjects, in relation to Taiwan's status? This article addresses these issues by conceptualizing the Sunflower Movement as an affective-political outburst of discontents that sits uncomfortably with the future of neoliberal globalization as the ontology of being.
Written in the first-person narrative, Gold by the Inch describes an Asian American’s exotic, ero... more Written in the first-person narrative, Gold by the Inch describes an Asian American’s exotic, erotic trip to Bangkok and his return to Penang, Malaysia, in search of the memory of his grandmother, who embodies the rooted multiculturalism of Southeast Asia as a nexus of desire, migration, colonialism, and capital, East and West. The text is a poetic and critical weaving of multiple histories—of both of the narrator and the region—that hinges upon the quest for queer desire—to be fulfilled in the exchange of money and body—and the narrative of return as defined by the inaccessibility of origin. An “Asian American” novel that reaches beyond the geographical frontiers of America and relinquishes the obsession with a resistant and positive identity, Gold by the Inch introduces a decadent, self-reflexive, queer view into the existing discourses of multiculturalism by outlining how the capitalist colonial domination inheres in the eclipse of the multicultural history on the ground, the history of the outcast and the downtrodden. In doing so, it reminds us of the liberatory promise of multiculturalism and how it is linked to the aspirations of queer freedom and labor migration. Moreover, in depicting an Asian American subject as both a quester for roots and a consumer of sex, the text breaks new grounds for Asian American literature, asking us to face the tension of transnational encounters as we hold fast to the dream of interethnic alliance. Multiculturalism, cast in this light, is not about embracing an identity or cultural origin, but living in a world made of colliding dreams.
Amerasia Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 2016, pp. 43-68.
Co-authored by Pin-chia Feng, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Shyh-jen Fuh, Guy Beauregard, and Chih-ming Wang. T... more Co-authored by Pin-chia Feng, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Shyh-jen Fuh, Guy Beauregard, and Chih-ming Wang. This forum engages with the Summer Institute in Asian American Studies (SIAAS) project, a multi-campus initiative dedicated to furthering Asian American Studies in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. Since our first event in Taipei in 2013, the SIAAS project has brought together students and scholars and community and cultural workers from four continents for a series of summer institutes that have featured formal talks, seminars, roundtable and panel discussions, literary readings, film and video screenings, research sharing sessions, field visits, and small-group break-out sessions led by scholars from around Asia. This forum investigates the stakes involved in organizing and contributing to these events. We ask: What are some of the conditions that have made our project possible in Taiwan? How have SIAAS events changed our views of Asian American Studies and its presumed subjects of analysis, especially concerning its engagement with "Asia"? In what ways have these events affected our teaching and learning, both inside and outside the classroom? And what might the SIAAS project indicate about the institutionalization of Asian American Studies as it has taken an international turn?
![Research paper thumbnail of Bob Dylan in China, America in Bob Dylan: Visions of Social Beatitude and Critique [Chinese translation]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37339481/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This is Chinese-language translation of "Bob Dylan in China, America in Bob Dylan: Visions of Soc... more This is Chinese-language translation of "Bob Dylan in China, America in Bob Dylan: Visions of Social Beatitude and Critique," based initially on a talk at the Bookman cultural studies series in Taipei and at the University of Hong Kong and Tsiinghua University in Beijing. This essay focuses on US/China interactions, uncanny temporalities, and Pacific Rim discrepancies of dissemination resonating through popular culture and belief systems as embodied in Bob Dylan’s conversion-drenched poetics (aligned to social beatitude) and protest politics (aligned to critique and allegory). Building out from the “Dylan controversy” of spring 2011, this analysis probes Dylan’s post-Beat poetic tactics from works like “All Along the Watchtower” and “Chimes of Freedom” to socialist-Judeo-Christian works of blasted prophecy from the more recent albums Modern Times and Tempest. “Bob Dylan in China, America in Bob Dylan” opens into transnational dynamics, transcultural wariness, and the post-Jeremaic aims of American cultural poetics and politics in contexts of globalization, global China, the efficacy of popular culture as a mode of transformation, amid perduring Asia-Pacific differences.
This talk begins with remembering the 1970s movement in North America, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to p... more This talk begins with remembering the 1970s movement in North America, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to protect the liminal islands between Okinawa, Taiwan, and China, called Diaoyutai in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. Like the South China Sea dispute, the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands are one of the most controversial liminal spaces that locks in the secrets of geopolitics and national sovereignty. Remembering the controversy and the activism around it provides us with a unique perspective into the making of post/colonial geography and post/Cold War complications. While the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands are often framed as a territorial dispute between Japan and China, the history of activism around them articulates a "liminal island chain" as the frontline of democracy that links Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, all of which are victims of colonialism and the Westphalian system that are now shaking towards uncertain futures. Taking the liminal islands as zones of indecisive sovereignty, border economy, and policed spaces, this talk addresses how Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, despite their obvious differences, when put together, may generate a set of debates on nationalism as colonialism in which liminality as both metaphor and reality compels us to explore alternative visions. At a time when nationalism loses its appeal as a unifier, and nativism aligns with populism, it may be time to reflect on the geographical imaginations of islands and their relationship to one another.