Abstract Book of the 8th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences Studies
Year: 2025
DOI:
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The Power of Populations Underrepresented by the State: How Asian American Literature Enables Liberated Futures
Caroline Basha
ABSTRACT:
Asian American literature explores themes of identity and resistance through personal and collective histories and can be internalized as models to understand the weight of relationality in developing agency. Through Yuri Kochiyama’s Passing it On: A Memoir (2004) and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2021), I investigate how Asian American authors write to push past identitarian themes to question who can establish agency and how they use their subject positions to enact change in their environments. I argue that these authors redefine agency through shifting relational power dynamics resulting from orientalizing perspectives in the context of racism and sexuality discourses. Yuri Kochiyama articulates a relationality with other underrepresented groups that are based on love, for example, through her empathy for Malcolm X. Ocean Vuong’s text considers the bottom as being emblematic of a receptivity that is necessary to inform solidarities through the narrator and his American lover’s personal evolutions in their relationship. This paper’s primary theoretical framework draws from Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996), specifically the harmful effects of essentializing Asian Americans. When analyzing On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I additionally frame my position with work from scholars Tan Hoang Nguyen and Robert Diaz, who intersect queer and Asian American studies. I selected Kochiyama and Vuong’s work for this research because they are different examples of combating relational power dynamics, evidencing multiple ways–individual and collective– to the path of liberation depending on one’s goals. Through the empowerment of Asian American futures, they speak to all underrepresented populations.
keywords: agency, cultural studies, identity, orientalism, relationality