This proposed "Just-in-time" session, "Beyond Silent Grief: Transgressions of Asian American Feeling," seeks to situate recent amplifications in anti-Asian violence and rhetoric (as well as the resistance to name them as such) within the context of Asian American literary and cultural production and current trends, both within and outside the academe, towards anti-racist pedagogy. As the theme of the MLA convention is Multilingualism, this panel considers Asian American texts, media and auto-theory that privilege embodied affect or memory as language itself.

As further outlined in the individual presentation descriptions, Drs. Alpen Razi and Kevin Pyon engage with both the possibilities and limits that melancholic frameworks of Asian American identity pose, contemplating how Asian American grief might be subversively reclaimed for a politics of resistance and create conditions for intra and cross-racial solidarities. Offering a counterpoint to Drs. Razi and Pyon's presentations, Matthew Blasi asks how applications of humor to the grotesque (Asian body) reimagine cultural grief. In addition to responding to current scholarship that considers the nexus at which affect theory and race meet (for ex., the late José Esteban Muñoz's s most recent work, The Sense of Brown, and Sianne Ngai's concept of "racial animatedness"), this session builds upon the theoretical interventions offered by Anne Anlin Cheng (Melancholy of Race) and David Eng and Shinhee Han's Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation.

This possibility is particularly resonant at the moment, as enactments of anti-Asian sentiment continue through violence -- both in language and on the body. More profound and alarming, perhaps, are the ways in which they continue to be detached from the grief it both causes and erases. This "Just-in-Time" session aims to return attention to this trend, which is not simply unique to this moment but part of a larger history of deploying the language and experience of melancholy to define Asian American identity through silence, passivity, and non-action. As a panel, we ask if and how creative modes of "feeling" Asian American, often through a melancholic framework and rhetorics of suffering and death, can contest, disorient, and reimagine experiences of Asian American belonging in the US. We will also consider the spaces in which Asian Americans are allowed to express their discontents and refuse the logic of grief as a self-defining feature. We will ask how performative acts of grief and its refusal coincide with, support, and diverge from anti-racist initiatives in our communities and in higher education.

To open the session, I would like to pose some introductory remarks and a series of questions that might help contextualize the presentations to follow (10 minutes). Each presenter will be allotted 15-18 minutes, which will then lead into an interactive Q&A with session attendees in the remaining time.

(note: as of submission date, Dr. Razi is not a registered MLA member, but I have let him know the deadline for registration is 9/22. Thank you for your consideration.)