Acknowledging the current urgency to establish a dialogue towards planetary consciousness, this panel examines works of Asian American literature that portray and evaluate various natural and man-made disasters and their aftermaths. Global catastrophes leave a flotsam and jetsam of debris that reveals not only evidence of towns and cities gone asunder, but from the aftermath surge disease, pollution, conflict, socio-political discord, and further dissonance and destruction. We will explore the ways in which Asian American narratives reflect imperial influences functioning as corrosive agents that mediate, perpetuate and exploit systems and peoples while disclaiming accountability and maintaining vested transnational interests and global power. Inspired by Ann Laura Stoler’s critical attention to imperial formations of “ruination,” which leave residual traces of its influences that persist in both psychic and material spaces, our four twelve-minute papers look at how Asian American narratives portray disaster and the subsequent entanglements that occur between the national subject and the nation state as a consequence.

We begin with Eliko Kosaka’s paper “ A Depiction of Hibakusha in Yamazaki Toyoko’s Two Homelands” in which she examines depictions of Kibei hibakusha in Yamazaki Toyoko’s novel. This underrepresented history of Japanese Americans during WWII in not only the US but also in Japan shows how their victimization was twofold because their experience of internment was compounded by their experience as survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. In so doing, it prompts questions concerning how Japanese American war history has been narrated in the US and its inherent mechanisms. By comparing Yamazaki’s novel with a select number of other narratives that depict Kibei hibakusha, this paper explores the significance of the distinctly different ways in which they depict the psychological debris that the Japanese Americans carry as a consequence of nuclear warfare.

Yasuko Kase’s “Politics of Disaster Medicine: James N. Yamazaki’s Children of the Atomic Bomb” turns to the complicated relationship between military operations and disaster by examining Japanese American physician James N. Yamazaki’s collaborative memoir. During World War II, Yamazaki served as a combat surgeon in the European theater while his family was imprisoned in an internment camp as enemy aliens. Later he served as Physician in Charge in the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in Nagasaki from 1949 through 1951 which conducted research intended to serve offensive and defensive military interest on nuclear weapons. Pointing out ABCC’s complicated position in the genealogy of disaster medicine, whose primary mission is supposed to be to provide emergency medical care to the victims rather than to experiment on them, Kase explores Yamazaki’s complex negotiation with US racial politics, which implicated both the military and medicine, as a racialized physician placed amid nuclear debris.

The third presenter Zhou Xiaojing’s “U.S. Chemical Weapons in the Vietnam War and Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain” examines how the poetry by the Hmong American poet, Mai Der Vang exposes the enduring impact of chemical weapons used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War. Over a ten-year period from 1961 to 1971, the US military used tremendous amounts of herbicides that destroyed mangroves, forests, bamboo groves, grasses, and food crops in Vietnam and Laos. This military strategy simultaneously operated as a profitable business for US chemical corporations to sell the herbicides. Drawing from Ann Laura Stoler and Kathryn Yusoff’s criticism against the imperial violence against racialized land and peoples, Zhou’s paper discusses the interconnections between racial violence and historical amnesia and between environmental disasters and imperial militarism.

Finally, Christina Lee Stevenson’s “ The Vuong and the Restless: Asian American Identity and Climate Disaster” examines two works. The first is Severance, Ling Ma’s pandemic novel, which turns the reader’s attention to the impact of global capitalism where the spread of a deadly fungus is linked to the inequities and blindnesses embedded in an economy dependent on foreign production. The second work, On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, highlights transgenerational trauma as the author links the destruction of the earth to a history of the abuse and rejection of the “abject” in its multiple forms. For each writer, Stevenson argues, Asian American identity works as a site for interrogating how humans relate with each other and with the natural environment. She examines how the Asian American perspective – in these two works – looks from a unique vantage point that sees how the specific network of human relations directly impacts the natural environment.