According to Hong, minor feelings accompany the invisibility of Asian Americans within the Black-white binary paradigm of the U.S. racial imaginary. They come from the awareness of one’s own racial positioning in a system that both occludes the traumas that Asian Americans experience and compels Asian Americans to become complicit in anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. These feelings include shame, anger, envy, melancholy, and subversive pleasure.
This session positions minor feelings with respect to established theories of racial affect—for instance, the work of Sara Ahmed, Anne Anlin Cheng, David Eng, and Sianne Ngai—and extends the concept to readings of literary texts and cultural artifacts. The papers demonstrate diverse approaches to testing the concept’s academic portability and potential: from zeroing in on specific affects, forms, genres, and intersections to panning out to larger ideologies and political structures. Together, they offer models for future work on Asian American affect that accounts for the multiplicity and difference encompassed within Asian America.
This session is especially timely amid heightened attention to so-called “Asian hate” and the affective ambivalences that accompany this attention. It focuses on minor feelings to begin disentangling the contradictions of our moment and to explore possibilities for mobilizing affect in acts of resistance.
To leave ample time for discussion, each of the four panelists will present for 12–14 minutes followed by a Q&A of approximately 15–25 minutes.
The session begins with Melanie Abeygunawardana’s paper, which explores Asian American shame as part of a larger interracial structure of feeling. Arguing that Asian American shame is intimately tied to Black rage and white innocence, Abeygunawardana situates minor feelings within the historical advent of colorblindness—the legal discourse that claims that race should play no part in the functioning of U.S. liberal democracy. She suggests that shaking the individuating frame of shame could make room for a shared Afro-Asian investment in dismantling liberal systems of violence such as the carceral state—systems structured by the manipulation of Black and Asian subjects against each other.
Building off this theoretical framework, Erica Kanesaka’s paper asks how the white innocence that produces minor feelings is underpinned by the ideologies surrounding white childhood. Turning to turn-of-the-century children’s material culture (1880s–1920s), Kanesaka locates an archival history behind the forgetting of Asian American trauma in Japanese dolls designed to endure white children’s affection and abuse. By studying their representation in children’s literature, Kanesaka theorizes these dolls as racial transitional objects—figures that were quite literally “loved to pieces” before being discarded—and illustrates how they distill the ambivalent feelings of desire and aversion projected onto Asian Americans today.
James Kim’s paper carries forward these questions of attraction and violence by turning to racial anger—the unconscious grammars governing the production, circulation, discharge, and absorption of anger throughout the social totality along the axis of race. Kim theorizes Asian American anger as a minor feeling by staging a comparative analysis of Homer’s Iliad and Lela Lee’s “Angry Little Asian Girl.” In doing so, he shows how the West’s political economy of racial anger has, from its very beginnings, reserved a special place for the figure of the diasporic Asian woman, persistently imagining her as a kind of relay-point that converts anger into honor, subjugation into intimacy, and violence into beauty.
The session concludes in a future-oriented direction with Huan He’s paper on how minor feelings are encoded in and by Silicon Valley techno-Orientalism. Responding to Hong’s provocation that “we’re so post-racial, we’re silicon,” He reads Asian American racial formation in relation to the industrial formation of the Silicon Valley. To do this, He analyzes two contemporary novels that feature Asian American women finding love while navigating start-up tech culture: Anna Yen’s Sophia of Silicon Valley and Y.Z. Chin’s Edge Case. By emphasizing how the category of “romance” operates in these texts, He argues that the racial affects that surface within romance plots diagnose the humanization of a corporate form in which Asian Americans are conscripted to serve as the engines of information capitalism.