How are visions of doom indicative of social failures in the face of a radical alterity, especially one such as the Covid-19 virus that renders identificatory metrics like race completely moot but also absolutely critical? How does the global dynamic of the Pandemic illuminate transpacific entanglements of racial discourse past and present, along with material labor through which such relations are instantiated? What kinds of actions do specific modalities of racial, national, and ethnic disenfranchisement call for on the brink (or tail end) of total collapse, when the systemic bias that they spring from are perpetuated by not only our own kind but also nonhuman agents? In response to these pressing questions, the four presentations that comprise this session bring literature, media, other forms of art, and reflections on current events that diagnose, challenge, and imagine other ways of being against existing systems causing misery across the globe. Unpacking on the value-laden metaphor of parasites as radical alterities, Chang-Hee Kim’s paper illuminates how anthropocentric metrics of normalcy cater to racial and speciesist practices of dehumanization through close readings of Alien (1979) and Annihilation (2018). Expanding on the subject of monstrous creatures in her focus on The Host (2006), Erin Suzuki’s paper examines the biopolitics of framing public health threats as “collateral” in the military, scientific, and economic projects across Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. Jinah Kim’s paper analyzes pandemics and dystopias in pursuit of a transpacific feminist form that enables alternative knowledge and practice emerging from pandemics and dystopias in her reading of Marjorie Liu’s steampunk manga/comic series Monstress (2016-2022), Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem Monster (2018), and the zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies {care in the time of the coronavirus} (2020). And finally, bringing the issue of racialized apocalypse into the folds of lived reality, Kristin Kim’s paper looks at intersectional identity-construction in young Asian women and their working conditions against the backdrop of the yellow peril rhetoric in the Covid-era. While drawing inspiration from the current state of affairs, the papers in this panel employ the terms “pandemic” and “apocalypse” expansively to investigate the racial implications of contagions and states of emergency, whether figurative or actual, as they are manifested in cultural representations. Each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes, leaving ample time for Q&A and general discussion with the audience.