Following global capitalism and imperialist nation-state building, former worldviews and space-times were replaced with homogeneous societies constructed and stratified along national, ethnic, and imperial identities. However, resistance against nation-state and imperial oppression proved difficult as it was divided often by reproducing the same homogeneous identities inculcated through imperial modes of knowledge production. This panel seeks to (re)animate formations of solidarity that question such homogeneous identities and explore alternative coalitions of human association in modern and contemporary transnational Asian literatures. Solidarity is understood here as a fluid and elastic process of conjoining people together with their immanent differences and disparate interests into temporary and mobile groups. To resist the nation-state as a point of departure, this panel is informed by the growing body of transnational research, including Lisa Lowe’s study (2015) that urges us to rethink “separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions.” Further, as Anna Tsing (2015) has shown, under the economic and ecological destruction we need to open our imagination and “think about collaborative survival.” For such a practice, literary and cinematic storytelling is essential to trigger our imagination. Lastly, Donna Haraway (2016) allows us to consider a posthuman present, in which we discover anew “making kin,” symbiotic and sympoietic assemblages of species acting together while moving beyond borders of geography, ancestry, language, and ethno-nationalism.

In this panel, each paper analyses how solidarity is negotiated in literary and cinematic narratives from transnational Asia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our panel takes transnational Asia as a method rather than a geographical, national, or linguistic area to engage with questions of political struggles and activism in modern and contemporary times.

Edwin Michielsen starts the panel with an examination of how proletarian writers addressed questions of indigeneity in relation to leftist solidarity with Ainu in imperial Japan. Following the heydays of leftist activism in the 1920s, proletarian writer Miyamoto (née Chūjō) Yuriko argued that political struggles are delineated by “one land border” between the world proletariat and the world bourgeoisie. This world proletariat, however, was first and foremost envisioned as the class of industrial workers and extended to other marginalized groups, but hardly included indigenous peoples. Reading through a selection of works by Miyamoto, his paper aims to elucidate how proletarian writers strove to undo imperial borders and align Ainu struggles with those of the world proletariat. In so doing, he aims to demonstrate that forging relations of solidarity was often (and still is) constant-changing and multi-directional assembling of disparate interests, both in theory and practice.

Following Edwin’s historical and theoretical discussion of alternative modes of solidarity, the panel turns to the contemporary period to examine how (post)colonial formations of solidarity have changed since the waning of totalitarian narratives and party and union allegiance. Anne Mai Yee Jansen continues the discussion by examining Violet Kupersmith’s novel Build Your House Around My Body (2021) to reveal a transpacific feminist solidarity undergirding the characters’ relationships. The novel shifts back and forth through time, delving into French and US-American colonial histories in Vietnam in its interrogation of the gendered violence(s) of colonization. She analyzes how the novel forges a transpacific and intergenerational feminist solidarity through hair. By using Asian hair—with all its exoticized, fetishized, and gendered implications—as both image and symbol, Kupersmith illustrates the need for a transpacific feminist solidarity for both Asian and Asian American women within the context of anti-colonial struggle. As such, Anne demonstrates how solidarity through storytelling rooted in community unfolds as intersectional and responsive to the particular needs for alliance.

Lastly, Abigail Jinju Lee concludes with a paper that examines depictions of Afro-Asian solidarities in film and literature. Through the space of the convenience store as portrayed in the film Gook (2017), the TV series Kim’s Convenience (2016-present) and the novel Native Speaker (1995), as well as the short film Love Song for Latasha (2019), her paper considers how Asian Americans are relationally shaped by anti-Blackness, as well as the grounds for Asian American solidarities with Black liberation. She undertakes an exploration of the subversive power of Asian American vision and takes up Asian American opacities—a refusal of the media in/visibility discourse and a fugitive embrace of illegibility to the state and systems of racial power. Her argument theorizes an Asianness that does not strive for inclusion in the current structures maintained by racial violence, but refuses the framework of visibility altogether, turning instead to rooted solidarity with Black liberation.