Paul Crutzen’s warning against modern human’s impacts on the earth through his discourse on “the Anthropocene,” has brought our attention to the catastrophic effects of damages caused by human activities and raised questions about human-centered perspectives on civilization and world systems. While scholars in the humanities, in general, have been problematizing the epoch of the Anthropocene, using approaches in relevant fields such as ecocriticism, animal studies, new materialism, and posthumanism, to challenge human-centered vantage points, scholars in Asian/ American Studies can offer unique perspectives reflecting their keen awareness of tremendous impacts of imperialism and colonialism as part of the historical force of the Anthropocene, which are often neglected by scholars who prefer universalist approaches. Such awareness brings a historical contextualization of natural and man-made disasters as the consequences of colonial powers, shedding light on how the catastrophic effects can be distributed disproportionately across the globe through the hierarchical divide imposed and enforced by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and dis/ability. With each 14-minute-presentation, our four panelists explore how Asian/Americans’ connections with their ancestral origins and particular racial positions and socio-historical backgrounds in U.S. society enable them to witness disastrous events differently using their transnational perspectives.

The first paper is Eliko Kosaka’s “Kibei Hibakusha Traumas in Naomi Hirahara’s Summer of the Big Bachi and Yamazaki Toyoko’s Two Homelands.” Kosaka discusses the significance of the distinctly different ways Yamazaki's and Hirahara’s works recuperate a WWII experience of the Kibei that portray the suffering of Japanese Americans due to experiencing internment but also incurring trauma from the Hiroshima bombing. She examines what both texts suggest about the manifestations of trauma within the Kibei themselves, but also how their trauma can have the power to shift and transform their external environment. In so doing, when we look at the effects of nuclear warfare in the Anthropocene as it is tied inextricably to the larger concern of human coexistence on the planet, she argues their memories of war reveal both the corrosive and mobilizing aspects of trauma that can challenge and resituate established narratives of the Pacific War.

“Confronting the Other Ecohorror in Vietnam: Guan Barry’s Poems” by Zhou Xiaojing examines Amerasian poet Guan Barry’s poems that depict the American soldier’s horrific atrocities that devastated the Vietnamese lands and people. Intertwined with the horror of massacre and rape committed by American soldiers against the Vietnamese, the ecohorror Barry portrays expands on and departs from popular apocalyptic ecohorror narratives. Zhou problematizes the invisibility of US imperial militarism in those narratives and the studies of the Anthropocene, which create a homogeneous view on disasters as a common planetary crisis. As a result, they ignore how disproportionally distributed material resources create inequality among people resulting in making some people’s lives more vulnerable. Through her analysis on Barry’s poem, Zhou problematizes homogenous perspective on ecohorror, which does not engage with the horrific disasters produced by colonialism and imperial militarism.

Gayle Sato’s “Comfort and Catastrophe: Non/Fiction in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being” offers an analysis of Ozeki’s use of two women’s parallel stories that unfold various disastrous events such as recruitment of Japanese university students as kamikaze pilots during WWII, Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Great East Japan Earthquake, triggering a massive tsunami and a meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant on March 11, 2011, and prostitution of teenage girls in Tokyo’s maid cafes. Inspired by Oliver Kellhammer’s idea of “Neo-Eocene botanical intervention” and Ozeki’s extensive use of nonfiction to show its inherently therapeutic functions of the novel harnessed by the branch of psychology known as narrative therapy, Sato places Ozeki’s text on disaster relief in the larger context of surviving and living in the Anthropocene.

Yasuko Kase’s “Apocalypse Now, Again?: Reading Ling Ma’s Severance in the ‘Post’-Pandemic Era” examines Ma’s debut novel published in 2018 that uncannily echoes the COVID-19 pandemic. Ma depicts a dystopic world caused by the “Shen Fever” pandemic, which is believed to have originated from Shenzen, one of China’s “special economic zones” where the free-market economy is more allowed than other regions in China. The fungus of Shen Fever travels through trade, spreads infection, and turns people into “the fevered” who exhibit a significant memory lapse and repeat a habitual routine until they finally collapse. Tracing the history of Asian/Americans’ participation in an exploitive global capitalism’s (re)productive system, Kase discusses how Ma’s installation of a young pregnant Chinese American woman in the pandemic disaster warns against the false optimism of the exceptionalism of the human species.