In the last two decades, affect theory has transformed how we understand emotion, body politics, the visceral, and the affective logics of late capitalism. The first wave of affect theorists such as Brian Massumi emphasize the “irreducibly bodily and autonomic” aspects of affect that distinguish it from more socially recognized forms of emotion such as sadness, happiness, and anger. Meanwhile, theorists who approach affect with feminist and queer lenses reframe affect as inherently tied to the infrastructure of racism, nationalism, able-bodiedism, and heteronormativity. Specifically, Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism attune to the ways in which neoliberal fantasies of the good life reproduce dominant structures of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and heteronormativity. This panel builds on the recent scholarship on affect, critical race theory, and Asia/America (Lily Wong, Xine Yao, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Leslie Bow, Summer Kim Lee, etc.) by countering the Eurocentric framework of US racialization and late capitalism in affect theory’s engagement with the social. It reorients affect to processes of racialization, gendering, transnationalism, and the Cold War politics of knowledge in transnational Asia. Here, we ask: How do narratives of victimhood, global humanitarianism, and the “good war” reproduce the affective logic of US empires in Asia? How do Orientalist fantasies about Asian food and “culture” circulate in Transpacific circuits? How do contemporary feminist, queer, and posthumanist literature and films in East Asia both acknowledge the violence of human-centered narratives of environmental damages while conjuring an affective other-worldly imaginary? Our panelists take up these challenges in reframing affect theory in transnational Asia.

First, Su Yun Kim’s paper “Transpacific Migration and Settlement Stories in Popular Fiction in Cold War Korea” examines A Song to the Wave (1951–53), a migration and family story of Koreans in Hawai‘i serialized in a popular magazine in Busan during the Korean War. Written by Kim Marl-bong, a celebrated female popular fiction writer often compared to Pearl S. Buck, this novel is the first Korean literary work to foreground the marriage migration of Korean “picture brides” to Hawai‘i. It provides critical insight into the current conversation on transpacific mobility across the Japanese and US empires in Korean literature by reframing discussions of race, gender, and affect in the early Cold War era.

Next, Angie Chau’s talk “Cooking and Eating in Chinese: Storytelling and Food in 20^th Century Global China” analyzes Buwei Yang’s cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) and the restaurateur Cecilia Chiang’s memoir The Mandarin Way (1974). Their storytelling about authentic Chinese food in various media forms (cookbook, memoir, family history, etiquette guide) reveals the interconnectedness of foodscapes with gender, affect, memory, language, migration, and the circulation of Chinese cultural identity. By presenting Anglophone readers with practical ways of engaging with “Chinese” food, Yang and Chiang demonstrate how diasporic women could be active participants in American society while still maintaining affective bonds and ambivalent feelings about China as home.

Alvin K. Wong’s paper “Affective Racialization: Representing Ethnic Minorities and Gender in Hong Kong Cinema” examines the logics of racialization, affect, and gender in postcolonial Hong Kong cinema. Despite the Hong Kong governmental discourse of Sinocentric multiculturalism, non-Chinese residents face considerable obstacles in everyday life. Linguistic and cultural barriers are further buttressed by what Wong terms affective racialization. Namely, racism is mediated through affective infrastructures such as urban zoning, racist languages, and ideas of bodily hygiene and illegality. Wong examines the working of affective racialization in narratives of romancing the domestic helper in Still Human (2018) and saving the South Asian illegal child in The Sunny Side of the Street (2022).

Finally, Kimberly Chung’s paper “Embodied Nature in Contemporary South Korean Speculative Fiction” explores contemporary South Korean literature that foregrounds an embodied mode of knowing. With a focus on the visceral and affective use of the environment, “embodied nature” is an aesthetic framework that utilizes innovative frameworks of nature–the vegetal, microbial, and interspecific—across literature to advance novel conceptualizations of the body. Exploring how “nature is made culture” in South Korean contemporary environmental aesthetics, this paper examines how the aesthetics and analytic of “embodiment” anchored in the biosphere have changed alongside South Korea’s rapid rise to a technologically advanced economy in the 21^st century.

Overall, this panel reanimates the affective turn by situating affect theory within the materiality of transnational Asia. It focalizes the entanglement of affect, race, and gender through diverse perspectives on East Asian literature and cinema. Each presenter will speak for 12 minutes, leaving 25 minutes for Q&A.