Introduction: Contingency Plans | Vivian L. Huang and Summer Kim Lee (30.1)
Like so many in spring of 2020, we began writing this in quarantine, figuring out how to teach online, how to maintain communication with students, how to mourn, how to support loved ones at a distance: how to make plans for an uncertain future both in and outside of the academy. This is to say that we struggle with how to begin, how to think on the special issue’s themes of contingency, feminist relationality, and Asian American studies in the university, in the midst of a current moment that cannot help but interrupt all thinking and writing.
Contingency plans are made to anticipate future discrepancies, mistakes, failures, and catastrophes. They are seen as protective strategies, as risk management for when things are not working out the way they are supposed to. They are seen as a last resort, and therefore represent unlikely chances. Yet, we see that contingency plans are not just shelved for the future, but are in fact being acted out in our immediate present, in the face of everyday exploitative systems functioning exactly as they are designed to. As we write this, things are changing in ways we do not yet know, that we cannot yet give an account of -- the ground is shifting and the modern foundations of colonialism, slavery, Indigenous genocide, and orientalism surface. Therefore we ask, what feminist methods do we cultivate, what knowledges do we rehearse and create for our collective survival?
To consider contingency during a time of such explicit disruption, with its exposure of our systems and practices of labor, feels all the more urgent, if devastatingly so. The emergencies around COVID-19 and the ongoing police violence against black lives have laid bare the enduring paradox that brown, black, trans, and immigrant subjects, whose material security is most contingent, are also the subjects whose labor is most essential to the settler colonial, racist, heteropatriarchal scaffolding upon which modern life is built. This moment of reckoning then calls for the necessary disruption and destruction of old structures and statues that do not serve us, but also more. This moment also puts into question existing practices of solidarity, as well as the distribution of resources and care, when both have been contingent upon who is seen as deserving along lines of racial, gender, sexual, and national differences, and an adherence to the constraints of assimilation, respectability, and upward mobility.
For Asian Americans specifically, there is the need to grapple with antiblack racism within Asian American communities, but in ways that do not merely fit narratives of assimilation or normalization with a liberal politics and hollow gestures of allyship. The fact that a “contingent” may refer to a like-minded group -- including a group of troops or police -- moves us to put pressure on the ways we identify others as our own. We wish to hold Asian Americanist contingency in productive if problematic tension with minoritarian coalition. The figure of the Asian police officer either aligned with or the perpetrator of antiblack violence, such as officer Peter Liang in the murder of Akai Gurley in 2015 and officer Tuo Thao, who stood by as George Floyd died under another officer’s chokehold this spring, requires that Asian Americans find ways of holding accountability without taking up space, of understanding solidarity as operating under the assumption that one’s livelihood is contingent upon the livelihood of others, of black lives. Afro-Asian solidarities have long existed in ways historically both accounted and unaccounted for, rooted in the legacies of Third World movements, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism. In other words, the affinities between black and Asian American people are nothing new--they have already been going on. At the same time, the current moment asks that these ongoing solidiarites and affinities, and the kinds of organizing and coalition-building that grow out of them, must constantly be reworked towards a livable, even if not yet knowable, future.
Contingent coalition is not about rendering different histories of oppression, dispossession, and violence in analogous relation to one another. Rather, it is about grappling with the structurally uneven, nonequivalent relations such histories have wrought. Fred Moten writes, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”[1] The emergence of coalition becomes an issue of timing, attunement, and intensity, of either you catching up with them where they are at, or waiting for them to catch up with you where you are at. This is not the act of lending a helping hand -- it is not charity -- but instead, the act of loitering in that frustrated feeling of being in “the same way” together, that does anything but yield relations of symmetry in its hardness or softness. The slower and faster death strategies of systemic racism are not commensurable or equatable along the color line, and we might further object that one should not have to feel imperiled to recognize the stakes of abolishing the police state. Yet, here, too, we must ask after the ethical imperative of contingency as that which renders the “you” and the “us” constitutive in relation, which renders coalition as necessarily contingent in its liveness.
When we first conceived this special issue’s theme, our understanding of contingency was two-fold. Contingency names the provisional and precarious, the circumstantial and incidental, particularly in relation to Asian American studies and Asian Americanist faculty in the academy. It also gestures toward the risk and vulnerability in dependency, and the alternative forms of relation and care forged out of necessity and survival. As we write this towards the end of an academic year met with huge financial losses for many universities, we feel a responsibility to acknowledge how many contingent faculty’s contracts will not be renewed, how many administrative, custodial, and food service staff have been laid off, or else risking exposure by showing up to work, and how many graduate students, undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members are facing hiring freezes and a shaky job market.
As universities call emergency meetings to tamp down panic around their plummeting investment holdings, and figure out options for campus reopenings and “hybrid teaching” for the next academic year, contract faculty and staff members, and faculty working in the arts and humanities, feel once more vulnerable to the capitalist logics of the neoliberal university. Due to financial losses, and the continued protection of endowments, job offers have been rescinded while other job searches have been put on hold indefinitely or canceled.
At the same time, documented accounts of anti-Asian racism have risen in the global pandemic, not helped by the president’s persistent rhetoric of COVID-19 as the Chinese or Wuhan virus. In his study on Chinese immigrants and public health in San Francisco’s Chinatown from the nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, Nayan Shah brings our attention to the longer history of yellow peril and sinophobia, and the ongoing figuration of the Asian body as the source of virality and contagion that poses a threat to heteronormative domesticity and the U.S.’s economic, national virility.[2] Similarly, Mel Chen points out how material toxins like lead metal during the U.S. “lead panic” in 2007 around the Chinese manufacture of children’s toys, turns lead into a “queer agent”[3] animated by race, where Chineseness acts as a contaminant that encroaches upon the borders of the sovereign white body and a white nation state. Asian/Americans also compose a significant population of essential workers -- as doctors, nurses, caretakers, food service, and delivery workers -- demanding that we think of Asian/Americans not only in relation to the toxic and contagious, but also to the necessary and the resilient. The laboring Asian body is then both integral and threatening, rendered contingent to the greater judgments of the public good.
Simultaneous to the proliferation of racial anxiety, we find ourselves in a moment when minoritized communities -- queer, of color, and disabled -- innovate and insist upon systems of care, with a growing abundance of mutual aid networks that are not just temporary fixers, but rather radically different sustainable and sustaining models of living with others that render police and prisons, to put it in Angela Y. Davis’ terms, “obsolete.”[4] Therefore, from all this, we ask what forms might feminist relationality take in the face of a global pandemic? How are Asian American performances of contingency necessary to these forms of relationality rooted in the work of taking care of oneself and others, and how is Asian American performance the site where such relations are acted out and made possible? How does something like a contingency plan, as that which only goes into effect during what is perceived as the exceptionality of the crisis, become the means for connecting the present moment to ongoing histories of differential crisis and resource distribution?
Unsolicited Acts
Our initial call-for-papers was accompanied by a still from Xavier Cha’s video Human Advertisement Series (2004), wherein Cha enacted “unsolicited advertisement performances” in front of three different storefronts in Los Angeles.[5] Outside of a sushi restaurant on a street corner, she gyrated in a cooked shrimp costume and white sneakers, her face peeping out of the shrimp’s tail, while her legs sprouted out from the shrimp’s body below. By a nail salon on another street corner, she danced as a large acrylic nail in heels, her head, arms, and torso completely obscured by the pink nail’s oval shape. Outside a closed tarot card reader’s shop in a mini strip mall, Cha encased herself in a transparent crystal ball resting on a pedestal, while she sat on one knee in her underwear, circling a sheer scarf around her rhinestone-clad long hair.
Xavier Cha, Human Advertisement Series, 2004. Image courtesy of the artist
Xavier Cha, Human Advertisement Series, 2004. Image courtesy of the artist.
Xavier Cha, Human Advertisement Series, 2004. Image courtesy of the artist.
Like a human billboard or sign holder, she wears these costumes as though to lure in customers when no lure was asked for in the first place. The unsolicited presence of the artist’s body on a street corner provokes questions of belonging in public space, where one might see Cha and wonder if she is a disruption, or in fact business as usual. One is reminded of busy street corners where workers expertly spin, toss, and catch signs, but one is also reminded of costumed protests, strikes, and picket lines. Cha’s series makes these two forms of public demonstration seem nondistinct in the way that her body is both an interloper and a site of vulnerability. From another vantage, we might think about the racialization of the selected small businesses of sushi restaurant, nail salon, and fortune reader as storefronts before which Cha’s body (whether obscured through costume or not) is vulnerable to racial if not orientalist frames.
The unsolicited performance connotes an imposition, but one in the guise of a favor, as a benevolent voluntary act that has risked overstepping in an attempt to anticipate another’s needs. Think of how often any of us has been given “unsolicited advice,” and how it could either be advice we did not yet know we needed, as much as it could be a condescending comment that nevertheless still coerces one into an expression of gratitude in return. In this encounter, one cannot be sure who is doing whom a favor; the interaction puts pressure on who is overseeing whom, on who is working for whom. Is Cha working for these businesses, or are these businesses providing Cha a service -- a setting -- for her performance? Cha is both the unsolicited artist and the unpaid worker, whose contingency to the actual businesses for whom she advertises, marks her as both a nuisance and necessity.
In this special issue, these unsolicited acts are what we call performances of contingency. Such performances are taken up by those who are often not sought after or invited, yet nevertheless in their imposition, or in what Vivian L. Huang calls their “inscrutable hospitality,” cultivate a willingness towards another that is not mere submission, but instead a parasitic willfulness, an openness to doing a favor, to providing an unrecognized or unpaid service that is in fact an insistence on one’s necessity.[6] The analytic of contingency allows us to think of the racialized gig worker alongside not only the activist but also the performance artist, as Cha does in Human Advertisement Series. The contingent worker and performance artist have converged under neoliberalism through what Bojana Kunst calls a projective temporality, one wherein the “rigid connection between work and the future does not give rise to changes in ways of being and creating” but rather reinforces the distribution of power in the art world.[7] To labor in a precarious and exclusionary present might be to reproduce the conditions for more of the same in the future. And yet gendered and racialized contingent labor is not original to late capitalism but rather constitutive of it.[8] A contingent relation to institutional space, then, is also a contingent relation to temporal belonging under capitalism, following centuries of colonialism, war, and migration.
After all, to be uninvited is a familiar refrain for immigrant communities, whose very presence is queered as an obstruction to an imagined national future. Told to “go back,” immigrants bear the labor of embodying historical time, coerced into narratives of assimilation that overlook how one knows in their body that they have been displaced. As Victor Bascara writes, “we are here because you were there.”[9] Foreclosed from and critical of nationalist futurity, immigrant and minoritarian populations simultaneously inhabit other temporalities, making contingent plans as necessary and ethical practice. Joshua Chambers-Letson, quoting the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, writes that “planning and minoritarian performance are the continuum of ‘ceaseless experiment[ation]’ through which minoritarian subjects materialize life-sustaining futurial forms of life that don’t yet exist.”[10] When the work of the minoritarian performer, like Cha, crashes the marketing genre with her human advertisement, she warps the temporal trajectory of a familiar marketing tactic into another kind of project.
To be the contingent is to be needed, to be “essential,” yet only temporarily so, in times of crisis, in a global pandemic, in a time that is not one’s own—in the realm of what Harney and Moten call “policy” with its “exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus.”[11] The contingent is expected to risk having one’s longevity and livelihood depend on another, in the name of something bigger, for the sake of holding out for the vague promise that things will change, or perhaps worse, that things will go “back to normal.” In this way, to embody the contingent is to present both a temporal problem and temporal possibility.
This state of chance and transition, bracketed at times contractually with an endpoint and possible renewal, also names a kind of touch within precarious forms of relationality that are imposed, injurious, and harmful, but not always just so. Within the term, the Latin contingere means “befall” or “happen,” invoking the performative felicity or abuses of that contingent touch. We therefore understand contingency to name not only a passive position under the weight of “imposed consensus,” but also the insistent act of reaching out toward another for survival and more. For contingencies emerge out of necessity, precisely when a problem has finally come to light -- when something like a global pandemic makes clear how many so many of our institutions fail to serve us, and in light of those failures, other plans must be made and put in place. Therefore we ask what would it mean to turn to forms of contingency as the grounds for critique, but also as the grounds for mutual aid work rooted in, as Dean Spade and others have described, “solidarity not charity,”[12] and what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls “care webs”?[13] More important, how might such contingencies stick around, even when they are no longer needed or “essential” in times of crisis? Contingencies would then no longer just be for proclaimed states of exception, but would set in place new ways of relating and living with one another.
We understand performances of contingency – in everyday, artistic, and activist practice – to enact and work through forms of feminist relationality that feel nurturing, burdensome, exhausting, exciting, lonely, and boring. We attend to these performances, like Cha’s, as those which we may not solicit but that may respond to a nascent need yet to be acknowledged, opening up the horizon line through aesthetic practice.
After Institutionality
How has the contingent disciplinarity of Asian American studies occasioned such feminest modes of relating and world making? Since its conception as a field following the student protests organized by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, Asian American studies has had a contingent relationship to the academy. It struggles with institutionalization across college campuses. Therefore often times, in the absence of an Asian American studies department or program, students and faculty are told that although there is a demand for Asian American studies on campus, in efforts to reflect a growing Asian American student body, the formalization of the field by way of a major, minor, or tenure-track hire in Asian American studies cannot yet be put on the table. As of 2019, the College Board reports that only 25 schools in the U.S. offer a major in Asian American studies.[14]
Asian American studies subsists as contingency, which is to say, through undercompensated and insecure faculty, staff, and student labor. Too often, its institutional presence is formed as a necessary afterthought, as damage control, as that which smooths over unanticipated curricular gaps and student dissatisfaction, as that which suits a university’s diversity initiatives and program-building.
Similarly, Asian Americanist feminists are contingent to spaces of belonging, at the edges of political certainty and recognition. As Leslie Bow writes, Asian American women are represented as traitorous subjects, who disappoint in their failure to fulfill Orientalist fantasies of Asian femininity, heteropatriarchal ideas of Asian femininity in service to a staunch cultural nationalism, and liberal optics of feminist and POC solidarity.[15] Relatedly, Laura Kang has pointed out the fraught emergence of “Asian/American woman” as a social identity and “compositional subject” produced in the academy through its various disciplines and forms of knowledge production.[16] Her representation as a legible, political subject is then in some way or another, tethered to the academy, to institutional forms of recognition.
Scholars like Bow and Kang show that institutions such as the university, the state, and the domestic household have historically relied upon the flexible, feminized, material, affective, and contingent labor of Asian Americans. Whether cast as perpetual foreigners or model minorities, however, Asian Americans have no refuge from institutional erasure even when contingent to it. Such a historically belated and peripheral relationship to legal, economic, and educational institutions positions Asian Americans within the time and space of contingency -- a space we understand to be shared by many, for those who know something about vulnerability, uncertainty, and feelings of difference.
In this special issue of Women & Performance, we draw upon the language of contingency, and its historical, cultural, and aesthetic resonance with the racialization, gendering, and sexualization of Asian Americans as perpetually foreign, traitorous, displaced, or in exile. We consider how being without a space of one’s own, and instead inhabiting unused offices and empty rooms, might offer us a way of approaching Asian Americanist critique after the realization that the university cannot give us what we need, and instead leaves us searching for what we crave in our relationships with and commitments to one another through and in difference.
We approach contingency as a contemporary condition of minoritarian living-with and living in precarity both in and outside of institutions; as a critical, generative mode of Asian American performance, promiscuously and transnationally construed; and as a relational aesthetic, wherein we encounter the problem that Asian American feminism and femininities present in genealogies of liberal, women of color, and transnational feminisms, as well as in queer studies’ predominant focus on gay men’s desire, gender, and sex. For while critiques of the emasculation of Asian American men, the insistence on the pleasures of what Nguyen Tan Hoang calls the “view from the bottom,” and the radicalization of the hyper(hetero)sexuality of Asian American femininity are crucial to dislodging white masculinity’s hold on desire, at the same time it seems that queer Asian American women and queer Asian American femininity remain contingent not only to queer Asian Americanist critique, but to Asian American studies and queer studies more broadly.
Given this, how does an alternative feminist and queer mode of critique emerge through the performance of Asian American contingency? What does racial and gendered contingency enact, gesture toward, and make possible within the internal, turbulent contradictions of the term “Asian American”?
The scholars, writers, activists, and artists in this special issue tackle themes of contingent labor, feminist form, racialized materiality, and the limits of Asian American disciplinarity through performance analysis. Rather than limiting a discussion of Asian American studies to a necessary horizon of institutionality, within the bounds of masculinist and colonial notions of disciplinary knowledge formations, the special issue includes work that explores and theorizes what feminist and queer genealogies of critique, reading practice, and study might productively trouble, offer, and open up within what constitutes the field of Asian American studies after the institution. Here we do not lament and chase after the representative politics of what Roderick Ferguson calls “the will to institutionality,” which has replaced the imperative of the redistribution of resources and structural change. Instead, we follow Ferguson and scholars like Sara Ahmed to ask after an Asian American studies that is something like a feminist “willfulness” to institutionality, that which bends toward the touching-with of contingency and its critically relational forms, irreducible to the comparative, the analogic, or notions of equivalence.
How has the unfulfillment of institutionalization reflect and occasion new racial, feminist, and queer forms of knowledge production from the position of contingency? Since we cannot politically afford to wholly give up on claims of representation – especially for those of us poor, immigrant, refugee, who need the cruel optimism of institutional shelter – what have we constructed in the meantime? What can and has contingency given form, dimension, and weight to that might speak not only to survival, but something more?
Contingent Relations
The essays in this special issue on performances of contingency put into practice what Lisa Lowe and Kris Manjapra have termed an analytic of relation, “a mode of study that attends to the contradictory and tensile entanglements that are the condition for different modes of social organization in the longer time of the global.”[17] Such entanglements are the “global connections and intimacies [that] might reside within material objects,”[18] which decenters the presumed universal category of the Man at the center of the humanities and therefore productively pushes up against established modes of comparative analysis in critical race and ethnic studies. An analytic of relation turns toward the “more-than-Man,” as that which contains “the relations between different human histories and worlds, between humans, surrogacies, and technologies, amongst humans, animals, ecologies and environments.”[19]
In her article for this special issue, “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia,” Tao Leigh Goffe theorizes the gastropoetics of chop suey alongside the construction of Afro-Chinese femininity and the Afro-Chinese woman, who “represents the entangled political economies of racial slavery and racial indenture.” Goffe’s archival practice seeks this elusive figure of the Afro-Chinese woman in U.S. film and literature, by way of writing through and with the materiality, textures, and tastes of chop suey. Goffe’s work importantly intervenes in Afro-Asian studies, which all too often is aligned with heteropatriarchal constructions of solidarity in revolutionary and cultural nationalisms.[20] Additionally, her work contributes to recent Asian American feminist scholarship on race, place, and gender through global circulations of taste, matter, and form, including Mila Zuo’s work on the sour aesthetic, and Summer Kim Lee’s writing on the “cold leftovers” of Asian femininity.[21]
Anna M. Storti’s writing in “Half and both” expands upon critical mixed race studies and further contributes to formal engagements of racialized, gendered objecthood through the artwork of Jennifer Ling Datchuk that uses materials such as porcelain, chicken feet, and human hair. With close readings of Datchuk’s work, Storti considers what it is that being mixed-race looks and feels like through an understanding of contingency as touch, and the visualization of that touch as the mixing and overlaying of colors: of the whiteness of porcelain, the blue of paint on its surface, and the yellow of racialized skin.
To further push comparative models of analysis within a global context that decentralize Man, Asian Americanists have turned to the transpacific and the oceanic as significant sites of exchange, migration, transformation, and encounter. However, scholars such as Erin Suzuki, Aimee Bahng, Christine Mok, and Michelle Huang have noted that this turn must be scrutinized, and enacted with care.[22] They point out that earlier U.S. centric scholarship in Asian American studies and other fields had the tendency of approaching the Pacific and its islands as solely a space of transit, as a momentary meeting place, or as a passive site subject to the movement of people, goods, capital, and other nation’s wars. In other words, the transpacific was a space contingent to Asian American history and Asian Americanist scholarship. This approach runs the risk of subsuming Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples -- not to mention Pacific and Oceania studies -- within that unwieldy category of “Asian American.” It makes the site of the oceanic adhere to the nation-state borders and ethnic categories that have become foundational to Asian American studies, contributing to its legibility and recognition of the field. Yet these are precisely the kinds of foundations that transpacific critique aims to question and take apart, in order to loosen and contend with these constraints on geography that erase histories of Asian settler colonialism and endanger the livelihood of Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people, and the environment more broadly.
It is then incumbent upon Asian Americanists to not only undo Cold War configurations of the “Asia-Pacific” and the “Pacific Rim,” but to do so through an engagement with settler colonial critique and Native Pacific studies that take seriously Native sovereignty and forms of Indigenous knowledge and relations to the land, the oceanic, and its nonhuman life forms and animate matter. Transpacific critique, then, attends to the oceanic and the lives and livelihoods of Native Pacific Islander, as “an act of deterritorialization.”[23] It turns toward the extranational, but also to what Gayatri Gopinath, in her book Unruly Visions, reviewed here by Natasha Bissonauth, has referred to as the queerness of the subnational and supranational spaces of the region.[24]
For the cover of this issue, Tiffany Beam’s graphite drawing, Dwelling in Water, traces gestures of deterritorialization by tending to shorelines, to the edge where land meets water, and the rich ecologies of nonhuman life residing there. Beam’s drawings resonate with the work of artist Rachel Deng and her large-scale installation, Southern Oceans (2018), which Kelly Chung offers a review of here in these pages. As Chung writes, the installation, with its panoramic wallpapered images of the Pacific Islands as seen by the French and British, accompanied by ceramics of rotting breadfruit, “invites us, then, to see and encounter the Pacific in its decay—as an enduring effect of colonial conquest and as an aesthetic form.”
Alongside work on the Pacific and the vibrancy of nonhuman life and the racialization of objects, Aanchal Saraf’s article, “Aloha Made: The Circulation of Empire, Plastic, and the Visceral in Bishop Museum’s ‘Unreal Hawaiʻi,’” considers histories of white and Asian settlers’ objectification of Pacific Islanders by turning toward the production and display of tiki kitsch objects made of plastic and glass. Through attentive close readings of the Honolulu Bishop Museum’s exhibition Unreal Hawaiʻi, Saraf introduces the concept of “borderwork,” where the juxtaposition of tiki kitsch with a mural made by Kānaka Maoli artists, as well as the presence of hula dancer Pualani Mossman Avon, interrupt a “moral hierarchy of materiality” by continuously making and unmaking racial forms as vital and lively, rather than deadened and decontextualized. Saraf’s approach to the racialization and gendering of matter expands upon the work of scholars like Mel Chen and Anne Anlin Cheng, whose book, Ornamentalism, reviewed here by Michelle Lee, urges us to consider how the “yellow woman,” as the unwieldy subject of feminism, is constructed as the synthetic and inorganic.
With Care
In the film Afterearth (2018), poet Kit Yan asks: “How can I feel at home in this body when my body is not at home in this world?” A 14-minute film with music, poetry, and personal testimony, Afterearth centers the voices of four artists who live along the Pacific Ocean and highlights their relationship to volcano, ocean, land, and air in times of environmental devastation. As the film’s website describes, “As rising sea levels threaten the loss of their motherland in Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, China and North America, four women fight to preserve the volcano, ocean, land and air for future generations.”[25] Created by Jess X. Snow, Yan, and Peter Pa, Afterearth is publicly available for a limited time through Care Package: Cultural Nutrients for Times Like This, an online exhibition of films, poetry, meditations, and more curated by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in April of 2020.[26] Care Package acknowledges the particular struggles of Asian Pacific Americans at the height of U.S. COVID-19 cases and offers “a range of approaches to addressing uncertainty, anxiety, and grief through vision, reflection, and healing.”[27] Afterearth responds to Yan’s question by highlighting the artists’ intimacies with earthly elements and kin. In this way, the film -- and Care Package through art curation as community offering -- shows the vitalizing force of collaborative art practice as a form of care-taking and home-making in uncertain times.
Contingent methods occasion ethical relations of care for and among Asian American selves and communities. These methods necessitate a turn towards activist and artistic practice as adaptive strategies for minoritarian worldmaking. In this special issue, new work by Jennifer Hayashida, Jonathan Magat, and Mimi Thi Nguyen innovates the contingent and vital forms of Asian American studies within larger discourses of care and institutional critique. How does care circulate through and beside institutional affiliation and epistemological limits?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samaransinha writes, “As sick, disabled, poor, Black and brown, queer and trans people (to name a few), we already know a hell of a lot about surviving.”[28] When modern life is built upon the exploitation of black, brown, and immigrant labor, the legibility of black, brown, and immigrant bodies is historically contingent upon their labor, upon their ability to provide care while enduring in its absence. Expectations of care labor structure the subjectivization of women and people of color, while their own needs often go dismissed or neglected. In fact, asking for assistance can lead to shame, punishment, and criminalization from institutions of state and legal family.[29] Though often not centered in wellness discourse, cultivating Asian Americanist care practices through collective work is remarkable given the public dismissal of Asian psychic interiority. As David L. Eng and Shinhee Han write, “there was -- and continues to be -- little acknowledgement or understanding of the social violence and psychic pain afflicting Asian American communities.”[30] They continue, “we are seen as a homogenous and self-sufficient community in no particular need of assistance or support.”[31] In this vein, we might ask: how have Asian American contingencies borne out other models of assistance and support?
In addition to Care Package, we bring attention to Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus, a collaboration between the Asian American Feminist Collective and Bluestockings NYC.[32] The zine -- distributed as a PDF with live links to bit.lys, mutual aid donation funds, and artists’ Instagram accounts -- includes first-hand accounts of essential workers, poems by Fatimah Asghar, comics, resources for reproductive health and for surviving gender-based violence, information to support sex worker and disabled community members, and bilingual plant remedy recommendations to bolster immune systems. The zine shares out practices of care as key skills and knowledges for the performance of Asian American feminist life.
Cover of “Asian American Feminist Antibodies,” an Asian American Feminist Collective and Bluestockings NYC collaboration, 2020. Image courtesy of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Cover art by Amira Lin.
The zine’s cover image features Amira Lin’s drawing of frontline healthcare workers geared up in PPE and facing abstracted visuals of scientific data, discourse, and viral particles. The anonymized care worker, commonly imagined in the hospital, household, or nursing facility, often does not appear as a social entity outside of such institutional contexts. So through which aesthetic forms might she or they appear?
In this special issue, Jonathan Magat’s article “‘Toward Something Deeper and Stranger’: Tracing Forms of Ambiguity across Jenifer Wofford’s Nurse Drawings” challenges the associative line that connects “Filipina” with “nurse” and “care.” Magat insists on the unknowability of the Filipina nurse and caregiver in Wofford’s drawings, which envelope the figure in abstracted environments that bring focus to her person instead of her labor context. Instead, Wofford allows distance between the trope of the Filipina nurse and caregiver and her ability to be known while also prioritizing her figural form as one that requires attention, focus, shape, and care. We read Magat’s work on unknowability and abstraction making a key contribution to recent work in Asian American feminist performance studies, which refuses recognition and representation, and instead turns toward aesthetics and form, for “something deeper and stranger.”[33]
The tension between abstraction and legibility takes a different shape in Jennifer Hayashida’s piece in this special issue. Intelligibility persists as a painful crusade for institutional commitment to Asian American studies, isolating especially in the invisibilization of its contingent labor. As Hayashida asks, “what happens when Asian American bodies begin to make demands, if what is automatic to faculty and management becomes named by students, when the invisible is made visible, the unspeakable is spoken, and mutual contingencies are laid bare?” Hayashida writes of the “small humiliations” of spectral disposability under racial capitalism and the neoliberal university. With scarcity models ruling higher education, the contingent Asian American worker has no institutional time or space to grieve the particular injustice of their mistreatment. The contingent model minoritarian worker cannot grieve the loss of that which was never recognized anyway. Under these conditions, what does the work look like, when the work needs to tend to that which has been so dismissed? Here, the envisioning and building of a pocket of space/time takes another form of care work, in carrying forth the movements of Asian American studies and creating modes of being-with.
Hayashida’s essay, “Removal, Refusal, Rehearsal: 15 Fridays,” written to and for her student collaborators, writes in the refuge of this grief, where refuge is found and built in relation, in collective study, in a de-hierarchized learning environment. Hayashida makes clear the radical care practices that can happen through methodologies of Asian American studies. Through this work, Asian American studies comes into relief “as a method for artistic research, as a model of collectivity, and as a place,” as well as “a vantage point, a perch from which we could be retrospective and forward-looking all at once.” With Hayashida’s phrasing of small humiliations, we may consider the etymological “low” position of the humiliated, the humbled, as a contingent positionality conducive for subterranean study. To consider the contingent along with the subterranean as a vantage point is to effort to find grounding in the present perspective, knowing that it, too, will shift.
We continue to demand the institutionalization of Asian American studies, knowing that institutions do not delimit the spaces or modes of reaching out and transmitting care, even as they hold the power to edify them. Though Asian Americanists have never been able to take institutionality for granted, the horizon for political futurity cannot be so meager as to culminate in its recognition. These contingent acts of gathering and studying together create movement and a different kind of infrastructure for the longer project, a more sustainable project that does not subsist on institutional debt. Mimi Thi Nguyen’s contribution to this special issue, “Poster Child,” connects contemporary conversations of care and institutional critique to anarchist creative praxis. With a refrain of “[i]t is not my job,” Nguyen writes of her button and poster creations, and their free distribution, as part of a practice “[a]gainst the valorization of intellectual property as the endpoint of creativity.” Nguyen’s DIY postcard functions as a “minor objection,” as surplus labor that operationalizes the ungovernable even within professionalizing contexts like an academic conference. As Nguyen writes, “the state cannot give us what we need, but that together under its shadow, we can get it, and get beyond.”
“Much in need”
As we have mentioned, we have written this introduction in quarantine, and like many, during this time, we have relied on video chats and calls to stay in touch with our friends, family, and loved ones for happy hour, for a “surprise” birthday call, for a drag queen’s make-up tutorial, for queer speed dating, for a webinar, to watch a movie together, or for our favorite QTPOC dance party. Sometimes we show up having dressed up, sometimes we show up from bed. Sometimes we think we have figured out our angles, sometimes we find we still have yet to learn. Sometimes our pets take over the frame, jumping into our laps and demanding our attention. Sometimes we still forget to unmute ourselves before talking, sometimes we forget to mute ourselves when we should. Etiquette, social queues, lighting, facial expressions, and postures are getting worked out as we figure out a new way of being present to and with others.
Zoom has become a crucial part of our contingency plans, and not just the university’s. We are loath to admit that we have to rely upon it, particularly when it is tied to our institutional affiliations and their paid subscriptions to its platform. But we have noticed how some of us do our best to use it for other means, as we send out zoom links for events that are not a part of the university’s optics and risk-management programming.
In early June of 2020, we attended an “End-of-Semester Un/Talent Show” organized by some friends and colleagues, who, during quarantine, actualized a cover band with the name, Hot Tub Race War Planning Committee. An email invitation was sent out, threaded through with emojis, that read:
Let us gather, at the first ever
End-of-Semester (Un)Talent Show
Your performance participation is desired!
Please RSVP with details about your act, open form!
But it’s okay if showing up is your participation of choice.
As some of you know [we] have been threatening to premiere our once-fictional band, and
we invite you to humiliate yourselves along with us.
No, but seriously. We know and suspect you have turned to amateur projects to endure
these times.
Want to share them with an encouraging audience, much in need of sweet silliness?
We hope so! Let us know.
Five minutes past showtime, the hosts discovered the link they had sent out was no longer good and wrote a panicked email to all with a new link. A handheld blackboard was brought out, on which a shy setlist was chalked. LaWhore Vagistan set the bar high by sharing a video performance of herself lip-synching Rihanna’s “Diamonds” against a projection of shimmering falling diamonds. She told us she could not share it widely because of potential copyright violations with Rihanna’s song. The circulation, then, of the video was limited; we felt we got to enjoy the luxury of an exclusive screening. Another friend performed a hula in her living room, which she learned while taking hula lessons on Zoom after returning from a trip to Hawaiʻi for her research. Another person brought their webcam close to their mouth as they rolled their tongue.
Hot Tub Race War Planning Committee played two cover songs, and then they played them again, as latecomers who missed the first performance asked for an encore. Tanis Franco wanted to show us a short film they made with a friend and collaborator of themselves reciting lines of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in the New England wilderness, but once they pressed play, we realized that the video was in fact a blooper reel. As they tried to find the final version of the short video piece, we insisted that we liked the blooper reel better, as we watched Tanis and their collaborator recite lines interrupted by pauses, looks of confusion and hesitation that dissolved into laughter.
The varying levels of preparedness, production value, participation, and yes, (un)talent, made for a deeply slap-dash effort. The amateurism on display, out of wanting to reach another at a safer distance, to be embodied before another, to give and bear witness in such uncertain times, allowed for a makeshift non-space where what José Esteban Muñoz terms the “burden of liveness” felt a little different.[34] In this encounter, the mediated, in-and-out presentation of self did not need to be framed by biographical authenticity or coherence within a greater professional project. Instead, the show became an offering in times of social distance and concomitant loneliness.
We began this introduction thinking about Cha’s Human Advertisement series, and her performance of contingency as unsolicited acts. On the other side of this, and in closing, we offer a brief account of these zoom amateur performances. Cha performed the minor antagonisms of the unsolicited as the insistence of one’s own necessity. In this one-off (un)talent show, all performances were solicited acts, shared and prompted by this invitation to witness how we endure time. These performances were desired, but not needed, not a necessity. Yet in that desire, and the space it left for us to participate in any way we wanted, another need was met, for it is there in that “open form,” that we felt “much in need of sweet silliness”--of time set aside to show what we have been doing alone that didn’t lend itself to productivity.
Through Cha and these everyday zooms, we understand performances of contingency as being about need, about what and who is needed. At the same time, they are also about the risk and vulnerability in not being needed. Here, we think of Cha’s performance in front of a tarot reader’s storefront with black-out, tinted windows -- but what if we look and decide that it appears vacant inside? To respond to another’s needs or adapt to another’s terms is one task of the contingent worker, but in Cha’s performance, contingency subsists on other desiring modes that do not equate service with worth, with calculable results or profits of another customer, another client.
Performances of contingency critically take on one’s own precarity by asserting one’s labor as essential, even to the point of being a disruption or distraction. But they also glean, out of the nonrecognition of one’s necessity, other kinds of social relations, where one can get away with seeking out relief, rest, and protection in not being needed for the time being. Contingent acts, then, may loosen the hold of “compulsory sociability” to allow for other ways of doing and caring.[35] For to be contingent to the (un)talent show was to be the one who came to the zoom late, who came with their camera turned off and on mute, who made a snack during the proceedings, who came and went when they needed, who felt too shy to interrupt the conversation to say goodbye on video, and so instead just sent a message in the chat before signing off. In this way, contingency is about the much needed sweetness of and from another, but also about letting go and risk missing out, relinquishing oneself to the momentary grace that whatever one can or cannot give is enough for now.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Bascara, Victor. Model-Minority Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Bhaman, Salonee, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, and Tiffany Diane Tso. Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus. Asian American Feminist Collective and Bluestockings NYC, 2020. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59f87d66914e6b2a2c51b657/t/5e7bbeef7811c16d3a8768eb/1585168132614/AAFCZine3_CareintheTimeofCoronavirus.pdf
Bow, Leslie. Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Asian American Women’s Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Cha, Xavier. Human Advertisement Series, 2004. Artist website, 1:16. June 24, 2020. http://xaviercha.com/?projects=human-advertisement-series-2.
Chambers-Letson, Joshua. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. New York University Press, 2018.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Chung, Kelly I. “The defiant still worker: Ramiro Gomez and the expressionism of abstract labor,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2019), 62-76.
Constante, Agnes. “After 50 years, Asian American studies programs can still be hard to find,” NBC News, June 27, 2019, https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-search?major=164_Asian%20American%20Studies
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
Eng, David L. and Shinhee Han. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press, 2018.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Huang, Michelle. “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 95-117.
Huang, Vivian L. “Inscrutably, actually: hospitality, parasitism, and the silent work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 28, no. 3 (2018): 187-203.
Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
________. Traffic in Asian Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Kim. Jina B. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom’?” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6, no. 1 (2017): https://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/
Kim Lee, Summer. “Cold Leftovers: Sensing Matters of Asian Femininity in Mila Zuo’s Carnal Orient.” Paper presented at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 17-20, 2018.
________. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” Social Text Vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2019): 27-50.
Kunst, Bojana. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2015.
Lowe, Lisa and Kris Manjapra. “Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge.” Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 36, no. 1 (2019): 23-48.
Manalansan, Martin F. “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life,” Political Emotions. Ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds. Rutgers, 2010.
McMaster, James. “Revolting Self-Care: Mark Aguhar’s Virtual Separatism.” American Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 2020): 181-205.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nguyen, Hoang Tan. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Snow, Jess X., Kit Yan, and Peter Pa. Afterearth. (2017) Care Package, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. https://smithsonianapa.org/care/#afterearth
Spade, Dean. “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival.” Social Text 142, Vol. 38, no. 1 (2020): 131-151.
Suzuki, Erin and Aimee Bahng, “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Josephine Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-877.
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NOTES
[1] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 140-141.
[2] Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
[3] Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
[4] Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
[5] Xavier Cha, Human Advertisement Series, 2004, artist website, 1:16, June 24, 2020, http://xaviercha.com/?projects=human-advertisement-series-2.
[6] Vivian L. Huang, “Inscrutably, actually: hospitality, parasitism, and the silent work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 28, no. 3 (2018): 187-203.
[7] Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism (United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2015), 158.
[8] See Martin F. Manalansan, IV, “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life,” Political Emotions, ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds, Rutgers, 2010.
[9] Victor Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism, (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
[10] Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018), 29.
[11] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 76.
[12] Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival,” Social Text 142, Vol. 38, no. 1 (2020): 131-151.
[13] Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
[14] Agnes Constante, “After 50 years, Asian American studies programs can still be hard to find,” NBC News, June 27, 2019, https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-search?major=164_Asian%20American%20Studies
[15] Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, ed. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).
[16] Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
[17] Lisa Lowe and Kris Manjapra, “Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge,” Theory, Culture & Society, 26.
[18] Ibid, 41.
[19] Ibid, 28; see also Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
[20] See the special issue of Scholar & Feminist, co-edited by Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar on “Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations.” http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-and-queer-afro-asian-formations.
[21] Mila Zuo, Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Durham: Duke University Press, Forthcoming).; Summer Kim Lee, “Cold Leftovers: Sensing Matters of Asian Femininity in Mila Zuo’s Carnal Orient,” paper presented at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 17-20, 2018.
[22] Erin Suzuki and Aimee Bahng, “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Josephine Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-877.; Michelle Huang, “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no 1 (2017): 95-117; Aimee Bahng and Christine Mok, eds., “Transpacific Futurities: Living in the Asian Century,” Special issue, Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017).
[23] Ibid., 97.
[24] Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Also see the special issue of GLQ, “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies” edited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel (2016).
[25] “Afterearth.” Accessed July 3, 2020. https://www.afterearthfilm.com/.
[26] Care Package: Cultural Nutrients for Times Like This, https://smithsonianapa.org/care.
[27] A self-described “museum without walls,” the Smithsonian APA Center evidences the contingency of Asian Pacific American cultural life in national institutions. Yet with this contingent positionality, the APA Center has adapted to remote connection and could curate these collaborations with artists in a time of crisis.
[28] Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Half-Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine,” ibid.
[29] See Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Webs, 33, and Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom’?” Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017): https://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/
[30] David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2018), 2.
[31] Ibid, 3.
[32] Salonee Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, and Tiffany Diane Tso, Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus, Asian American Feminist Collective and Bluestockings NYC, 2020. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59f87d66914e6b2a2c51b657/t/5e7bbeef7811c16d3a8768eb/1585168132614/AAFCZine3_CareintheTimeofCoronavirus.pdf
[33] See the special issue of this journal on “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform,” co-edited by Lilian G. Mengesha and Lakshmi Padmanabhan, especially Kelly I. Chung, “The defiant still worker: Ramiro Gomez and the expressionism of abstract labor,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2019), 62-76.
[34] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
[35] Summer Kim Lee, “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text, 37, no. 1 (March 2019): 27-50.