2019 Association for Asian American Studies Convention

I just got back from the 2019 Association for Asian American Studies Convention (AAAS) in Madison, WI, where I had an incredible time engaging in stimulating conversation with other scholars and activists. I organized a panel titled "The Mixed Race Asian American Literary Imagination" sponsored by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS). Here is a poster announcing the two panels sponsored by CAALS this year:

​In my paper titled "Passing Away and Racial Passing in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You," I considered how Ng's novel employs the trope of the tragic mulatta figure to establish the mixed race subject as a figure of ungovernability. I was joined on the panel by Sara Lee (English Ph.D. student at SUNY Binghamton University), who considered the representation of racial ambiguity in Chang-Rae Lee's Aloft; Elizabeth Moser (English Ph.D. student at George Washington University), who explored mixed race counter-histories in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer; and Heejoo Park (English Ph.D student at UC Riverside), who discussed the genre of the mixed race bildungsroman in Asian American and Latinx young adult fiction. Here is a picture of us after the panel.

With my fellow panelists (from left to right: Elizabeth, Sara, Heejoo, and me).

On my last day of the conference, I attended the section meeting for the Critical Mixed Race Studies caucus of the AAAS, where I met many other scholars engaged in Asian American critical mixed race studies. During this section meeting, we held leadership position elections, and I am excited to share that I was selected to be the next secretary of the CMRS-AAAS caucus, a position that I will hold until next year's AAAS conference in April 2020 in Washington, D.C. In my role as secretary, I will attend CMRS meetings and maintain records, as well as work with the newly appointed president Anna Storti to ensure that CMRS sponsors a couple panels at next year's AAAS conference. I am looking forward to taking on this new leadership position!