2024 Critical Mixed Race Studies Association Conference

Last week, on June 13-15, 2024, I attended the 2024 conference meeting of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, a scholarly and activist community that meets biennially to critically explore racial formations through a multiracial lens. The theme for the conference meeting was "More than Betwixt and Between: Solidarity and Liberation in Beloved Communities." The conference convened both in person at The Ohio State University and virtually, allowing hundreds of community organizers, artists, scholars, and activists to come together from all over the world. 

I presented twice during the conference. On Friday June 14th, I joined a roundtable conversation on "The Multiracial Pasts and Futures of Asian American Speculative Fiction," with Cynthia Zhang (University of Southern California), Dr. Melissa Erika Poulsen (Menlo College), and Dr. Nancy Carranza (Riverside City College). During this roundtable discussion, I analyzed the vignette "Machine Love" from Greg Pak's film ​Robot Stories​ (2003), which I taught during my fall 2023 Stanford course on ethnofuturist rhetorics. "Machine Love" tells the story of an android robot (a "Sprout G9 iPerson") that is subjected to dehumanization while performing menial computing work in a corporate office setting. Envisioning a future in which humans and AI robots are inextricably intertwined (a vision that is not too far from our current reality), "Machine Love" raises questions about the ethics of developing humanoid intelligence only to sell it on the mass market purely for human exploitation. We might ask ourselves: What happens if we allow this technology to develop without critically interrogating our current society’s racial, gendered logics? The answer to this question, I suggest, lies in thinking about the racialization of the Sprout G9 iPersons as mixed race Asians, which I argue is not incidental, but rather reflective of two longstanding problematic tropes in the US popular imaginary: first, the belief that Asians are inherently "other," and second, the myth that mixed race people represent the promise of a postracial future. My fellow panelists offered exciting readings of other works of Asian American speculative fiction that feature multiracial characters or perspectives, such as Lois Ann Yamanaka's Behold the Many, Violet Kupersmith's Build Your House Around My Body, Marjorie Liu's Monstress, and Ling Ma's Severance.

With my fellow "The Multiracial Pasts and Futures of Asian American Speculative Fiction" panelists.

On Saturday, June 15th, I presented on a second panel called "What is the 'Critical' in Critical Mixed Race Studies?: Theorizing Mixedness through Structural, Geo/political, and Contextual Analytics of Power" alongside Alma Villanueva (Independent Scholar), Dr. Anna Storti (Duke University), and Jasmine Kelekay (UC Berkeley). In my talk, "'I'm Not the Person You Think I Am': Familial Loss and Multiracial Identity Erasure in Danzy Senna's New People," I explored how the experience of racial imposter syndrome can be heightened when racially ambiguous multiracial individuals lose a family member who represents a critical connection to their minoritized ancestry. By way of answering this question, I analyzed Danzy Senna's most recent novel New People (2017), which narrates the emotional breakdown of a white-presenting twenty-seven-year-old woman of remote Black ancestry named Maria after she suffers the death of her adopted mother Gloria, a monoracial Black woman. I greatly appreciated having a supportive scholarly forum to articulate this argument, which is rooted in my own personal inquiries as a mixed race person who has suffered the loss of beloved grandparents in recent years.

With my fellow "What is the 'Critical' in Critical Mixed Race Studies?" panelists.

Overall, it was a rewarding and fulfilling experience to participate in this conference for the second time (see my previous post about attending the 2022 CMRSA conference). I can't wait to bring what I learned into future versions of my Stanford PWR 2 course on mixed race identity, as well as into my future research projects.