Discussing literary care as a mode of resistance with CAALS

On Friday November 14, 2025, I had the great privilege of sharing about my book, Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State (Ohio State UP, 2024), at a virtual event sponsored by the Circle of Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS). I presented alongside fellow CAALS member Chris A. Eng, who shared about his book, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America (NYU Press, 2025). CAALS co-chair Timothy August opened the event, greeting the twenty people in attendance and introducing CAALS as an organization committed to the research and teaching of Asian American literature founded in 1995. Then Howie Tam, another CAALS member who was serving as moderator of the event, took the reigns by introducing Chris as the first speaker. 

Chris gave a captivating overview of his book, which explores "camp" as both a biopolitical site of confinement (i.e. the concentration camp) and a queer mode of expressive resistance (i.e. campy). He discussed several cultural and artistic texts produced by queer Asian Americans that engage this double meaning in order to challenge the historical abjection of Asian American identity, such as T. T. Takemoto's film Looking for Jiro (2011), George Takei's musical Allegiance (2012), and Chay Yew's film A Beautiful Country (2020).

I was delighted to recognize many synchronicities between Chris' research and my own. In my talk that followed, I explained how the literary and cultural texts that I explore in my book serve as counternarratives to the dominant myths about risk put forth by the contemporary US security state, which read racialized Black and brown bodies as threatening to US hegemony and white racial purity. Like Chris, I discussed how these texts prioritize themes of care and collectivity through counterhegemonic artistic and literary expression, using one text as a case study, Miné Okubo's memoir Citizen 13660 (1946), which was created when she was unlawfully incarcerated as a Japanese American during World War II. 

Following our talks, Howie noted the connections between Chris' book and my own, tracing our shared discussion of care as a tool of subversion and our mutual interest in racial and queer abjection. Then he facilitated an engaging Q&A with the audience, in which attendees asked excellent questions about how we assembled our archive, how we incorporate reader/audience response theory into our analyses, and how we conceptualize what it means to perform literary and artistic resistance. I am deeply grateful to CAALS for creating space for Chris and me to share about our research in such a supportive environment.