As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, anti-Asian sentiments, narratives and hate crimes continue to surge across North America while the US military’s nearly two-century long geopolitical involvement in the Asia-Pacific continues. Many have realized the need for critical dialogue: to ask why Asian people have immigrated to the US, and to question how our experiences can build movements that imagine safety and liberation while demanding an end to American imperialism in our homelands.
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Together, we'll explore these issues by asking what Asian Americanist critiques can ‘do’? How does the instability of the categories “Asian” and “America” challenge the ‘model minority’ narrative? How have Asian peoples been associated with ‘excess’ and can it be a site of solidarity in our struggles for liberation?
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We'll tease through these questions by reading Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a historical queer love story set in 1950s San Francisco that explores themes of Asian diasporas, histories, experiences, identities, differences, and solidarities. We'll alternate the Telegraph Club readings with several other optional texts to critically think about how these themes exist within the United States and its larger empire. These texts are drawn from cultural studies, geography, anthropology, and various other public scholarship to open Lo’s historical fiction to a wider Asian American diasporic critique.
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We hope you'll join us in our mutual reading and learning journey!
