Racist Intimacies: Asian America in Thrall to Desire
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Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental (and interdepartmental) colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.
About the Talk
US imperialism in Asia and the Pacific relies on a sexual logic that places people from different backgrounds in close proximity, so close, in fact, that they touch, and through that touching, they meld. So the logic goes. Contrary to the controversial claim that Asian Americans are becoming white, this talk looks to the scenes in which empire casts Asian people with white heritage, theorizing the ontological dilemma of mixed race subjection alongside the sexual undercurrents of western imperialism that bring Asian people and whiteness together, again and again. Through three case studies, this talk builds towards the formulation of "racist intimacies" as a means to observe the never absent influence of empire's racial ideologies, specifically as they haunt the sexual and reproductive spheres of social life.
About the Speaker
Anna Storti is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. An interdisciplinary scholar trained in feminist theory and queer of color critique, Storti explores the aesthetic and affective relations between race, empire, violence, and pleasure, specializing in performance art across the Asian diaspora. Her research has been supported by Dartmouth College, the University of Maryland, College Park, Northwestern University, and the McNair Scholar's Program. You can find her scholarly and creative writing in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, forthcoming in Feminist Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as the chair of the Critical Mixed-Race Studies section for the Association for Asian American Studies and on the conference programming committee for the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association.
