Torn - Asian/White Life and Intimacy of Violence

A feeling and an affliction, torn provokes a sense of woundedness and oscillation. It can describe a literal splitting of one thing into two. It can speak to a state of hesitation or indecision. Fragmented, broken, incomplete. Unsure, in doubt, ambivalent. These are words too often used to characterize mixed race life. In this talk, Professor Anna Storti will read excerpts from her book Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence. An investigation into the political and affective tensions that surround mixed race identity and interracial desire, Torn raises Asian/white life as the representative case study to examine a familiar narrative of inner strife-that being of two distinct racial histories is to be rendered a body in tension, torn between ancestral lineages. Rather than refute this stance, Storti traverses an ever-growing archive of aesthetic, literary, and cultural portrayals of Asian/white racial mixture, showing how Asian Americans with white heritage either refuse, rework, or reify the logics of racial progress and disavowal that have long fueled the US war machine.