Abstract
This forum emerged out of a series of conversations that began as virtual panels in 2020, including a public roundtable, titled “COVID-19 Vulnerabilities: Asian Racialization, Coalition, and Creativity,” that brought together community organizers, artists, and scholars located in North America and Asia, as well as artists’ conversations and screenings of Seoul-based web art duo YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ recent artworks, CHARLIE CHAN AND THE YELLOW PERIL and GUNS ‘N ASIANS. With a focus on Asian and Asian North American racialization, cultural production, and migration, this collection of essays moves beyond the question, “How do you solve a problem you can’t see?” and instead attends to the inquiry: How does COVID-19 engender ways of seeing and not seeing racially?
Danielle Wong
Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersections of race, empire, and technology. Her current book project, Racial Virtuality: The New Media Life of Asianness, traces a genealogy of the “virtual” in racial capitalist, settler colonial logics, and examines how everyday experiments applications of virtuality are entangled with Asian diasporic and Asian North American racialization and labour.
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Thy Phu
Thy Phu is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. She is coeditor of Feeling Photography and Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also author of Warring Visions: Vietnam and Photography and Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture.
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Clare Jen
Clare C. Jen, PhD is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Denison University, where she is jointly appointed as Associate Professor in Biology and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her areas of inquiry are in feminist science and technology studies and critical race and gender studies in public health. She explores oppositional scientific praxes, like biohacking and do-it-yourself/do-it-together (DIY/DIT) science, as feminist, queer and trans enactments of alternative scientific method(ologies). She has published in Feminist Formations, Ethnic Studies Review, Rhizomes, Knowing New Biotechnologies (2015), and Introduction to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (2017, 2020) from Oxford University Press.
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Neel Ahuja
Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor of feminist studies and a core faculty member of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016).
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Visualizing COVID-19 Emergency in India
Melissa Karmen Lee
Melissa Karmen Lee 李林嘉敏 is a visual arts curator and literature scholar and the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her previous appointments include Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Art, Hong Kong, David Lam Centre, Simon Fraser University, and English Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has published on art and literature including Protest as Polyphony: Raqs Media Collective (ASAP Journal), Hospitality and Chinese Diasporic fiction (Routledge Press), “Diasporic Literature: The Politics of Identity and Language” (Journal of Asian Pacific Communications), and “The Politics of Fiction: A Response to New Orientalism in Type” (Journal of Multicultural Discourses).
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The Minor Key in YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES: CHARLIE CHAN AND THE YELLOW PERIL
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang (she/her) is a South Korean-born interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She obtained her MFA at Concordia University in Canada. She works across moving-image-based media, text, participatory and performative work and also writes poetry and fiction. She has internationally presented her work at film festivals and galleries, including Jeon-Ju International Film Festival, South Korea; Chennai International Women Film Festival, India; Leonard Bina Ellen, M.A.I., Canada; SomoS Art House; Germany, Arlington Arts Center, the USA. She is a co-founding member of an artist collective called Quite Ourselves.
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Canadian Literature issue 245, Pandemics, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.