Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasure of Fantasy

Racist Love Flyer

Leslie Bow (English, Wisconsin) will be in conversation with Victor Mendoza about her recent book “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction & the Pleasure of Fantasy”.
In “Racist Love”, Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence.

Leslie Bow is professor of English and Asian American Studies at UW-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning “Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South” (New York University Press, 2010); “Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature” (Princeton University Press, 2001); and “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (Duke University Press, 2022).

Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hjsXfN3NRqKRXimgDWMAZw

 

Race and Racism, Comparatively: A Fall 2022 Series

Poster of the events.

Poster of the events.“Race and Racism, Comparatively” is a series of three conversations highlighting the work of scholars both in and beyond U-M whose scholarship is contributing to much-needed conversations on the global dimension of race, racism, and their impacts. Through these events, we seek to help broaden the aperture through which the academic community considers these themes, encouraging an understanding of a dynamic and interconnected set of systems, practices and material effects.

September 20th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Virtual conversation with University of Pennsylvania scholar and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Eve Troutt Powell and Tennessee State University scholar, Keisha Brown. A cultural historian, Professor Troutt Powell’s scholarship has focused the history of the modern Middle East with a particular emphasis on slavery in the Nile Valley and in the former Ottoman Empire. Professor Brown’s work has focused on modern China and the negotiation of Sino-Blackness; her research interests broadly include ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory and social and cultural history in East Asia.
Register here:
https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ce6GMDBUSPyNH94U9LQBDg

October 4th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Roundtable featuring U-M faculty whose scholarship takes up the question of race and racism according to a transnational lens. The areas of focus represented among the participants include: the construction of blackness in the Francophone world; race, gender and Islam; the role of race and racialization as a tool of biopower in Mexico; and race and representation in US classrooms, literature and media. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option.

November 1st 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Pedagogy Workshop. The groups will function as both an opportunity to reflect on the provocations raised during previous two events, dissect our assumptions about race on the global stage, and exchange ideas and best practices for teaching the same. The aim is to create a constructive and productive dialogue which will ideally produce a series of “best practices” for teaching race and racism from a comparative, global standpoint. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option on Zoom.

Co-sponsored by: Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, NCID, CMENAS, Middle East Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, History, and LACS.

Registration link

Race and Racism, Comparatively: A Fall 2022 Series

Poster of the events.

Poster of the events.“Race and Racism, Comparatively” is a series of three conversations highlighting the work of scholars both in and beyond U-M whose scholarship is contributing to much-needed conversations on the global dimension of race, racism, and their impacts. Through these events, we seek to help broaden the aperture through which the academic community considers these themes, encouraging an understanding of a dynamic and interconnected set of systems, practices and material effects.

September 20th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Virtual conversation with University of Pennsylvania scholar and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Eve Troutt Powell and Tennessee State University scholar, Keisha Brown. A cultural historian, Professor Troutt Powell’s scholarship has focused the history of the modern Middle East with a particular emphasis on slavery in the Nile Valley and in the former Ottoman Empire. Professor Brown’s work has focused on modern China and the negotiation of Sino-Blackness; her research interests broadly include ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory and social and cultural history in East Asia.
Register here:
https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ce6GMDBUSPyNH94U9LQBDg

October 4th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Roundtable featuring U-M faculty whose scholarship takes up the question of race and racism according to a transnational lens. The areas of focus represented among the participants include: the construction of blackness in the Francophone world; race, gender and Islam; the role of race and racialization as a tool of biopower in Mexico; and race and representation in US classrooms, literature and media. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option.

November 1st 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Pedagogy Workshop. The groups will function as both an opportunity to reflect on the provocations raised during previous two events, dissect our assumptions about race on the global stage, and exchange ideas and best practices for teaching the same. The aim is to create a constructive and productive dialogue which will ideally produce a series of “best practices” for teaching race and racism from a comparative, global standpoint. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option on Zoom.

Co-sponsored by: Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, NCID, CMENAS, Middle East Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, History, and LACS.

Registration link

Race and Racism, Comparatively: A Fall 2022 Series

Poster of the events.

Poster of the events.“Race and Racism, Comparatively” is a series of three conversations highlighting the work of scholars both in and beyond U-M whose scholarship is contributing to much-needed conversations on the global dimension of race, racism, and their impacts. Through these events, we seek to help broaden the aperture through which the academic community considers these themes, encouraging an understanding of a dynamic and interconnected set of systems, practices and material effects.

September 20th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Virtual conversation with University of Pennsylvania scholar and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Eve Troutt Powell and Tennessee State University scholar, Keisha Brown. A cultural historian, Professor Troutt Powell’s scholarship has focused the history of the modern Middle East with a particular emphasis on slavery in the Nile Valley and in the former Ottoman Empire. Professor Brown’s work has focused on modern China and the negotiation of Sino-Blackness; her research interests broadly include ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory and social and cultural history in East Asia.
Register here:
https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ce6GMDBUSPyNH94U9LQBDg

October 4th 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Roundtable featuring U-M faculty whose scholarship takes up the question of race and racism according to a transnational lens. The areas of focus represented among the participants include: the construction of blackness in the Francophone world; race, gender and Islam; the role of race and racialization as a tool of biopower in Mexico; and race and representation in US classrooms, literature and media. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option.

November 1st 2022 @ 4:00 PM: Pedagogy Workshop. The groups will function as both an opportunity to reflect on the provocations raised during previous two events, dissect our assumptions about race on the global stage, and exchange ideas and best practices for teaching the same. The aim is to create a constructive and productive dialogue which will ideally produce a series of “best practices” for teaching race and racism from a comparative, global standpoint. This event will be in-person (conditions permitting) with a hybrid stream option on Zoom.

Co-sponsored by: Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, NCID, CMENAS, Middle East Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, History, and LACS.

Registration link