Feeling Onwards: Model Minority Affects in Contemporary Asian American Literature

Abstract

My dissertation project works at the intersection of institutional critique, affect theory, and formal analysis to survey the flowering of Asian American cultural works in the contemporary moment. I argue that recent Asian American literature’s emphasis on upwardly mobile subjects represents a critical impasse for Asian American studies discourse, which continues to reject the model minority subject as politically dispensable while gravitating toward subjects of historical trauma and pain as politically expedient. My dissertation identifies four different affective models surrounding upward mobility that avoid a teleology of historical trauma as the foundation for Asian American subject formation, casting a softer focus on political pain: sourness in the Chinatown bildungsroman and Jenny Zhang’s short story collection Sour Heart (2017), racial paranoia in the Asian American mystery novel and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014), aesthetic alienation in the city novel and the film Columbus (2017), and finally positivity and happiness in K-pop music. These contemporary affective modes serve as a complement to existing psychoanalytic and economic discourses in affect theory that frame Asian Americans’ minor status through lack.