Affect, Aesthetics, and Afro-Asian Studies

This JAAS editors' forum on "Asian American Studies in the Age of Black Lives Matter" provides a timely occasion to examine the limitations and possibilities for past and ongoing cross-racial solidarities, and of doing so through an explicitly queer feminist framework. I understand this framing of Afro-Asian solidarity as continuing the unfinished political project of dismantling heteropatriarchal structures of colonialism and racism articulated more than thirty years ago by third world/women of color feminist scholars and activists in the 1980s, perhaps most famously in the edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). This framing also issues from several overlapping political and intellectual projects within race, feminist, and queer studies: the role of black women and feminists in Black Lives Matter (BLM); the comparative turn in Asian American studies toward engagements with black intellectual and political histories over the past fifteen years; and the turn toward affect and aesthetics in queer theory and feminist cultural studies over the past decade. Here I bring together some central concerns within each of these projects in order to inquire into what kinds of political affiliation—and even what notion of the political—might emerge if we attend to affect and aesthetics as the site of queer feminist possibility for "Afro-Asian solidarities."

Three black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullers, and Opal Tometi—began BLM as a social media hashtag in 2013 as a response to the death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, which drew national (and eventually international) attention to ongoing police brutality and other forms of state-sanctioned violence against black populations in the United States. Yet, like mainstream media coverage of the civil rights movement before it, contemporary mainstream coverage of BLM has rarely mentioned the central role of black feminists and black women, including transwomen, in the movement's mass mobilization. This is a critical oversight that calls for an examination of antiblack violence and racism as an explicitly feminist project from the outset. It also calls for an attention to black (trans) women and transmen as victims of these same forms of state violence as the unarmed black men whose deaths have become the most visible representations of this violence—Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. In 2015, Girls for Gender Equity started the hashtag #SayHerName—soon after taken up by the African American Policy Forum's Center for Intersectionality and Policy Studies—which drew attention to the deaths of countless unarmed black girls and women at the hands of police from 2014 to 2015. As feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, the lead author for the SayHerName project, notes, even when black women's and girls' experiences of violence are identical to those of black men, they are elided within the framework of antiblack violence precipitated by racial profiling and lethal force; and "when their experiences are uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation, Black women remain invisible."¹

Like this recent history of feminist and queer absences in dominant narratives of BLM, recent work in Afro-Asian studies has tended to reproduce a heteromasculinist genealogy of cross-racial alliance. As Anantha Sudhakar and I have recently argued, this diverse body of scholarship—from Vijay Prashad's (2001) Everybody is Kung Fu Fighting to Yuichiro Onishi's Transpacific Antiracism (2013)—reframes twentieth-century minority histories as constituted by antiracist and anti-imperialist alliances between Asian and African diasporic populations. Turning to public archives and the personal collections of political leaders, these scholars have revealed the deep history of political cross-fertilizations among African American and Asian leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Chairman Mao, and Ho Chi Minh. Yet perhaps because it relies so heavily on public intellectualism, direct action, and armed militancy as expressions of cross-racial radicalism within the historical record, this body of work reveals an almost exclusive focus on men as political and historical actors in the construction of Afro-Asian solidarities. Much of this scholarship has thus inadvertently upheld a limited model of cross-racial brotherhood, as queer...