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Queer Genealogies of (Be)Longing: On the Thens and Theres of Asian America in Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel
- Journal of Asian American Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 20, Number 3, October 2017
- pp. 345-372
- 10.1353/jaas.2017.0032
- Article
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This article explores how familial logics of (inter)generationality undergird narratives about the origins and development of Asian American studies in ways that posit the "community" and the "academy" as competing formations within a generational conflict between a radical past and an institutionalized present. As a counterpoint to such accounts, it examines Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel (2010) to chart a queer genealogy of (be)longing that brings to bear relations, affinities, and contingencies that exceed a generational model of the history of the field. Specifically, the first novella Eye Hotel reimagines modes of Asian American literary paternity by playing with and disassembling enduring tropes of normative familial relationality. Through the depicted relationship between protagonists Chen Wen-guang and Paul Wallace Lin, Eye Hotel envisions forms of queer (be) longing that reframe ethnic studies' projects of social justice as productive, erotic exchanges of intimacy, rather than reproductive legacies of filial transmission.