Turning Diaspora to Dirt: Addiction and Illness in Asian American Critique

This article locates the Asian addict in global capitalism and argues that drug addiction and illness point to the limitations of diaspora in Asian American criticism. Through a reading of Nami Mun's 2009 novel, Miles from Nowhere, where "dirt" configures as a central trope, this article theorizes "diasporic dirt" as a framework to challenge the rehabilitative impulse within identitarian politics and narratives of diasporic "uplift" often valorized in Asian Americanist critique.