PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies

(Graduate Resident Fall 2024)

1. Focusing on late-20th- and 21st-century literary and artistic production from East Asia, my dissertation examines coastal imaginaries as a generative site for forms of kinship beyond blood and species lines. The project explores Taiwanese, Okinawan, and zainichi Korean (ethnic Koreans living in Japan) artists’ reflections on sites across the northwestern Pacific Ocean that have often been folded into the shadows of multiple empires. I focus on fictional writings and installation art that problematize the systematic erasure and instrumentalization of Taiwan, Okinawa, and Jeju Island in the wake of maritime military expansion and intensified migration.

After the Vietnam War, some Northeast Asian writers and artists propose new forms of kinship that seek remedies for lives sacrificed by the consolidation of US-allied democratic regimes in the Northwestern Pacific. The dissertation theorizes new models of kin relations in literature and installation art that 1) challenge forms of official inclusion rhetoric in colonial history,  2) seek remedies for state-sanctioned bloodsheds where citizens were recruited or tempted by the authoritarian state to prosecute their blood relatives,  3) offer non-anthropocentric ways to relate and belong to watershed habitats.