Many questions abounded, from panelists and from equally important audience members (including Lisa Nakamura, who is one of the few practitioners, along with Anna Everett, Wendy Chun, Tara McPherson and others, who do critical DH work with ethnic studies in mind). Some asked if it’s too early to be trying to make an intervention, but I like how Amanda put it: “We need to do this now, before DH develops bad habits.”

I thought I’d share some of my contributions from the panel, where I focused on Asian American Studies and DH. It’s in outline format, but hopefully still makes some sense.

• First off. WHY Asian Am and DH?!
•   They’re actually really well related and Asian American studies can provide a useful framework for DH and the current trends we see happening now in academia. Just to be clear, I’m not making an analogy between Asian Americans and academics.
• Problematic Stereotypes are the visible subjects of each discourse:
• Model Minority – the ideal for achievement for all ethnic groups
• Academics – most elite of professionals, especially knowledge workers
• And now DH in that elite and desirable, marketable group, esp. within Humanities, since they can (presumably) walk in both humanities AND tech/science worlds

• BUT these stereotypes, as we’re all seeing with current struggles in higher education, elide drastic differences in terms of subjective experience in each sphere, especially in terms of living and working conditions, wages, even power.
• Wealthy, well-educated Asian Am vs. less educated, low-wage earners
• Well-recognized, securely situated senior professors vs. temporary, contingent adjuncts, or under-paid, overworked grad students at public institutions

Now to answer the why: What Asian American studies has done so well, that DH would benefit from, is self-conscious examination of the contradictions that exist within the wide-spread community.

• Links between concerns of Asian Am studies and DH
• Asians and Asian Americans are closely tied, in terms of labor and the foundations of digital tech
• High-tech temporary workers, programmers, etc.
• Physical laborers who have been helping build connective networks since the 19^th century, and today making computer chips in Silicon Valley, building our phones in Asia, etc.
• Producers of content – software, videogames, entertainment, blogs, etc.
• They are also noticeable consumers of both that same content and hardware
• For Asian Am scholars working in these areas (tech, digital, media, pop cultural studies, labor, etc.) they must recognize the disparity and contradictions that exist within our communities. Asian Americanists have made it explicit that there is no homogenous Pan-Asian identity or politics. This is something we digital humanists can take away from Asian Am studies. DH can be a multitude of things, not just hacking, or building, or DIY. It is not in any way detrimental to have more inclusive and expansive definition of what Digital Humanities is. And in our practice of it, we must maintain a critical, self-conscious distance.

So…. Recap – why is Asian American studies important to Digital Humanities?

• Historicity – We can’t become enamored with technology and what we can do with it. At the same time, media archeology is important but it’s not enough, the material conditions in which technologies have been made and labor that produce them remain important.
• Action – We need to be conscientious consumers/producers/critics
• Scholarship – We need to critically reexamine the foundations of DH as a field and how it can be problematized and broadened by seemingly unrelated fields, like ethnic and queer studies

I’m not going to lie. As a consumer and scholar, I try to practice as I preach, and it’s not easy. (I have to confess to owning several Mac products, and they are one of the worst companies in terms of exploiting low wage Asian laborers.) The awareness that I have from studying labor injustice has been critical in informing my work…I’ll let you guys know how it works…

Now that you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear how others are working to transform Digital Humanities in their own way. Come comrades! Take on the #transformDH hashtag and tweet, blog, or submit to our tumblr. Whatever you do, please share and reach out. This is not a huge community, and the more allies we have in different corners, the stronger our cause. And if you want to read more from #transformDH scholars, check out the great list that Amanda put together in her post at HASTAC.

Seriously though, please share and get in touch!

P.S. ASA was awesome! Pretty sure that has my favorite conferencing experience so far.

Close-readings of the formal aspects of the document, read in relation to more creative humanist texts, will also be included the chapter.

(P.S. ASA update to come soon!)

• Summer sessions went well. Loved the students and the class.
• I had a blast presenting on xenophobia and ethnic others in the Justice League of America/The 99 crossover at Comic Con in July. Made some excellent contacts and met some important allies.
• I have officially paid $90 to the UC Regents (post dissertation prospectus oral defense), and advanced to candidacy. I’m now a Doctoral Candidate!
• I will be serving as the graduate fellow for the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center in the English Department at UCSB for the next two quarters, where we’re co-sponsoring an incredibly exciting series on Speculative Futures. (Be sure to follow @acgcc and @SpecFutures on twitter for the latest info on events!)
• Spring will be spent teaching in the Asian American studies department, where I’m teaching a course on Asian Am pop culture.
• I’m currently applying for a Fulbright to do research in Vietnam. Keep your fingers crossed!
• And of course, much writing and reading needs to be done for several upcoming presentations (ASA in Baltimore, MLA in Seattle) and the dissertation.

For those interested in critical race and ethnic studies and queer studies, I’ll be on an amazing panel at the American Studies Association this Friday with a group of very talented peers, and moderated by Anna Everett (who is too cool for words). Our panel is titled “Transformative Mediations? Ethnic and Queer Studies and the Politics of the Digital.” Here’s the abstract of the panel in the ASA program:

In an era of widespread budget cuts at universities across the United States, scholars in the digital humanities are gaining recognition in the institution through significant grants, awards, new departments and cluster hires. At the same time, ethnic studies departments are losing ground, facing deep cuts and even disbandment. Though the apparent rise of one and retrenchment of the other may be the result of anti-affirmative action, post-racial, and neoliberal rhetoric of recent decades and not related to any effect of one field on the other, digital humanities discussions do often elide the difficult and complex work of talking about racial, gendered, and economic materialities, which are at the forefront of ethnic and gender studies. Suddenly, the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technological seems the only aspect of the humanities that has a viable future.

The increasing precariousness of the job market, which results in an unprecedented increase in part-time, adjunct, and non tenure-track hires, makes it important to consider issues of labor and inequality based on difference – whether in terms of race, gender, sexuality, or disability. Even tenured faculty have difficulty justifying their ambitious, non-traditional digital projects to funding agencies; ethnic and queer studies faculty–so often dual appointments or contingent positions–face additional challenges when planning digital projects. We must also consider the impact of technology on labor beyond academia. How, for example, is this current discourse of digital humanities ill-equipped to deal with issues of production and consumption, such as the Asian American women workers who build computer parts or the disposal of e-waste in Ghana? Moreover, how can we build a digital humanities that creates better tools and forms of collaboration, but is also attentive to the gendering of hardware and software tools, or is sensitive to the exclusionary practices of collaboration?

This roundtable consists of a panel of graduate students and recent PhDs who work on gender, queerness, race, and additional forms of difference in digital culture, moderated by Anna Everett, senior digital humanities professor. Focused on issues affecting more junior scholars, it emerged out of critical conversations that began at the 2011 MLA convention and continued at the Southern California digital humanities unconference THATCamp. First, we ask how “digital humanities” has been defined; who benefits from that definition? How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies? And what can modes of digital scholarship and pedagogy offer to scholars and teachers in American Studies? Our panel will discuss various ways digital scholarly work can productively engage with these lenses of critical cultural studies and solicit new ones. What works of digital scholarship, art, activism and pedagogy enable new possibilities for activating transformations in contemporary US cultural politics?

Taking the form of a rather large, open-ended roundtable discussion we’ll try to present a slew of concerns and problems of Digital Humanities and how it’s emerged as a field, critical perspectives that can be applied to DH as a field, some innovations underway currently, and all with plenty of time for interaction with our audience. Sounds like a lot to cover in an hour and 45 minutes, but it will really be the continuation of a series of discussions that have been occurring for a while now at venues including various THATCamps, queer studies conferences, and in online spaces like Twitter and blogs.

For my part, I’ll be discussing critical race and ethnic studies (particularly Asian American) concerns in DH with an emphasis on labor in the academy, digital production, and opportunities for coalition and collaboration. I’ll confess that my portion is so far rather unformed, but I’m excited to bounce off the ideas of Amanda Phillips, Alexis Lothian, Melanie Kohnen, Marta Rivera Monclova , and Tanner Higgin.

Can’t wait for some RL rabble rousing! Hope some of you can make it.

Sadly, Renee, Jeremy, and I didn’t get the NEH/Vectors Fellowship, though we’re still quite proud of our project and will most likely try to submit it (or a variation of it) elsewhere in the future. One positive that came out of this is that I am now free to teach a summer session course at UCSB, which I am quite excited about: Literature and Film – Translation, Adaptation, and the Global Media Assemblage. I’m able to combine my interests in media studies, literature, and the “global”. Hopefully the students will be as excited about this as me…

Coming soon…A post on recent presentations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and AAAS, as well as another to discuss an upcoming presentation at the Comic Arts Conference at Comic Con on Graphic Representations of Otherness.

I was thrilled to be involved for the third year in a row, and am pleased enough with my presentation to even share it here. This is coming out of my larger dissertation project, which I am just starting, on temporariness, mobility, and the global (to pick a few keywords) in the contemporary moment. The poster itself has very little information, since the whole point of the Slam is to encourage exchange and interaction with attendees and fellow presenters. This particular poster presents word clouds based on the I-129 Petition for Nonimmigrant Workers to the U.S., and select passages from Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, which deals with such a single fictionalized “nonimmigrant” subject. Feedback is greatly appreciated, in-person or on-line. (Also, a quick note, the “No”, which should be as big as the “Yes” in the first word cloud for some reason, does not appear, but be assured it should be!)

The poster itself examines two texts: the I-129 Petition for Non-Immigrant Workers, and the novel Transmission by Hari Kunzru (excerpts from the passages dealing specifically with the application and relocation process of the character Arjun Mehta). This poster represents a more visual representation of close-readings that does not make any conclusions.

Enjoy! And feedback would be greatly appreciated.

My second exam has been postponed till this coming Tuesday, following a minor hiccup with the grad steering committee. But revisions are in, and *fingers crossed* the exam will go well and I’ll be ABD this quarter!

CFP: Fourth Annual Research Slam

Hosted by the UCSB English Department’s Transcriptions Center,  this slam is an academic mini-conference meets poster session. It’s non-hierarchical, dynamic, interactive, and an incredibly welcoming and fun environment to share and engage in research. Super friendly, and everyone should apply!

Here’s a video from the Research Slam in 2009.

After about a year and a half of writing and revising I have finally submitted my prospectus for my dissertation to our department’s graduate committee for review. If all goes well I will take my second exam and advance to candidacy in mid-March. *fingers crossed*

Here is an excerpt of what I submitted:

The rhetoric of free movement surfaces with new vigor in discourses of networked societies in the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Though this language can be found earlier in the twentieth century in the flâneur or the expatriate (and in countless others that predate these), it returns in virtual form as what Lev Manovich calls digital navigators or flâneurs.¹ The virtual movement of these navigators and flâneurs as they “browse” and “surf” the Internet and traverse digital spaces is indicative of a networked mobility in a world seemingly free of borders, as lauded by early techno-utopianism, which saw limitless possibility in digitally networked technology like the Internet. In the “real” world, we see mobile figures emerging in contrast to the national citizen—the “static” resident within a territorially sovereign nation-state. This project will examine one paradigmatic instance of these mobile subjects: the temporary worker, a politico-juridical category we encounter in cultural figurations of the entrepreneur, the gangster, the migrant laborer, the guest worker, and the sex worker. I propose a cultural study of their representations in print, audiovisual, and digital media, focusing specifically on the affordances of networked communication and travel technologies that facilitate or hinder mobility.

Such a study is clearly warranted for several reasons. First, if we look at the dominant discourses on technology, neither the libratory potential of networked technologies, nor the disparity of the “digital divide,” adequately theorize the role of these technologies in the cultural engagements of underrepresented temporary workers. I argue the new, networked technologies affect mobility in a tangible sense. While offering a fiction of agency, or what Aihwa Ong has called “flexible citizenship,” they highlight the experience of temporariness characteristic of this contemporary moment. Second, while there have been several studies of particular coteries of migrant subjects—from refugees to corporate elites—few studies have brought these figures together under the same critical rubric. The dissertation takes up this challenge not to homogenize temporary workers, but to underscore the glaring divides and unseen relations in this unstable political category. The same mobile body that represents potential opportunity also emerges as a dangerous supplement to the citizenry, one that incites ambivalence at various national, corporate, local, and individual levels. These differences impact the social experience of temporary migration quite substantially. For an elite few, like binational citizens who have a surplus of both capital and citizenship (multiple passports, diplomatic immunity, business visas), traditional nation-bound concepts of belonging are no longer restrictive. For others, like migrant and guest workers, this type of global citizenship is little more than an unattainable ideal. The promise that networked communications have created a borderless world, allowing for the virtual and “real” migrations of people, media, information, and goods, remains somewhat of a utopian myth. Recent events in the Middle East may have demonstrated the democratic potential of social networking technologies, but the types of networks that temporary workers utilize and form are infinitely more diverse and complicated in terms of form and function as they connect individuals and communities across nation-states. Rather than being subaltern and voiceless others, these migrants, from the most transnational corporate elite to the most disposable unskilled laborer, engage with networked technologies in various ways: professionals seeking job opportunities; unskilled workers sending remittances to family members; undocumented immigrants providing interviews to NGOs; or traffickers and coyotes relying on underground networks to transport human cargo. My dissertation is chiefly concerned with these migrants, legal and illegal, the networks they navigate, and what awaits them upon arrival in their host nation.

It goes on for quite a while (who knew I’d be so wordy), and details the geographic regions (Los Angeles, Dubai, Ho Chi Minh City) and texts I’ll be working with (print, digital, graphic, cinematic). It’s a project I’m completely in love with, and I hope it turns out well. Who knows what the next few years will bring!

And many thanks to my friends and colleagues (frolleagues!) for their invaluable feedback and time. <3

The institute and the community it brings together sounds amazing, and I know the competition is steep, but thus far I’ve already been overwhelmed with the encouragement I’ve gotten from peers, many from different institutions, who are also applying to the institute and who have shared their projects with me. The community formation that has been facilitated through THATCamp, Twitter,  and now this application process have been great. There is hope for us after all!

It’s a crazy process, especially being geographically separated and occasionally beleaguered with tech issues, but many thanks to my amazing collaborators for putting this beast together with me!

Now to get back to grading, to prepare for my second exam, and then to write a paper on mediated sex economies in Linh Dinh’s Love Like Hate for the Technologies of Asian Migration and for AAAS. Lots of traveling to come. Please let me know if you’ll be at either one of those, so the coalition and collaborating can continue!

Before I go into why I’m feeling all excited and conflicted, I think it might be helpful to share some of the panels I went to at this past MLA…

185. Planet Wiki? Postcolonial Theory, Social Media, and Web 2.0

233. Transmedia Activism

309. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities

331. The Open Professoriat: Public Intellectuals on the Social Web

442. Postcolonial Diasporas

466. Teaching Asian American Literatures

681. Writing Human Rights: Asian American Contexts

743. What the Digital Does to Reading

Of course there were a gazillion other panels I wanted to attend and didn’t get to, whether it was because of my late arrival (darn the quarter system and early teaching duties) scheduling conflicts (so much going on at the same time!), or pure exhaustion. I think you can still get an idea of the breadth and the particularities of my interests, which is why I am sharing some of my MLA itinerary.

From my limited experience at MLA, I observed a few things about the various areas I’m interested in:

• Digital Humanities is hot! There were over 40 panels and roundtables either devoted to or including presentations about digital projects, issues, etc. A massive increase from previous years. (Also catalogued here by Mark Sample.)
• Maybe it was all those iPads and iPhones, but the atmosphere at those DH panels was positively electric. Of course this was probably aided by the vibrant young scholars, the running stream of tweets, and close-knit relationships fostered by that online community. This also gained criticism by some for being cliquish, exclusive, and even alienating. It’s the “cool-kid’s table,” said William Pannapacker at The Chronicle. But in my opinion, DH is no more cliquish or exclusive than any other period/geography/language specific field. It’s just much more transparent and rapid because we’re watching it unfold in real-time on twitter, ProfHacker, and individual or institutional blogs, as opposed to peer-reviewed journals and annual professional meetings. I mean, I was intimidated and reserved, and it wasn’t just cause these panels were populated with DH rock stars.
• Digital Humanists seem to be overwhelmingly white. (Maybe it’s just the MLA? But I also noticed this at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in 2009.) No offense, but where are all the people of color? Not that the work being done by these current superstar academics isn’t amazing and important, but where are those individuals and communities who are visibly different to examine and create or represent disparate voices and media objects?
• And, this is where I was most concerned, there isn’t all that much overlap when it comes to race/ethnic studies, the postcolonial, and DH. I mean this in terms of participants as well as represented scholarship. “Planet Wiki?” was the only panel devoted to such issues (though there were several on language teaching and acquisition, which is quite different).

I don’t mean to criticize DH as a field (something that seemed to already be occurring by the third night of MLA, which led to a wonderfully self-conscious examination of the community on twitter that very night) for it’s lack of diversity. But as a new scholar invested in both the global, the subaltern, and the ethnic other, as well as the digital and the literary, I’ve been struggling to find a means of articulating a project that reconciles methods, theories, and cultural objects from both fields. This is most visible in a question I got from an Asian American scholar (a mentor) when she asked me, “Why do you want me on your committee?” My project wasn’t an Asian American project, why would I want an Asian Americanist?

And that was it. Why did the two have to be mutually exclusive?

For the longest time had the most difficult time trying to justify why I wanted to bring the two together. But I think I’ve got it now. Many thanks to the amazing scholars at MLA this year, cause their mind-blowing presentations helped me to articulate this. I think. I might reach the end of this and find out it still doesn’t make sense.

But here goes…

The critical significance paid to code, to networks, to interaction and play, to labor and practice that are foundational to DH can be used to inform an Asian American or global project. But what about the reverse relationship? Does Asian American criticism lend itself to larger, possibly non-Asian, more global, more digitally focused projects? As Stephen Sohn asked us so beautifully in his paper on D’souza’s Whiteman (panel 681), must Asian Am literary study restrict itself to texts based on the descent of the author or characters? Can we not re-appropriate the disciplinary concern of Asian Am (and other specific ethnic) criticism with its investment in social justice, equity, ethics, and representational politics to expand the scope of what is considered “Asian American literary criticism”? Can we not examine a more flexible “literary refraction” instead of insisting on “literary reflection”?

I think these questions are incredibly important right now in this environment of crisis in the public university. As the Digital Humanities becomes more institutionalized and recognized as a field, with many universities making cluster hires and building DH areas of their own, ethnic studies departments seem to be finding themselves in more precarious situations which has led to efforts to justify their existence and relevance. When ethnic studies programs elsewhere are being eliminated (I’m glaring in the general direction of Arizona right now) the anxiety I’ve noticed at UCSB in particular is not completely unfounded (but c’mon, “post-racial”? Really?!). How many grads have I spoken to have expressed some regret that they didn’t jump on that digital band wagon earlier so they could be more marketable now? Well, I can’t remember an exact number. But it’s a lot.

Ok. Now I’m fading. The kitty is purring, and I’ve since moved to my bed. So, to paraphrase: Asian American literary criticism doesn’t have to be only about Asian American texts any more, it can serve as a critical paradigm, and Digital Humanities can be informed by ethnic critical traditions. (Wow, why does this suddenly sound so easy?) Don’t the DH peeps always call for collaboration? Well, there you go.

And here’s a gratuitous picture of Allister sleeping. =D

Happy Holidays! (2010)