UC Riverside

My dissertation explores contemporary Asian American and Latinx speculative fictions that critique racist and xenophobic discourse on migration by highlighting the unequal distribution of freedom of movement against alternatively imagined worlds. This project takes a comparative approach to differentially racialized migrants and their descendants, represented in the literary productions of Karen Tei Yamashita, Malka Older, Ling Ma, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Gish Jen, Carmen Maria Machado, and Anjali Sachdeva. Reclaiming language and aesthetics that have historically alienized Asian Americans and Latinxs, my dissertation analyzes various aesthetic strategies of resistance that emerge from this body of work. My analysis of Asian American and Latinx racial formations in the United States focuses on a mutual struggle over the dominant discourse on immigration that creates false binaries between apparently good/bad and legal/illegal immigrants. Such a narrative renders members of Latinx and Asian American communities in the United States as foreign regardless of their residency or citizenship status. I suggest that aesthetics that foreground and stem from migrant worldviews enable readers to visualize the often-obscured multi-directionality of migration and its myriad causes rising from colonialism, settler colonialism, global racial capitalism, and climate change. Furthermore, these migrant aesthetics placed in speculative fictional contexts urge us to move beyond geopolitical borders in plotting for planetary survival in the Anthropocene.