Faculty
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Jodi Kim Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies Ph.D., 2004, University of California, Berkeley INTS 4034 (951) 827-2523 jodi.kim@ucr.edu |
My research and teaching interests are at the intersections of Asian American studies, comparative ethnic studies, critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist epistemologies. In my scholarly and pedagogical pursuits, I situate cultural forms as potent sites of knowledge production and imaginative articulation that provide a critical diagnosis of the uneven distribution of power and differential proximities to life, freedom, and violence wrought by racial capitalist modernity.
My first book, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (2010), offers a critique of American empire in Asia through an interdisciplinary analysis of Asian American cultural productions and their critical intersections with Cold War geopolitics and logics. I investigate how what is taken to be the bipolar Manichean rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was triangulated in Asia, and how contemporary Asian American cultural works critically index and give complex form to this vexed triangulation. I argue that the Asian American literary and cinematic texts in my study shift, reframe, and critically extend dominant interpretations of the Cold War by staging the Cold War as a geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological project of gendered racial formation and imperialism undergirding U.S. global hegemony, and by making visible the centrality of Asia to that project.
Indeed, the U.S. Cold War’s violent displacements and migrations constitute in large part the conditions of possibility for the post-World War II, and especially post-1965, formation of Asian America. Asian American critique and cultural politics thus exceed their literal and figurative domestication within the corrals of U.S. liberal multiculturalism. Indeed, their global genealogy – issuing from the globality of the Cold War itself – conjoins them to “Non-Aligned” or “Third Way” Cold War cultural texts and critiques produced throughout the world. They constitute a significant body of what I call transnational “Cold War compositions,” compositions that are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining.
A second book project in-progress, Disposable Life: Race, Globalization, and the Threshold of the Human, seeks to provide an analysis of how cultural productions make visible and help us apprehend the ways in which contemporary modes of globalization complicate previous conceptualizations of race and who/what constitutes the “human.” How do we conceptualize race in a post-civil rights, putatively decolonized/postcolonial, and some have even argued “post-race” conjuncture? I grapple with this question by focusing attention on what I take to be two intricately connected logics in our contemporary moment: disposability and scarcity. The seemingly contradictory relationship between disposable lives and scarce bodies calls for a revision of our analytics of race, one that can rigorously theorize and account for the new contradictions brought about by globalization.
Research Interests:
- Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literature, Culture, and Critique
- Cultural Studies
- Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Studies
- Postcolonial Theory
- Globalization and American Empire
- Feminist Theory, Gender and Queer Studies
- Critical Cold War Studies
Teaching Interests:
- Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literature, Film, and Visual Art
- Critical Methods and Theories in Asian American Studies
- Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Studies
- Ethnic American Literature
- Postcolonial/World Literature and Theory
- 20th Century American Literature
- Cultural Studies
- Critical Theory
- Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Select Publications:
Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and Cold War Compositions (University of Minnesota Press, “Critical American Studies” Series, 2010)
“An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics,” American Quarterly (Forthcoming December 2009).
“From Mee-gook to Gook: The Cold War and Racialized Undocumented Capital in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” MELUS 34.1 (Spring 2009): 117-137.
“‘I’m Not Here, If This Doesn’t Happen’: The Korean War and Cold War Epistemologies in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11.3 (October 2008): 279-302.
“‘They’re a Billion Bellies out There’: Commodity Fetishism, the Uber-Oriental, and the Geopolitics of Desire in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly,” Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English, eds. Kam Louie and Tseen Khoo (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 59-78.
“Haunting History: Violence, Trauma, and the Politics of Memory in Nora Okja Keller’s
Comfort Woman,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 6.1 (Fall 1999): 61-78.