Critiques of Asian American Art and Visual Culture reading list
Compiled by the Que(e)rying Asian American Art History Group
With contributions by Jan Christian Bernabe, Alpesh Patel, Susette Min, Laura Kina,
Amy Tang and others
Batchler, David. Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000).
Beltran, Mary and Camilla Fojas, Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press, 2008).
Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. I love artists: new and selected poems (University of California
Press, 2006).
Bright, Deborah. The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993)
Butler, Judith. "Giving an Account of Oneself," Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter, 2001),
pp. 22-40.
Chang, Jeff. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic Civitas, 2008)
Chisholm, Dianne. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Spaces in the Wake of the
City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). [this is a brilliant book. she
queers Benjamin in fantastic ways.]
Cvetkovich, Ann, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Duke, 2003)
queer history and the queering of history;
Doyle, Jennifer and Amelia Jones. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 31:3
(Spring 2006). Special issue, “New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture.” [came out a
while ago, but still important in terms of thinking about intersectionality and visuality.]
Edelman, Lee. Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke, 2004)
Elam, Michell. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New
Millennium (Stanford, 2011).
Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Hom, Q&A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998)
Eng, David, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy"
Eng, David, Judith Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz’s “What’s Queer about Queer
Studies Now?” a special issue of Social Text, which calls for a queer theory attuned to
global politics, war, sovereignty, states of exception, global emergencies, among many
other pressing issues
Freeman, Elizabeth. Special double issue of GLQ on “queer temporalities” which
foregrounds in many ways issues to do with Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer
Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
Gordon, Avery. “The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management.” Social
Text 44 (Autumn-Winter 1995), 3-30. [I put this in here because of the discussion we had
about 'diversity management' which Susette usefully brought up.]
Gupta, Sunil. Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life, ed. Gautam Bhan (Yoda
Press, 2008)
Halberstam, Judith "Jack" The Queer Art of Failure (Duke, 2012)
Halberstam, Judith "Jack". In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (Duke, 2005)
Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick Ferguson and Judith Halberstam, Strange
Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke, 2011).
Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: A History an Theory of Identification and the Visual
Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). [this i think is a key new text if we are
thinking about art history, visuality, and identity]
Kim, Eleana J. Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of
Belonging (Duke, 2010).
Kim, Eleana. “Korean Adoptee Auto-ethnography: Refashioning Self, Family, and
Finding Community." Visual Anthropology Review 16 (2001): 43-70.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard,
2009)
Machida, Margo. Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artits and the Social
Imaginary (Duke, 2009)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Intertwining: the Chiasm.” In The Visible and the
Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968 [1964]. [if he were alive, i'd marry him...well, in
whatever states that was legal...or maybe his philosophy would be opposed to
marriage...oh, damnit...philosophers are too complicated...i am divorcing him]
Meskimmon, Marsha. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London
and New York: Routledge, 2010). [this book somehow manages to write about identity
without stabilizing it...really important book, i think...my review of this book is
here:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00880.x/asset/j.14678365.2011.00880.x.pdf?v=1&t=h4sorh7f&s=18227d11713d3290748034dc3bc7d3dffdca
f80d]
Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Censorship in 20th c. American
Art
Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Perfomance of
Politics (Minnesota, 1999)
Munoz, Jose. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009)
Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 84-8:23 (Fall-Winter
2005): 121-139.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)national(alism)s and
Queer Diasporas.” In Q & A Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice
Y. Hom, 405-22. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke, 2007)
Prashad, Vijay. Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
Schlund-Vials, Cathy. Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
See, Sarita Echavez. Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and
Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Shaw, Angel Velasco and Luis H. Fancia, ed. Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American
War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. New York: NYU Press, 2002.
Silverman, Kaja. Flesh of My Flesh (Standford, 2009).
Smith, Cherise. Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee,
Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Tam, Augie, ed. “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?” Trans. Gargi Chatterjee.
In Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Min
Zhou and James V. Gatewood, 627-35. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Yang, Alice, Jonathan Hay, and Mimi Young, eds. Why Asia? Essays on Contemporary
Asian and Asian American Art. New York: New York University Press, 1998.