Research Focus Group Talk: Racist Love – Author Conversation

Please join us for a discussion of Leslie Bow’s Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (2022). The talk will feature a brief comment from the author, followed by Q and A with participants.

Racist Love traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” Bow explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness.

Professor Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Register here for Zoom attendance link

Sponsored by the IHC’s Asian/American Studies Collective Research Focus Group and the Department of Asian American Studies

Photo credit: Duke University Press