Talk: A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Early Japanese American Literature

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This online talk will feature discussions and close readings from a chapter in Professor Andrew Way Leong’s forthcoming book, “A Queer, Queer Race: Orientations for Japanese/American Literature.” This book examines Japanese and English language texts written by Shōson, Sadakichi Hartmann, Arishima Takeo, and Yoné Noguchi—authors who resided in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924.

Andrew Way Leong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. A comparativist, Leong approaches the study of Asian American literature (and literatures of Asia and the Americas) with special attention to the generative frictions within and among multiple languages and literary traditions. He is the translator of Lament in the Night (Kaya Press 2012), a collection of two novels by Shōson Nagahara, an author who wrote for a Japanese reading public in Los Angeles during the 1920s.

Cosponsored by the University of California Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the UCSB American Cultures & Global Contexts Center