Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.
In sixteen timely essays, the contributors map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, family, and kinship. Collectively, these essays examine the limits of queer epistemology, the potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergence of queer liberalism. They rethink queer critique in relation to the war on terrorism and the escalation of U.S. imperialism; the devolution of civil rights and the rise of the prison-industrial complex; the continued dismantling of the welfare state; the recoding of freedom in terms of secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the politics of citizenship, migration, and asylum in a putatively postracial and postidentity age.
Contributors. Michael Cobb, David L. Eng, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Janet R. Jakobsen, Joon Oluchi Lee, Martin F. Manalansan IV, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Hiram Perez, Jasbir K. Puar, Chandan Reddy, Teemu Ruskola, Nayan Shah, Karen Tongson, Amy Villarejo
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