erin Khuê Ninh comes to UC Santa Barbara by way of UCs: she received both her B.A. and
her Ph.D. in English at Berkeley, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
in the English department at UCLA.
Her research and teaching are preoccupied with exploring the subtleties of
power, harm, and subject formation, whether in the contexts of terror and war,
of family and immigration, or of girlhood and beauty.
Her first book, titled Ingratitude and tentatively subtitled A
Cultural Theory of Power in Asian American Women’s Literature, is forthcoming from the
New York University Press. In it, she takes a long look at intergenerational
conflict, that weary specter of second-generation writing, but under the harsh
new lights of post-structuralist and cultural-materialist analyses. She argues
that the immigrant family unit is structured by an economic and political investment
in the American capitalist system, and driven by its dedication profitably
to raise the model minority. She argues, too, the grievous costs of this capitalist
venture: a daughterly subjectivity trained by masochism into self-destruction.
erin’s teaching in the Asian American Studies department will include
such courses as Vietnamese American Experience, Introduction to Asian American
Literature, and Writings by Asian American Women. Her courses will be interested
in framing topics such as trauma in the refugee community; the global scope
of war and colonization beside the intimacy of violence on the bodies of women;
the psychical role of language and code-switching in the racialization of the
Asian American. In the mid-range future, she would like very much to teach
a course on the discourses of Asian American femininity and the disciplines
of the feminine body: a course that will combine physical training in martial
arts and dance, with readings in feminist theory.
Incidentally, she is on the Advisory Board of Hyphen magazine: a smart, progressive
and beautifully produced Asian American publication. She hopes that you will
support independent ethnic media in general, and this nonprofit, volunteer-run
magazine in particular, by subscribing and donating to Hyphen: www.hyphenmagazine.com.
Lang Toi PPT: for Forwarding Memory through Diaporama, in Amerasia 35:2
