Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures

2017-06-10Existential Surplus: Affect and Labor in Asian Diasporic Video Cultures investigates contemporary identity discourses in Asian diasporic film and video. As the first substantial study of Asian diasporic media in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, this project analyzes the media works as worldmaking tools that reimagine dominant fictions of belonging. Specifically, at a time when ethnic and racial diversity are transforming into social capital and symbolizing the “good” nation‐state, I examine how Asian diasporic media makers reformulate notions of minoritarian personhood by staging subjects and affinities that are foreclosed by and, indeed, unsettle established identity narratives. Within this context, my research investigates the emergence of negative affect as a political strategy across personal documentaries, experimental videos, and recorded performances from the last decade. With a focus on the visual work of queer Asian German filmmakers (Ming Wong, Wayne Yung), female Asian American performance artists (Kristina Wong), and Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, I analyze how these diasporic agents mobilize affective registers of queer desire, depression, cruel optimism, and sentimentality to defy their social invisibility. At the same time, I explore how these artists and migrant workers deploy these emotional investments to offer narratives of political grievance, everyday survival, and intimate social worlds that move notions of belonging beyond the frameworks of national inclusion and ethnic kinship. Ultimately, I argue that this body of works collectively combines into what I call existential surplus—a repertoire of diasporic subjectivities that allows alliances that might not be legible in existing terms to come to the surface as objects of representation. Combining close reading with discourse analysis and social critique, the dissertation approaches affect thus not only as carrier of omitted Asian diasporic histories. I conceptualize affect as an analytic that allows for a new reading practice of transnational affinities