Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postsocialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits

This dissertation traces flattened affects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian American and Chinese literature, original ethnographic fieldwork, and film that imagine circuits of migration and capital between China and the U.S. following China’s entry into the global economy. This project builds on interest in Third World and Afro-Asian legacies in Asian American Studies and on considerations of the transpacific as a transnational field shaped by but also exceeding nation-based formations. I do so to propose a postsocialist framework that considers emergent possibilities for transnational affiliations and forms of agency following economic reform in China, when it was once a communist world revolutionary touchstone. This postsocialist framework seeks to make visible forms of agency that take shape through non-revolutionary affects, such as ambivalence and detachment, that do not seek to clearly overthrow a situation. Instead, they enable living on within dominant nation-based projects tied to capital without full affective commitment to them. Specifically, the narratives this project examines center sites of gendered affective care labor within and outside the family as arenas through which to apprehend and learn to navigate these still-changing and emergent postsocialist conditions. Rather than affects commonly demanded of caretaking relations, such as complete emotional regard, availability, and investment, these narratives elaborate on valences of flatness as a way of traversing and living on within China-U.S. circuits through caring for the self and others. Flatness enables the figures of these narratives to do so without fully acquiescing to either Chinese imperatives to cultivate the self and family for the nation’s economic prosperity or U.S. imaginations of Asians as economic resource and threat. My first chapter examines Ha Jin’s The Crazed (2002) and Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude (2014) to consider how flattened affects are differentially available in different gendered subject positions in the wake of China’s accelerated economic growth and increasing ties between China and the U.S. from 1989 onward. Chapter Two elaborates on original ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China (2017) to consider how my primarily female interview subjects who have lived through the Maoist era and China’s reform formulate flatness as healthful and desirable mode of caring for themselves and others to navigate and live with the unassimilable aspects of these vast changes. Chapter Three considers Chinese investigative journalist Chai Jing’s air pollution documentary Under the Dome (2015) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) to elucidate how gendered affective care is a racialized technology that extends into a speculative, technologized future. The project ends with a coda on Boots Riley’s feature film Sorry to Bother You (2018) to further mine how transnational forms of gendered care work underwrite contemporary imaginations of the evolving global economy and possibilities for contesting its structures