Description
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.
Explores the material and psychic impact of Asian transnational and queer social movements on family and kinship in the late twentieth-century.
About the Author
David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.
Reviews
"The Feeling of Kinship is a timely examination of the persistence of racial and national differentiation within the privileged investments of 'queer liberalism' in its particular focus on the rights to affective union in domesticity, privacy, and family. Here, as elsewhere, David L. Eng demonstrates his gifts of critical precision and elegant presentation."-Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
"Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng's The Feeling of Kinship looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the 'liberal' place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom."-Lauren Berlant, author of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
Book Information
ISBN 9780822347323
Author David L. Eng
Format Paperback
Page Count 268
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 404g