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The Bones of Strangers: On Violence, Grief, and Asian American Kin-making
Abstract:
“Write for your dead. Tell them a story.” The author Alexander Chee’s exhortation has come to mind often, during a time in which non-random violence against Asians has come to occupy a larger degree of American attention, both within the community and without. What are the stories we have told and continue to tell—about grief, violence, kinship, and Asian America? How have these stories circulated as talismans of survival and as parables for building common purpose in diaspora? The inscribed, effaced, and excavated poems found on the Angel Island detention center walls, the tales of misplaced remains of 19th century railroad workers accidentally cremated and melded with the bones of strangers in lieu of proper burial, and the lost histories of the women who lost their lives in the March 2020 shootings in Atlanta—anchor my exploration of Asian immigrant storytelling in the present.
Bio:
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow 周成蔭 is Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Duke Story Lab; at Duke, she is also a Core Faculty member of the Asian American and Diaspora Studies, and the Critical Asian Humanities graduate program.
Eileen is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature 傳記文學. She also serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory.
Eileen’s research and teaching center around all manners of transcultural storytelling: serial narratives, press practices and publics, fandoms and media technologies, Asian popular culture, Republican-era China literary and cultural history, as well as on the origins and articulations of Chinatowns around the world. Find her on Twitter: @chowleen