On the Politics and Promise of Hate in Anti-Racist Work

Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and affiliate faculty to the Africana studies program. She is currently Executive Officer of the PhD Program in English. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man’ (2019) and Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (2003), Chuh is co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). President of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, Chuh is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a collection of essays titled The Disinterested Teacher, and her current research tentatively titled Studying Asia focuses on Asian racialization in the era of globalization. Chuh teaches courses on aesthetic theory, queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, decolonial studies, and Asian and Asian American racialization.

Abstract

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act signed by President Joseph Biden in May 2021 legislatively punctuates the cultural discourse that has mobilized hate as a political category. The ubiquity of "Stop Asian Hate" (which, despite its phrasing, generally seems to call for the end of anti-Asian hate) as a slogan announcing solidarity with people of Asian descent, corresponds with the established practice of legislating against hate in the United States. Kandice Chuh revisits that history in this talk as she considers contemporary Asian racialization. What understandings of race and racism accompany such legislative solutions organized around hate? What does the call for the end of anti-Asian hate look like in a transnational context? A global one? A transpacific one? How does the equation of racism with hate hinder or help coalition building? By engaging such questions, Chuh hopes to enhance understanding of mutuality, solidarity, and reciprocity as practices key to shortcircuiting racism.