“The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015” (book manuscript)
The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015 presents an interdisciplinary study of contemporary US diasporic fiction. Comparing the popular fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Lan Cao, Achy Obejas, Cristina Garcia, Kiran Desai, and Nora Okja Keller, I demonstrate how contemporary authors use emotion as an expressive technique, one that exposes how the intersections of domestic racialization, global capitalism, and US empire and imperialism emerge in everyday emotional negotiations.
The project illustrates that belonging is a process, not a final subject formation, and contends that this daily emotional work is visible through acts of narrativization. In this way, I show that emotion is not only formative to characterization and the rhetoricity of fiction, but is crucial to the construction of the racial and gender politics of the stories themselves.
Ultimately, then, The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging asks readers to consider what we can learn about contemporary racial politics by examining the narrative work emotion performs in diasporic fiction.
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“Enough is enough: Learning to be adequate at the Writing Center” for Adequate: Writing New Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition, co-written with Malaika Fernandes (Wes ‘23), Tenzin Jamdol (Wes ‘24), Audrey Nelson (Wes ‘25), Xiran Tan (Wes ‘24), and Shaoxuan Tian (Wes ‘23). Submitted to Press
In this collaboratively written project, five writing tutors and a faculty Writing Center director explore how they flounder to meet institutional expectations as writers, learners, and educators. We ask: What does it mean to be (in)adequate employees at a liberal arts college and support “good enough academic work” at an undergraduate writing center? How might personal and structural factors complicate and inspire our efforts to affirm and challenge each other as colleagues and mentees/mentors? More broadly, how might we work within and against institutional constraints to produce meaningful change for communities? After exploring our personal backgrounds, our writing center’s structural conditions, our methodology, and the scholarly discourse on writing centers, failure, capitalistic time, and code-meshing, we disintegrate into a multi-voiced mapping of writing center work at Wesleyan. We reserve the latter part of this chapter for auto-ethnographic narratives of real-life mentoring experiences that strategically navigate what it means to “be good enough.” We don’t believe in a cure-all; instead, we continue to hold complexities, self-question, and make informed decisions together, recognizing that discomfort is part of our theorization.