Transpacific Environmental Humanities Summer Online Lectures


Lecture 1｜Remembering as Refuge: Belonging and the Nonhuman in Queer Asian Diasporic Memory Narratives


Lecture 2｜Literature, Mountain Environments, and Anti-Imperialist Critique on Jeju Island


Lecture 3｜Levity, from Ocean to Sky: Humor and Imagination in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City



Lecture 1｜Remembering as Refuge: Belonging and the Nonhuman in Queer Asian Diasporic Memory Narratives

This talk shows how memory and the nonhuman environment are crucial for queer Asian diasporic memory narratives in North America because they form the foundation to acquire a sense of refuge and belonging that is forged through acknowledging North America’s colonial history and, in doing so, offer a framework for understanding trauma, violence, and queer desire outside a conventional human and nonhuman binary. Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (2021) and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) are memory narratives about queer diasporic Asians whose search for refuge and belonging in North America is enmeshed with the nonhuman living world. In Ali’s memoir and Vuong’s novel, finding a sense of refuge and belonging is possible by describing, revealing, and archiving ecologically ruinous settler-colonial and heteronormative conceptions of nature. For both Ali and Vuong, this talk contends, recalling their past lives as children and depicting histories of colonialism’s ruination of the land and nonhuman world are about “remembering as refuge” in North America as a queer-ecological storytelling practice—a decolonial memory practice that not only lays bare and archives how this ruination is implemented and perpetuated by heteropatriarchy in settler colonialism, but implies understanding human interconnection and entanglement with the nonhuman wider world. 


Speaker: Jeffrey Santa Ana

Jeffrey Santa Ana is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Temple University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, 2022). He has published articles on Asian North American and Asian diasporic literatures and ecocriticism in book volumes and journals, including Signs, positions, Journal of Asian American Studies, Southeast Asian Ecocriticism (Bloomsbury), and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020 (Cambridge University Press). 


Moderator: Yugon Kim

Yugon Kim is a Professor of English at Pusan National University. He received a PhD in English from University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching interests focus on transnational American studies, American experimental poetry, and environmental humanities. His current book project explores Zen-inspired American ecopoetics and its critical interventions. 


#nonhuman  #memory  #belonging  #Asian Diasporia  #Queer ecology



Lecture 2｜Literature, Mountain Environments, and Anti-Imperialist Critique on Jeju Island

Jeju Islanders’ experiences and memories of the 1948 April 3 Uprising and massacres (4.3) are embedded in Jeju’s environmental features—especially Hallasan, the shield volcano at the heart of Jeju Island that in fact forms the island’s entirety. This presentation asks how literary fiction looking back on 4.3 centers the mountain in order to negotiate with the figure of the guerrilla fighter - a demonized figure in anticommunist accounts of the insurgency and counterinsurgency that took place on the island from 1948 to 1954. While archipelagic approaches to the study of transpacific imperialism and anti-imperialism tend to emphasize fluidity and porosity across oceanic networks, centering mountains within the U.S.-led militarized archipelago offers an important framework for the critique of U.S.-South Korean violence and the assertion of land-based cultural practices and identity. 


Highlighting fiction by the Jejuan writer Hyun Ki-young, the South Korean writer Han Kang, and the Korean American writer Paul Yoon, this presentation revises the post-Korean War construction of Hallasan as a sanctuary for biodiversity, tourist pleasure, and peace by employing a "guerrilla reading" of the mountain as a material memoryscape and textual terrain for political struggle. I juxtapose these three quite different writers to also chart the evolution and structural constraints of Jeju Island’s 4.3 memory culture before and after the democratization period.


Speaker: Adhy Kim

Adhy Kim is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Asian American Studies at Cornell University in the United States. His recent publications can be found in positions: asia critique and in the edited volume Techno-Orientalism 2.0 (Rutgers University Press). He is currently working on a manuscript called Speculative Natural Histories, which examines how natural history is mediated through cultural production to give shape and texture to US-led geopolitics in Korea and Japan. 


Moderator: Yeonhaun Kang 

Yeonhaun Kang is a Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea specializing in contemporary American literature and culture, US multiethnic literatures, transpacific studies, critical food studies, and environmental humanities. She holds a PhD in English at the University of Florida, and her work has been published in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Studies in American Fiction, and Journal of English Language and Literature. She is currently working on her new project on transpacific environmental narratives and multispecies justice. 


#archipelago  #land-based practice  #1948 Uprising  #Jeju  #imperialism



Lecture 3｜Levity, from Ocean to Sky: Humor and Imagination in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City


Speaker: Teresa Shewry
Teresa Shewry is an associate professor in English at UC Santa Barbara. She received a PhD in Literature from Duke University. Her research areas include Pacific and Pacific Rim cultures, environmental humanities, humor, water, and night studies. She has published the books Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011), Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and the three-volume collection, Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is the guest editor of a special section of South Atlantic Quarterly on environmental activism across the Pacific (2017).


Moderator: Shiuhhuah Serena Chou

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou has been writing, theorizing, and researching organic farming literature and culture as a re-worlding practice since 2005. She is currently working on her monograph on transpacific agricultural literary environmentalism while growing chives, asparagus, mulberries, and gourds sustainability at her office eco-rooftop garden in Taipei along with 23 colleagues in the Farm for Change project. This community farm that she and her team founded in 2019 is called Chung Chung Kan (種種看) or, literally, “let's try to farm.” Farming in Taiwan's most prestigious research center as perpetual beginners, Chung Chung Kan is becoming a radical site that aims to test out popular understandings of “organic,” “cultivation,” “urban farming, and “farming as spirituality.” Chung Chung Kan participants are also encouraging words and themes that embody the ethos and tactics of world-building and care-giving practices.


#levity  #humor  #urban  #historical and ecological harms



Event Sponsors

National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) 

Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan


Event Organizers

Transpacific Environmental Humanities Working Group in Korea

Farm for Change: Climate, Eco-poetics, Earth Justice (FFC)