Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life
Autor Seulghee Leeen Limba Engleză Hardback – 12 mar 2025
In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West.
By assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices.
By assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215098
ISBN-10: 0814215092
Pagini: 202
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.44 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215092
Pagini: 202
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.44 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Animated by theoretical erudition and historical attunement, Other Lovings is timely and perennial. Lee’s sensitive exploration of the overlapping frontiers between Afro-American and Asian American literatures, the romance of coalition and the labor of solidarity, and love’s fragility and sociality’s renewal is an extraordinary achievement.” —Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty
“Other Lovings centers the ‘love bonds’ that make up Black and Asian American sociality. Lee thematizes the strongholds of racial melancholia, Afropessimism, and queer negativity in contemporary thought and offers a dazzling theory of the loving, ‘intramural mega-sociality’ of Asian American racial ontology and AfroAsian life.” —Vivian L. Huang, author of Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability
Notă biografică
Seulghee Lee (he/him) is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. He is coeditor, with Rebecca Kumar, of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture.
Extras
What is the precise relation between a heuristic optimism of collectivity amidst dispossession, necessarily affected in the present, and the futurial notion of an already timeless otherwise love traced through contemporary Black and Asian American social formations? In the current iteration of the discourse of racial being, usually routed toward and defined as its full negation, the capacity and desire for love-being’s presence has been largely elided by our critical idioms, even amidst the explicit talk of being and nonbeing within the Ontological Turn in Black Studies and the explicit thematization of love’s relation to racial subject-formation in Asian American Studies. Yet for such optimism to cohere, it must necessarily be timeless, lasting beyond even their authorial personage. The passing of bell hooks in December 2021 provided a love-soaked reminder, as tragic as such reminder’s occasion was, to frame the possibilities of love bonds and love-being as delimited by what she famously called the all-encompassing system of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Her public-facing trilogy of books penned at the turn of this century presaged the turn to the discussion of both positive affectability and explicit love-talk in minoritarian discourse in the twenty-first century. For hooks, love was defined as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” All six of these constitutive elements are most often framed as interpersonal choosing, rendering love as primarily a space of personal agency and a mode of conversion.
In hooks’s system, love is less a notion of the already always existing and more a question, in echo of Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book—Chaos or Community? Where Do We Go From Here?—regarding the necessity of “an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations.” Against an anemic understanding of love as standing apart from “our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation,” hooks sought to resuscitate King’s idiom regarding “the transformative power of love in a culture where such talk is often seen as merely sentimental.” (Notably, she did this during a period in which King’s book, which articulates his most radical political vision as his penultimate major writing, had gone out of print.) In this Kingian spirit, hooks writes of and with “the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good.” Hooks’s tireless reminder that a love-ethic must be both culturally thematized and politically chosen appears contradictory to the central thesis of this study: that love’s being and bonds persist and constitute sociality, regardless of a subjective space of choosing. Instead, the realm of a love-ethic is indeed inclusive of love-being, and vice versa. The ethic of choosing and enacting love, after all, is an affective confirmation of the ontological foundation that is its very possibility. Indeed, to be subjectively affectable to the ontological force of love is to be vulnerable to its objective power, a loving objectivity, thereby aligning Audre Lorde’s and Tendayi Sithole’s separate formulations of positive affectability with hooks’s collective sense of “our radical aspirations.” In other words, to describe the intersection of this paradoxical tension between love-as-agency and love-as-presence is to limn the exposure, openness, and desire inscribed within Black and Asian living. To be affectable demands reciprocity, the expression of which is described in the bad world as a longing for a love not yet here. Indeed, hooks frames the matter explicitly as one of an elision of affected vulnerability: “We are indeed living in an age when women and men are more likely to long for power than they are to long for love. We can all speak of our longing for power. Our longing for love must be kept secret. To give voice to such longing is to be counted among the weak, the soft.” Here hooks configures the notion of being “among the weak, the soft,” tied inextricably to the expression of a yearning for love’s objective power, as a position of strength. After all, in a world in which power and love, in the Kingian formulation, must ultimately be conjoined in a transformative love-ethic, one must always side with the weak and the soft. In other words, to render the love-ethic, properly adjoining love and power, is to hear the open secret of a yearning. And such hearing is to reciprocate lovingly our common affectability.
In hooks’s system, love is less a notion of the already always existing and more a question, in echo of Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book—Chaos or Community? Where Do We Go From Here?—regarding the necessity of “an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations.” Against an anemic understanding of love as standing apart from “our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation,” hooks sought to resuscitate King’s idiom regarding “the transformative power of love in a culture where such talk is often seen as merely sentimental.” (Notably, she did this during a period in which King’s book, which articulates his most radical political vision as his penultimate major writing, had gone out of print.) In this Kingian spirit, hooks writes of and with “the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good.” Hooks’s tireless reminder that a love-ethic must be both culturally thematized and politically chosen appears contradictory to the central thesis of this study: that love’s being and bonds persist and constitute sociality, regardless of a subjective space of choosing. Instead, the realm of a love-ethic is indeed inclusive of love-being, and vice versa. The ethic of choosing and enacting love, after all, is an affective confirmation of the ontological foundation that is its very possibility. Indeed, to be subjectively affectable to the ontological force of love is to be vulnerable to its objective power, a loving objectivity, thereby aligning Audre Lorde’s and Tendayi Sithole’s separate formulations of positive affectability with hooks’s collective sense of “our radical aspirations.” In other words, to describe the intersection of this paradoxical tension between love-as-agency and love-as-presence is to limn the exposure, openness, and desire inscribed within Black and Asian living. To be affectable demands reciprocity, the expression of which is described in the bad world as a longing for a love not yet here. Indeed, hooks frames the matter explicitly as one of an elision of affected vulnerability: “We are indeed living in an age when women and men are more likely to long for power than they are to long for love. We can all speak of our longing for power. Our longing for love must be kept secret. To give voice to such longing is to be counted among the weak, the soft.” Here hooks configures the notion of being “among the weak, the soft,” tied inextricably to the expression of a yearning for love’s objective power, as a position of strength. After all, in a world in which power and love, in the Kingian formulation, must ultimately be conjoined in a transformative love-ethic, one must always side with the weak and the soft. In other words, to render the love-ethic, properly adjoining love and power, is to hear the open secret of a yearning. And such hearing is to reciprocate lovingly our common affectability.
Cuprins
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction Other Lovings and Racial Ontology
Chapter 1 Audre Lorde and Affectable Flesh
Chapter 2 David Henry Hwang and Asian American Love-Being
Chapter 3 The Amiri Baraka of Surplus Love
Chapter 4 Jeremy Lin, G Yamazawa, Lyricks: An AfroAsian Commons
Chapter 5 Gayl Jones and Somatic Wisdom
Chapter 6 Adrian Tomine and the Love of the Asian American Object
Chapter 7 Theodor Adorno, Eve Sedgwick, and the Kyoto School’s Optimism
Conclusion bell hooks’s and Charles Yu’s Love-Being in Practice
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction Other Lovings and Racial Ontology
Chapter 1 Audre Lorde and Affectable Flesh
Chapter 2 David Henry Hwang and Asian American Love-Being
Chapter 3 The Amiri Baraka of Surplus Love
Chapter 4 Jeremy Lin, G Yamazawa, Lyricks: An AfroAsian Commons
Chapter 5 Gayl Jones and Somatic Wisdom
Chapter 6 Adrian Tomine and the Love of the Asian American Object
Chapter 7 Theodor Adorno, Eve Sedgwick, and the Kyoto School’s Optimism
Conclusion bell hooks’s and Charles Yu’s Love-Being in Practice
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Argues for the shared positive affective function of love in Asian American and Black literature and popular culture, countering critical trends that center negativity.