Current Research
Image Credit: Tiffany Chung, HCMC Extreme Flood Prediction 2050
Transpacific Contaminations: Ecological Aesthetics and Cold War Afterlives
This book project reimagines the Cold War's environmental legacies through Asian American and Pacific Islander aesthetic interventions. Although the destructive role of US warfare on Asian and Pacific environments is well known, this project examines war's impact on spaces peripheral to the battlefield that still shape transpacific ecologies, such as economic zones and ecological sanctuaries created on demilitarized zones and Indigenous lands. Analyzing literary and visual narratives of contamination against Cold War ideologies of containment, this project argues that Asian Pacific diasporic writers and artists developed aesthetic forms that highlight the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories. In doing so, they restore ecological relations and imagine a demilitarized future that depends on coalitions across borders and species.
Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruin in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas
Coedited with Jeffrey Santa Ana, Rina Garcia Chua, and Xiaojing Zhou, Empire and Environment is an anthology of critical and creative writings on Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural works that respond to global ecological crises. Focusing on ecological ruination as a material consequence of empire, this collection situates the contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to the environmental humanities.