Yu-Fang Cho

Overview

Yu-Fang Cho is a Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and co-coordinator of Asian/Asian American Studies at Miami University.  She is the author of Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890–1910 (SUNY, 2013) and the co-editor of the 2017 special issue of American Quarterly, “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies.” Her research articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Transnational American Studies, Amerasia, Journal of Asian American Studies, Meridians, Comparative Literature and Culture, among others, and in edited collections, including Racial Ecologies (Washington UP, 2018). She has received fellowships from Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, the Pacific Rim Research Program at the University of California, the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, Miami University’s Humanities Center, and the National Research Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taiwan.  Her current project examines how post-Fukushima transpacific literary and cultural production mediates the genealogy of the post-WWII ideological shift of nuclear power from a death-making weapon to a technology of good life.  Portions of the manuscript have been published in Amerasia (2015), Cultural Studies (2018), and Racial Ecologies (Washington UP, 2018).

Research Focus

Queering the Nuclear Pacific: Indigenous-Asian Relationality in Transpacific Modernity

This book centers women of color and queer of color critique as a key method to analyses of geo-cultural politics of life and death in America’s Asia and Pacific as they are mediated by post-Fukushima transpacific literary and cultural narratives.  by the temporal and spatial displacements in which are characterized by both the saturation of nuclear threats from Asia and the amnesia about nuclear bombings and bomb tests in the Pacific.  This project seizes the temporal and spatial displacements in these narratives as critical openings toward writing a genealogy of post-WWII transpacific nuclear modernity and its effects on Asian and indigenous peoples and ecologies.  This genealogy entails both this ideological shift of nuclearism from weaponry to energy technology as well as what this shift has both made possible and invisible: from the emergence of U.S.-led transpacific high-tech industries to the continuous production of nuclear and high-tech wastes that has disproportionately impacted indigenous peoples and ecologies.  The literary and cultural works examined in this project bring to the fore the expansive yet invisible ways that this ideological shift of nuclear power operates across broad and varied scales, impacting life from the molecular (as with radiation) to the geopolitical (as with weaponry and energy technology).  Through linking these seemingly disparate formations through asymmetrical yet relational transnational frames, this project argues that understanding how reproduction centrally structures racial, gender, and sexual conditions of militarization must take into account not only human’s ability to biologically or socially reproduce, but also the very sustainability (or the lack thereof) of life itself.  

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