Sunny Xiang

Sunny Xiang’s research and teaching engage 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literature, especially contemporary Asian/Asian American literature. Her book manuscript Voicing Asia: Post-Cold War Novels, Geopolitics, and Human Rights draws on literary and documentary archives to compare how novels and geopolitics differently represent a voice as “Asian.” It reads the post-Cold War Anglophone novels of Chang-rae Lee, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Wei Hui, Mian Mian, Amitav Ghosh, and Monique Truong as a critical response to Cold War America’s crusade to cultivate Asia’s anti-communist voice. In treating “Asian” and “human” as formal effects of the novel, Voicing Asiapushes literary criticism on race beyond biological and geographical rubrics. It also seeks to provide a less homologous account of the relation between the literary humanities and Human Rights Discourse. Her second book, The Chindian Imaginary, reads Sinophone, Chinese Anglophone, and subcontinental literatures through the portmanteau “Chindia,” a term that for Professor Xiang indexes the co-belonging of Asia’s neoliberal homo economicus with its Third Worldist revolutionary.