“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
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 and Black public culture through figures such as 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.
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
Contents
ContentsList 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
