This year’s AAAS Annual Conference theme is Relations, Reciprocity, and Resistance: Asian American Studies Against Tyranny. I was honored to present on the panel Taiwanese/American Feminist-Queer “Memoir-Theory” in the Shadow of the US Cold War with Jih-fei Cheng and Rachel Lee.

In accordance with the conference call to consider how “Hawai‘i serves as a touchstone for thinking through the forms of resistance that have brought people and ideas in relation across the islands, to other archipelagoes,” this panel reflects upon and performs queer-feminist acts of memoir-theory as a mode to grapple with patrimonial structures tied to militarized rule, extractive industry, and the under-reproduction of nonhuman animals and racialized humans connected to island (nation-)states. Taiwan, like Hawaii, has been subject to missionary forays that have spread religious, medical-health, and imperial governance structures simultaneously. Moreover, the locations of these islands have also served to render both of them strategically significant to an imaginary and real rivalry between Euro-American power and Asian-Oriental power (realized through military base build-ups and economic trade deficits). The papers on this panel contemplate how the political becomes the personal and vice versa in creative non-fictional and counterfactual acts of transgenerational remembering that reflect on how imperial politics vis-a-vis Taiwan gets under the skin.

Jih-fei Cheng (Scripps College) presents “From ‘Coolie’ to Ku’er 酷兒: Mapping Porcine Visions and Indigenous Taiwan”

Anita Chang (Cal State East Bay) presents “Critical-Creative Reflecting on What We Never Forget For Peace Here Now”

Rachel Lee (UCLA) presents “The Father Place: Modernization, Masculinity and Trans-Colonial Relations”

I also enjoyed attending the panel Transitional Justice? Reckoning with Legacies of Violence in Asia and the Pacific, moderated by Guy Beauregard (National Taiwan University), with presenters Yana Ya-chu Chang (National Taiwan University) on “Transpacific Grieving: Han Kang’s Human Acts”; Joan Chia-en Chiang (UCSC) on “Injury Environmentalism: Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jāltok”; and Pei-chen Liao (National Cheng Kung University) on “Reckoning with the Toxic Legacy of America’s Secret War: A Hmong Attempt at a ‘Compositionist’ Manifesto in Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain”