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Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi’s queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women’s community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh’s utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity.

This project explores the relationships of Asianness and Blackness in racialized geographies. Three onscreen spaces organize my inquiry: the Asian-owned convenience store, the college campus, and the freeway. My argument elucidates the structures—racial, carceral, and spatial—that form the possibilities for popular onscreen racial representation. In the first chapter, this project takes up the convenience store’s mise-en-scène to route my exploration of Black-Korean conflict, reading Do the Right Thing (1989), the novel Native Speaker, the TV series Kim’s Convenience (2016-2021), and the 2017 film Gook, as well as the documentary A Love Song for Latasha (2019). I present a theorization of Asianness that turns from binary media in/visibility discourses and centers itself on Asian American and Black feminist visions of flourishing. The second chapter analyzes the space of the college campus through the TV series Dear White People (2016-2021) and Grown-ish (2018-present), addressing the seriality of racial structures through student activism and protest. In this chapter I intervene in serial narrative studies and television studies by insisting that contemporary narrative seriality be understood as underpinned by racial logics. In my final chapter I move to the freeway through Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange and the 1997 film Strawberry Fields, exploring the Asian American feminist road narrative. In this chapter I theorize Asianness as racial infrastructure capable of both transmitting and blocking the force of white supremacy and conclude by locating fugitive ways of being in racial geographies. Ultimately, my research contends that opacity, refusal, being-otherwise, and experimental form are essential to shaping an Asian American feminist politics in solidarity with Black liberation.