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Dr. Lily Wong
English department hosts film screening, book talk with Lily Wong[02/19/2019]
TAMPA, Fla. — On Thursday, Jan. 31, the Department of English hosted a series of events connected to Dr. Lily Wong’s book “Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness.”
Wong is Assistant Professor of literature at American University. Her research focuses on the politics of affect/emotion, gender and sexuality, comparative race, and media formations of transpacific Chinese, Sinophone, and Asian American communities.
“Transpacific Attachments” examines the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, stressing the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures.
The event series began with a meeting between graduate and honors students and Wong, centering on “Graduate Studies, Publishing, and the Job Market,” followed by a mentorship lunch with select graduate students working in the fields of critical ethnic and race studies. In the afternoon, Wong screened the film Seeking Asian Female, directed by Debbie Lum, and presented her talk “Sex Work, Media Networks, and Transpacific Histories of Affect.”
These events were part of the Department of English’s “Race, Colonialism, and Visuality in American Literature and Culture” series. The series seeks to create spaces for dialogue between faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and post-bachelors in the field of American literary studies. Moreover, it seeks to discuss and model crucial ways that scholars working within American Literary Studies (particularly at the intersection of race, colonialism, and visual/digital studies) can connect more concretely to local and global communities.
Through key events in the Fall and Spring, the series queries the past and present role of visuality in the production and reproduction of race, colonialism, and social inequities. Furthermore, it explores how such visuality and textuality in American literature and film can work to mobilize emotions and sentiments that produce notions of community, materialization of (racial, colonial, gender, and sexual) divisions, and conceptions of relationality.
Filed under:Arts and Sciences English CreditsAuthor:Dr. Quynh Nhu Le Contact:nhule@usf.edu