Seulghee Lee, "Other Lovings: An Afroasian American Theory of Life" (Ohio State UP, 2025)
42:33 Share

Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

This episode is brought to you by eBay. We all have that piece. The one that's so you, you've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet, Fashionistas, you'll find it on eBay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the Cousteau Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee. eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion. eBay. Things people love.

Spring is here and to celebrate Princeton University Press is having an incredible sale. Use the code BLOOM50 to receive nearly 50% off of every single Princeton University Press print book, ebook, and audiobook. The sale ends May 31st. So go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to the new books network.

Hi everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Asia Adomanis, your host for this episode. Today I'm talking with Dr. Sewell Gheeley, professor of African American Studies and English at the University of South Carolina and the author of the recently published Other Lovings, an Afro-Asian American Theory of Life from the Ohio State University Press.

So, I'll be thanks so much for chatting with me today about your research and your work and about this book in particular. It's really a good read that gave me a lot to think about in terms of my own work and also lots of threads and themes that I'm eager to follow up on and learn more about.

I was hoping we could begin with a bit of an introduction from you. Maybe you could share a bit about the work that led you to this project before we dive into the book itself. Sure. Thank you, Asia, so much for having me. It's a real honor to be a podcast guest in This Not Work and to be talking about my work with you. And

I would say that this text began all the way back in graduate school when, as a kind of Berkeley theory head, I started noticing the comparable trends in critical theorizations of race and racialization in the United States context specifically. So the ontological turn in Black Studies, whose signature school is Afro-Pessimism, alongside the racial melancholia thesis in Asian American Studies.

as well as the so-called antisocial thesis in white queer theory. And I started kind of thinking about what it is these three trends had in common and how they back systematic comparison. At the same time, in my literary and cultural archive, I was starting to think about the ways in which

There's these moments of the loss of subjectivity or the forestallment of what it means to have an ego replenished that comes out of the notion of and the narrated experiences of

heartbreak and loss of love relationships and how it is that our literatures in the Asian American and African American traditions tend to emphasize the ways in which rather than recuperation and wholeness, what we get are ideas that

certain kind of putative lovelessness shows the ways in which we can think about love as a separate ontological force that kind of coheres our social formations, as well as the fact that the presence of such love actually sometimes gives lie to the idea of an individuated, consolidated social subject altogether. And so it became, through this archive,

It became a way to topple with and sometimes tarry against the idea of a singular non-being as constituted by social death and natal alienation for Afro-pessimism or for the forestalled

melancholic subjectivity as described, grounded in a lost love of racial whiteness that can never have been actually achieved as articulated by the racial melancholia thesis in Asian American discourse. And I started thinking about these together. And it's the polemical side of the text is to put together a notion of love's plenitude and presence in our archives and to

hopefully contribute to the rebuttal of certain theoretical formulations that have become dominant in academic discourse.

Great. That's a great sort of big theoretical look at the project. We also get to see you take on these theories and some certain terms that we'll get to later on in a lot of different forms throughout the course of the book. And before we sort of jump into a little bit more of that theory and a little more into sort of some of the terms that you really utilize really well, really sort of interesting, engaging ways throughout the entire book. Are there any particular chapters or case studies that you think that

best sort of embody or capture the ethos of the project overall? Sure. Well, the project took a certain turn after the anti-Asian and anti-Black conditions of the pandemic. And so there was a lot of revising done on the introduction and in the concluding chapter that describes the interweaving

insurgency of anti-Asian and anti-Black necrophilia and violence in the last five years. And so I would say that the theoretical comparison that I hatch in the introduction and then the discussion of an Asian-American novel that actually came out during the pandemic, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, in the very final chapter are the moments where you can see this kind of Afro-Asian comparison the clearest.

Yeah, great. There's really exciting contemporaneity to those chapters that really tie or work well as bookends, I think, for the entire project. Yeah.

This book is also structured around a few key ideas and terms that I think really sort of hold the whole weight of the project, almost like a scaffolding or like some load-bearing supporting terms that occur throughout. Of course, one of those terms is in the title, other loving, but there are also some others that really grabbed and kept my attention throughout the text, sort of working as a really useful guidepost as I worked through it.

And I think the most prominent one for me was the idea of the love being. So could you give the listeners and also me an idea of what this term love being means and your specific use of it? And then maybe also contextualize it a bit, as you also do in the text, alongside the work of Michael Hart and Antonio Negri's work. Sure.

Sure, sure. Prior to the discussion of Hart and Negri and the introduction, I introduced what Dr. King was talking about in the final year and a half of his life when he tried to conjoin a concept of

imminent love with a source of political power. And he said that love without power is sentimental and anemic and power without love is reckless and abusive. And so this idea of what the political configurations of loving can be, I try to cohere in this notion of love being that I appropriate from Hart and Negri's Commonwealth.

in which in the middle chapter of that text, they described that every event of love is an ontological event. It represents a rupture of subjectivity of sociality and creates new forms and new socialities. And so it's that kind of idea that I want to discuss in the text. And I also like the notion of love being because it emphasizes the ways in which

the love that we seek is not always elusive, that it's present and that we don't need to think about the particularities of its loss or its rupture, but rather excavate its presences in all its fullness and plenitude. Yeah, great. Thank you. That quote from Dr. King does a great job sort of having your work straddle

different, I think, theoretical and disciplinary worlds and realms. And sort of on that note, thinking, sort of bringing up this term or getting into the concept of racial ontology that is sort of

and sort of takes on different forms throughout the text. I'd love to hear you sort of articulate or re-articulate here how you use or conceptualize racial ontology as it relates specifically to subjectlessness for both the fields of Asian American studies and African American studies, but also those moments where those two fields are congruent with one another or congruent.

constructive of one another. It was just sort of another centering theme of the text. Sure. There's a couple of ways to narrate what I'm trying to say by way of this ontological force of love. One would be to say that in the Black Studies theoretical tradition, one story we could tell is that there's been a transition from an emphasis on the existential mode and navigation in an anti-Black world. I'm thinking of figures like

Lewis Gordon, Cornel West in the 1990s, and the ontological framework provided by figures like Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wooderson going into the 2000s. And it's interesting that while the ontological framework has insisted on the idea of this kind of non-being or a kind of foreclosure of Black subjectivity and subjecthood, it hasn't been able to talk about as well the ways in which other forms of

the articulation of social strivings and cultural frameworks are also important.

under those ontological conditions as well. And love being a central one for me because it was so well articulated coming from the 1990s from the previous thinkers I had mentioned in the existentialist tradition. And so one way to think about what I'm trying to do in other lovings is that I'm trying to congeal the ways in which Black brothers and Black love bonds become a way to link up

the ontological conditions of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in the gratuitous violence that shaped the modern world with everything that's come against it, including how love speaks back and how love actually has its own kind of ontological formation.

In Asian American studies, what I would say is that the clarion call from Candace Chu in 2003 to insist on a certain kind of subjectless discourse, that this isn't about what kinds of Asian American subjectivity and identity that enter into a certain cultural marketplace, but rather the idea that, you know, there's a

forms of non-subjecthood and non-being that can be harnessed toward more liberatory political projects. And I take that idea very seriously, especially against its kind of concomitant psychoanalytic

frameworks and the aforementioned racial melancholia thesis that insist on a certain kind of another kind of subjectlessness, the idea that we are only legible as racial subjects because of this kind of emptiness or this absence. And so I'm trying to bring all those ideas together to argue for a certain kind of fullness that doesn't rely on a notion of subjecthood in the first place. Yeah, great. Thank you. I think that's really well formed in the

the text especially in the introduction and in the first few chapters the sort of uh contours of subjectiveness if that's not uh sort of contradictory uh come into form pretty well there um did you do you want to maybe say anything else else about other counter ontologies that are explored throughout your project uh i think that's sort of a key term that again is uh

and reshaped in each chapter, the different counter-ontologies that you find useful in your analysis? Well, one thing I would say is that

In addition to the close readings of literary and cultural texts, the earlier renditions of my argument really relied on a certain kind of formation of affect theory that I learned through my own theoretical genealogies. And that was really big when I was in graduate school. And one of the things that happened was...

in the genesis of the project is try to link some of the best aspects of affect theory. Um, and it's grappling with European psychoanalysis with the aforementioned schools of thought from black studies and Asian American studies that I mentioned. And so, uh, there is a, um,

legacy of the best of the intersection of affect theory and talking about race and racism that also converged in the book as well yeah this that sort of leads me to ask uh about how you cohere some of these ideas and some of these approaches uh in your case studies and uh

What's first brought to mind for me after that question and your answer and your sort of explanation of your approach to the book is a point that you get to in your explanation of Adrian Tamine's graphic novel Shortcomings, one of the later chapters in the book, particularly in your analysis, which is a bit humorous, of the scene in which the novel's protagonist,

Ben has a conversation with his ex-girlfriend in her new boyfriend's apartment. And the boyfriend in this case is a white man dating a Japanese woman whose apartment is decorated with so-called oriental accessories in the words of the protagonist.

And it's through scenes like this that the characters, and I'll quote you here, briefly enter into a set of object relations which give lie to their love having been exclusively a matter of intersubjective relations. And I thought those were really sort of good leading generative description of how these relationships are changing and can be sort of viewed through these different lenses that you, these different theoretical lenses that you introduce.

Could you maybe draw out here a little more about how this sort of challenge to the discourse of what you call a gentle identity and the dissolution of the individually bound subject and sort of in place of or which which is take its place is taken by the socially constructed object. How's that maybe characteristic of or definitive of the love being as as you sort of use the term throughout the text?

I really appreciate that question and thank you for saying that about the close meeting.

In 2023, when Randall Park released the film version of Shortcomings, that really brought that idea home for me. And teaching that graphic novel alongside that film in the 2020s has brought into relief the

utter objectionability of Ben Tanaka, the main character in the text, especially as articulated from folks like Randall Park himself, and folks who have, you know, been impressed and have stood up for the graphic novel over all these years, including myself. And so talking about the idea of object relations in that point in the novel is coming at the heels of that being a really, you know, despicable thing to say, right? Especially to an Asian

And to say that, you know, Ben's kind of scorn and his kind of obvious forms of racial melancholia that are exhibited throughout the graphic novel, very much up to that moment, especially when he confronts what he calls the rice king, Leon, the, you know, the clandestine lover of...

of his kind of quasi or ex-partner at the time. And it's the panels that Tomine constructs right after he says the thing about the oriental accessories, I think are really meant to emphasize the ways in which

Asian-American-ness, Asian-American so-called subjectivity actually can be interpolated sometimes more precisely by talking about objecthood. And as Fanon and as Fred Moten have taught us, right, objects, racialized objects do resist and they do speak back and they do fight back. And so there's a way in which being inscribed into this kind of orientalized world is where we see most clearly that

these Asian American characters are actually not in this notion of intersubjective relationality to each other. And yet that we could read that as a good thing, that that allows us to see the other ways in which their love or what's left in the ruin of their actual relationship could be held in a good light, that they could be thought of as ways to think about how Asian American-ness actually means that

There's possibilities of ducking whiteness or ducking white interpolative power, and particularly that notion of the individuated subject that racial subjection, subjectivity always seems to demand. And

And so and the fact that it's in the genre of the graphic novel, right, that these characters are quite literally made into these drawn objects for us. And there's something about the function of the graphic novel and particularly its uptake in Asian-American discourse in the last 15 to 20 years. So in the beginning of that chapter, I contextualized Tomine's

amongst the other, you know, big time Asian American graphic novelists. And I speculate a little bit as to why that might be the case that the graphic novel has been particularly inviting for Asian Americans, Asian American cultural production.

Yeah, great. I think that's a really astute point about the sort of the way in which Ben's character so forcefully embodies racial melancholia. And also funny points about his unlikable personality in there as well. Yeah, that's sort of a there's a good sort of back and forth between the more academic analysis of his characterization and then the more sort of straightforward analysis of how that actually plays out.

I'll just say this in addition to that, just as a reader and as a consumer of when Shortcomings came out, it was my first semester living in Berkeley. And I had never been surrounded by Asian-Americans like that in my life as an East Coast Asian-American. And I haven't I hadn't read that much literature from the subject position of Asian-American masculinity. And so that graphic novel really messed me up.

in both good and bad ways. And so it always stuck with me because I knew there was something there about what it means to try to maybe not defend, but try to kind of explain what it is that gives rise to Ben's so-called subjectivity and so-called racial consciousness or Asian-American-ness in that text.

It's so fascinating to see that taken on in this project and sort of contextualized amongst so many other sort of works and pieces that provide such an interesting sort of tableau of texts.

Maybe we'll stay, I'll stay on this sort of question or these manifestations of a gentle identity. But think about it, or think about how you sort of approach it from a different angle in your analysis of texts coming from African American studies or texts that are foundational to the Black radical tradition.

I'm thinking of your sort of readings against Afro-pessimism to draw attention to the several moments across your case studies where you sort of described in a more intentional or thoughtful pessimism as converging with Black political consciousness and, again, some of these key works. And specifically, I was thinking of your analysis of Ursa's relationship to trauma and Corredora's

Could you maybe say a little bit more either about this example or maybe other moments in the project overall or in your research for a gentle identity is challenged by this rethinking of conventional notions of subjecthood or subjectlessness or identity, sort of however way we can take that on.

Yeah. I mean, Corregidor is this, you know, signal text in the theorization of Black feminist discourse alongside the ontological turn, right? Because it's about a contemporary Black woman subjects being haunted. And I can, you know, hear...

especially from my graduate studies, like the emphasis on hauntology that, you know, emanated from black theoretical discourse, especially at that time. And to say that Ursa is only constituted by the trauma that her great, great Graham faced, uh, in Brazil. And as, as that, which explains the conditions of abuse and lovelessness that Ursa faces at present in the text, uh,

that certainly makes sense. And there's a very compelling reason for that interpretation to have taken center stage in considerations of Jones's novel. What I argue instead in that chapter, however, is the possibility that that trauma isn't the final word for Ursa's subjectivity and her channeling those ancestors and her ability to really, you know,

not only kind of sit with them, but inhabit their consciousness and their being speaks to the idea that anti-Black violence and that gratuitous and sexual violence doesn't have the last say, and that that becomes the condition of possibility for Ursa to have her own dreams and have her own kind of utopian possibilities and dream making.

And then that language of ontological rupture enters the frame because Jones makes Ursa a catalyst and a receptor of the idea of these utopian breaks, as I described them throughout the novel. So the idea that these utopian

memories that come from the generations don't just melancholically or traumatically constitute one's subjectivity, but rather that they are who you are, right? That they make you into this configuration of former senses of love being that allow you to kind of break out and dream otherwise. Yeah.

Yeah, great. I think especially in your sort of analysis of dreams and utopia, it's made really clear that it's not a matter of either or. As you say, it's not a it's not the end all be all. Trauma is not the end all be all of any subjects formation or sort of circum circumvention of subjecthood even. But it's rather a.

alongside some of these other uh these other ways to approach these histories these these multi-generational histories um

So you brought together, you sort of already looked at two different, spent some time talking about two different, but one very contemporary, one more sort of foundational text for these two different fields. And throughout the whole text, you bring together some really remarkable and also fairly distant materials and topics for this project, which brings me to sort of a two-part question here, which is how did you...

sort of find or select or rationalize these materials and their presence together in the project. This points to comparative analysis. But in particular, what I'm really interested in is what led you to Linsanity? Because I think some of the books

key points actually hit best for me in this chapter. It's chapter four. And especially this idea that Asian-American-ness is, again, quoting you here, never fully reducible to the ontological force of anti-Asian racism, but also at the same time that Asian-American-ness sort of exists in its own context, but also in the ontological axis between anti-Blackness and Blackness. So this is sort of, I think,

really interesting dialogue that's being made here, but it's so interestingly being made through this subject of the Taiwanese-American NBA player, Jeremy Lin. So I'm really curious to know how you made your way to including Lin in this project, and then also sort of more broadly speaking, how you brought together all of these other connections that you've made.

I will speak to the part about the broader archive first. One is that I wanted to make the project as multi-generic as possible. And so Linsanity provided a certain kind of popular culture formation that I wanted to examine in the project.

And also Linsanity went down when I was in the middle of my dissertation. So I was very enlivened by following Jeremy and his sudden stardom in that little span. So that's one thing. But if you notice throughout the text, I already mentioned graphic novel and the novella.

Gail Jones, and then there's Laura's Biomythography from which the title is derived. And then I also have contemporary poetry. I have Amir Baraka in there, and then I have social essay, bell hooks, Cornel West, James Baldwin. And so I wanted to emphasize the kind of different generic structures where we can kind of trace this presence of love being across the two cultural formations discussed in the text.

Linsanity

When that happened, I was so curious about the way in which this kind of fortuitous, you know, Doridian pun of what it means to celebrate this Asian-American figure, how that could be formulated as a resource for the multitude, right? Again, just to appropriate Hart and Negri's language for a second, and to discuss the ways in which the Asian-American performance can be actually used

read as an instance of a celebration of the love being that is in that performance and embodiment. And so I was, again, really interested in how to think about

the Asian American so-called self or the so-called embodiment without the language of hauntology and without the language of melancholia. And the idea of everybody being in a frenzy celebrating this Asian American guy outscoring Kobe Bryant meant a lot to me. And I thought that was an interesting thing to try to put in the project. It's also...

As you know, where a certain kind of cross-cultural formation becomes really legible, right, where you have the only Asian American NBA player at that time thriving by playing a style of basketball that is culturally legible as African American. So what it means for Asian Americans to derive inspiration and to derive meaning from, you know, Black style, Black culture is,

And so at that level, it also, Jeremy Lin's performance needed to be examined. And I was almost close to cutting that part because I was afraid that too much time had passed when the book would come out and when Linsanity happened in February and March 2012. And

Yet there was this moment in 2021 when I was obsessively tracing all of the Asian American figures' responses to the anti-Asian crisis during the pandemic era. And there was a moment where...

in January going into February 2021, almost all the way up to the March 16, 2021 shootings in the massage parlors in Atlanta, where Jeremy Lin was as good and as consistent as any of our writers, any of our cultural figures, any of our politicians, and talking about all the vagaries of anti-Asian racism, sentiment, and hatred at that time. And so it

there was just a lot to work with that he had given these oppressors and he was trying to claw his way back to the NBA while going on this media tour, speaking out against these anti-Asian conditions. And so he resurged into the national consciousness for a moment there. And he started talking about what it means to articulate Asian American love and pride in the, in the midst of all of this hatred and violence. And so I,

I made sure to kind of comb through some of that material and to link it to my interpretation of Linsanity. So in that chapter, you see

these readings of what Jeremy Lin said and did that are, you know, almost 10 years apart and yet speak to, you know, the centrality of his presence in Asian American culture and what he represents and also like what he did, like what he accomplished given the platform that he had. Yeah, yeah, that's great. You point out in the chapter and just now sort of ways that the project is

transformed from your beginning of writing it to the end, to now in 2020s, and particularly after 2020 and 2021. You also mentioned how you sort of got to make some changes to the introduction and conclusion as a result as well. Are there any other points in the book? I know you also make reference to Stephen Yuen's comments. Are there any other points that sort of stand out to you as moments where connections

that maybe couldn't have or didn't occur when you started the project, uh, sort of took on new, new dimensions as, uh, things developed over the course of the past five years and the pandemic and, uh, different manifestations of anti-Asian and anti-Black, uh, hate, uh, that have been manifesting on a, on a social level, but also a legislative level, uh, some familiar, some not so familiar, mostly familiar though, but, uh, that have, that have, uh,

sort of been capturing media attention or otherwise.

Yeah, I mean, Stephen Yeun's utterance while he was on his press tour to promote Isaac Lee Chung's film Minari, when he said, sometimes it feels like being Asian American is when you're thinking about everybody else, but nobody is thinking about you. I thought that was a really compelling and precise formulation for our racial position, particularly amidst those conditions. And there's a paradox there because he was...

representing and, of course, also profiting from his own place in an unprecedented era of Asian American cultural visibility. So for him to use that platform to speak on these conditions and to talk about what it means for us to still feel relatively invisible in the in the national discourse is

even amidst these, you know, daily attacks, these instances of real racist violence, especially against our most vulnerable massage parlor workers, elders, children getting bullied at school. Um, I thought that was a really interesting, uh, formulation. And so, um,

I'm glad to have been one of the first scholars to really schematize that and to try to talk about that. And then, of course, there are the hip hop artists that, you know, some of whom I've befriended in the course of writing this project, G. Amazawa and Year of the Ox. And I looked around in the culture, especially in the digital space, and I thought about who are the Asian American folks who are really speaking out against this violence and trying to make sense of it and trying to mourn.

the victims. And it was those guys. It was a Japanese American MCG who I grew up nearby up in North Carolina. And then the LA based Korean American rap duo, you're the ox. And they put out entire songs about and freestyles and, you know, sometimes like weekly content, you know, trying to make sense of all of this. And I really appreciated them for that. And one of the things that, that made me realize,

Slightly different from Steven Yeun's utterance is that the hip hop artists allow us to see if you can get past the kind of common sense readings, almost stereotypical interpretations of their work as appropriation or as, you know, wanting to don a certain kind of black mask rather than, you know, being themselves. What you see is that they're actually using this black cultural art form to talk about Asian American life and.

That was a moment, 2020 and 2021, where because of the scourge of racist violence coming at us, there was a real need to articulate it in that kind of implicitly comparative way. And I really appreciated that. So they talked about what it means to find solidarity with

that iteration of Black Lives Matter on the heels of the George Floyd uprisings in Minnesota and elsewhere, and then link that up with the conditions that Asian Americans face. Yeah, it's a really amazing spread of voices that we get across media and across this text engaging with this topic. On the note of Jeremy Lin, are you an NBA fan? Less so today. Living in South Carolina, I've become fully a women's basketball fan. So

I barely watch the guys anymore. But I follow Lin's career and he's continuing to play and he's teammates with his little brother Joe out there. And so I've been tuned in as much as I can. That's great to hear. So we've nearly reached the end of our time together. So I'd like to wrap up by sort of looking towards the future, which is also a theme of the book we didn't get to, this sort of futureial aspect of it all.

But sort of barring a further discussion there, I'd like to ask just what projects you have in the work right now? What's up next for you?

Sure. Well, based on some of the figures that we discussed that are in this book, I'm working on a theoretical study of anti-Asian misandry and talking about the specific forms of vulnerability and violence that Asian American men face, men and boys. And this is piggybacking off the work, and it's going to be in the series by Temple University Press of the philosopher Tommy J. Curry and his work,

nascent framework of Black male studies is almost 10 years old now, that school of thought. And I've done article-length writings in that field. And so I'm trying to congeal the idea of Asian American maleness and how it comes together against the conditions of anti-Asian misandry in particular and racial misandry in general.

And then I'm working, starting to work on an edited collection on new approaches to Asian American relationality, working with some of the graduate students and senior scholars I've met in seminars over the last couple of years. And my co-editor on that is Professor Emily Yoon at UMBC. And we're going to work on putting together kind of new theoretical approaches to how Asian Americans relate to one another.

That sounds really great. And you also have a recently published edited volume as well, right, with Rebecca Kumar, Queer and Femme Gaze is an Afro-Asian American visual culture. Do you want to say anything about that either as it relates to this project or upcoming projects? Sure. I did the thing they told you not to do or work on two books at once. And so I'm very proud of that collection. Our

co-authored introduction really gets at the landscape of how Afro-Asian visual juxtaposition has reached unprecedented heights, whether it's in, you know, Doja Cat music videos or, you know, on a variety of Netflix shows and so on. My chapter in that text is on Justin Chan's 2017 film, Gook, which was top of mind for me this week because April 29th, of course, Sa-I-Goo, as we call it, is the anniversary of the, um,

LA riots in 1992. And so to think about, uh, these signal moments of where we, uh,

configure almost propagandistically at times the idea of a naturalized antagonism between black folks and asian american folks and uh what are the cultural responses and what are the ways in which there have been counter narratives against the given narratives of our communities being inherently in conflict with each other and i think chan's film really attempts to get at that and so and it at

attempts to get at that in particular through emphasizing anti-Asian misandry and emphasizing the Satche Noir. So you see the conditions of Black girlhood and Asian American manhood overlap in these really beautiful ways in that film.

And so that's what I try to describe in that piece. Yeah, that's, that sounds really great. I'll definitely be adding that, that book, uh, that volume to my to read list and I'm looking forward to seeing what else, uh, will you have published soon? Um, Dr. Lee, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today and sharing your work with the new books network. Uh, thank you so much for this, uh, really great conversation. Uh,

to your text, Other Lovings. Thank you so much.