Sunny Xiang

I study and teach race, war, and empire through wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. I am particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century. For example, in my first book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), I track the visual and narrative crux of Oriental inscrutability in relation to U.S. cold war intelligence operations. My current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air -and on the skin. In understanding war, empire, and science as not only structures of power but also regimes of perception and styles of knowing, my scholarship shows how aesthetic and cultural approaches can create surprising conversations across Asian American studies, Pacific studies, critical militarization studies, and feminist science studies.

My research can be found in journals such as ASAP/Journal, Radical History Review, Post45, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Recent classes I have taught include War and Everyday Life, Readings in Comparative World English Literatures, and The Teaching of English.

Selected Publications

- Co-author with Mundane Militarisms Collective, “Mundane Militarisms: War, Archives, and Everyday Life,” ASAP/Journal 9, no. 1 (Jan 2024): 111-135.

-“Militarized Comfort: How to Feel Naked While Wearing Clothes,” in Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, eds. Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins, 41-62, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

-“Bikinis and Other Atomic Incidents: The Synthetic Life of the Nuclear Pacific,” Radical History Review 142 (2022): 37–56.

- Review of erin Khuê Ninh’s Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, American Literary History 34, no. 4 (Winter 2022): 1677–1680.

- “Wars of Contemporary Life,” Review of Marguerite Nguyen’s America’s Vietnam, Crystal Baik’s Reencounters, and Christina Klein’s Cold War Cosmopolitanism, ASAP/Journal (April 2020).

- “Global China as Genre,” Post45: Peer Reviewed (July 2019).

- “Forgettable Wars, Forgetful Diasporas,” Verge: Studies in Global Asia 5, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 3-9.

- “The Peculiar Objecthood of the ‘Yellow Woman,’” Review of Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng, Los Angeles Review of Books (March 2019).

- “‘The Girl I Loved Was in a Cult’: Review of R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries,” Public Books (August 2018).

- “The Ethnic Author Represents the Body Count,” PMLA 133, no.2 (March 2018): 420-427.

Interests  

Asian/Pacific/American literature and culture; war, militarism, and imperialism in Asia and the Pacific; cold war and mid-century culture; contemporary literature; American literature, critical archival studies; cultural studies; fashion studies 

updated August 2024