Journal of Asian American Studies

ABSTRACT:

This essay reflects on the critical possibilities and stakes of (re)imagining Asian/America as a multispecies formation by analyzing Larissa Lai’s novel, Salt Fish Girl, alongside sybil unrest, her collaborative poem with Rita Wong. Through mobilizing speculative and spectacularized images of the Asian girl, respectively, both texts press us to confront linked human-nonhuman histories of racialization and gendered violence/exploitation. The novel conjures stinky multispecies assemblages that disrupt the knowledge-power structures of Orientalism, while the poem literally stages the assembling of multiple authorial bodies and cultivates transgressive ecological frames of vision. This essay engages these works to theorize expanded ecofeminist models of ethico-political collectivity for Asian American studies.