Class of 2025
(She/Her/Hers)
Hometown: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Majors: Statistical Science; International Comparative Studies
Mellon Project: Situating Asian/America in a Settler Colonial State: Tracing Historical Organizing Relationships
In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe posits “Asia,” in and outside of America, as a site through which the undulating anxieties of the American nation-state have been figured over time, rendering the Asian immigrant both (un)easily folded into and barred from what she calls a “simulacrum of inclusiveness." The point, elaborated and debated over and over again in Asian American Studies, is that Asians are hailed as outsiders, as easily cast out of a finicky net of belonging as they are embraced by its provisional liberty. Upon arrival, immigrants are thrust into a liminal categorization—settlers in a settler colonial state but also not quite part of its ideological self-conception. Does survival mean being complicit in ongoing U.S. settler colonialism, does success mean owning stolen land? I’m interested in how settler colonialism in the United States was theorized by Asian/American organizing groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM) garnered national attention, and how reckoning with settler status disrupts liberal formulations of Asian/America.