Building Critical digital diasporic spaces: digital memes and physical art in collective liberation

Abstract

Asian diasporas gather in digital spaces that transcend national boundaries and have created an aesthetic that reflects the tensions, politics and subjectivities of diaspora. The internet and especially social media sites have created important digital gathering spaces for Asian diasporic users to negotiate and reify communities and identities. In this reification, an aesthetic has formed around the principles of pleasure. This aesthetic eschews difficult and complex conversations on race, solidarity and other social justice to focus on finding a place within the settler national project instead. This article seeks to analyze the pedagogies of shame inherent in the memes created in the group subtle asian traits and suggests an affirmative movement towards a pedagogy of (be)longing. Instead, I turn to the art of queer, East Asian diasporic artist Lan “Florence” Yee, who proposes a relational and critical aesthetic that resists white hetero-patriarchal settler nationalism towards one rooted in collective liberation.