Matter Out of Place: The Legacy of Strange Encounters in Asian American Studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes the occasion of celebrating the theoretical long durée of Strange Encounters to think about two radically different forms of strange encounters. At the moment when Strange Encounters is celebrating its 20th anniversary it is important for feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity to reflect on the possibilities that Ahmed's work has provided for our critical perspectives about contemporary formations of race, gender and sexuality. The article considers two case studies: an art installation titled Enemy Kitchen by Michael Rakowitz and the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller. The article begins by thinking through what it means to form eating publics that often draw strangers together. Intimacy formed through strangers in this context is to be understood as generative and enabling. The kinds of intimacy that are enabled and formed through encounters with the stranger, I argue, are constitutive of positive social change that implicitly jettison the heteronormative logic of familial and familiar intimacy to imagine social worlds and possibilities in which radically different possibilities for coming together – via acts of shared commensality – are imagined and realized. The paper then moves to a different example of the encounter with the stranger, Chanel Miller's memoir. Using Ahmed's work, I explore what it means to confront strange encounters that involve coming into proximity with strange bodies that actually mean to harm women of colour. I shift from thinking about the enabling possibility of coming into contact with strangers to examine the latent violence of the encounter with the stranger that is structurally embedded in the rape survivor narrative. Together, these two examples allow me to ask how Ahmed's work has generated possibilities for a critically engaged form of social critique in Asian American Studies that takes on the challenge of confronting different forms of injustice.