In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Tag: Asian American
Towards an Asian American Disability Politics: On Mimi Khúc’s “Dear Elia”
Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native,…
Chinatown Poem
— “Chinatown Poem” is a cento poem written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…