Please join Asian American Studies for our upcoming, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (2025) by Summer Kim Lee. All are welcome!
Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair
Book talk by Summer Kim Lee
Introduction by Christine Imperial, Response by Professor Vivian Huang at San Francisco State University
Thursday May 14th 4PM-6PM Hart Hall 3201
In this talk, Summer Kim Lee discusses her book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke UP, 2025), which engages with contemporary Asian American artists who challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Recent Asian American cultural production has been praised for being healing, nurturing, caring, and therapeutic. Why is this what we have come to desire and expect from Asian American artists and cultural production? What assumptions are we making about what processes of repair should feel like? By turning to the “spoiled,” Kim Lee looks to the work of Asian American artists who attend to the painful, destructive dimensions of repair, as integral to the kinds of healing Asian Americans seek.
