Aisan settlers? PhD dissertation, Toni Nicole Hays, Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home in Asian/America, UC Irvine, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Aisan settlers? PhD dissertation, Toni Nicole Hays, Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home in Asian/America, UC Irvine, 2025

15Jul25

Abstract: My dissertation, Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home, argues that Asian/American literature and media articulates a preoccupation with landedness, or the persistent attachment the U.S. settler state draws between landowning status and subjectivity. As in the designation “landed gentry,” landedness emphasizes land ownership as the key criterion for subject formation under the U.S. settler colonial state. In Racial Site, home is the primary space for examining how land appropriation and settler colonialism shape U.S. racial schemas in the U.S. metropole and the global reaches of the U.S. empire. By treating home as a structure of feeling, I analyze how literature and media leverages U.S. settler colonialism to express the varying registers of differential inclusion felt across Asian/America. Then, I historicize how the logics of land appropriation guide U.S. empire building projects in the Asia and the Pacific regions and how settler colonial logics recur domestically to deny Asian/Americans access to immigration, naturalization, property ownership, and citizenship.To understand how the U.S. settler state transports logics of land appropriation between North America and Asia, I take a law and literature approach to understanding the relationship between U.S. settler colonial legislative histories and the literary forms of home in Asian/American cultural production. In the first half of my dissertation, I revisit two key legislative moments in Asian/American history–– the 1898 Treaty of Paris and Executive Order 9066 –– to recontextualize the impact of the U.S. settler state on the racialization of Asian/Americans. In my first chapter, I compare two Filipinx/American texts, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. In the second chapter, I situate how the U.S. settler empire deploys the logics of land appropriation to manage racial schemas in the U.S. metropole through Executive Order 9066 –– the policy which permitted the mass incarceration of Japanese/Americans during World War II. Through readings of Okada’s No-No Boy and Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, I examine how the dispossession of Native Americas via the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 lay the foundation for the detention and displacement of Japanese/Americans after the signing of Executive Order 9066 and produce the alienation Okada and Otsuka’s characters feel from the former homes. In the second half of my dissertation, I continue to take a law and literature approach to understand how home is a product of U.S.-Asia settler colonial entanglements in the 21st century. In the third chapter, I demonstrate how the process of Asian/American women’s gendered racialization resonates with how the U.S. state collapsed personhood with one’s property- owning status. I argue that the objectification of Asian/American women, or what Anne Cheng describes as the affinity between Asiatic women and objects, becomes akin to how the U.S. state conflates subjectivity with real estate. My of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Joanna Gaines, the co-owner of home design and media brand Magnolia, show how the site of the single-family home contains within its walls the transnational histories of gender-based exclusions, property ownership and global capitalism that determine the subjectivities available to Asian/American women. Racial Site concludes with an examination of how contemporary U.S.-Asia trade agreements between the China, Japan, and the U.S. impact the worldmaking premise of Disney’s techno-orientalist film Big Hero 6, in which nostalgia for “Japan panic” assuages anxieties over China’s more formidable threat in the mid 2010s. This taming process, moreover, makes use of the trope of multiracial Japanese/American hybridity, to make a home for the “mixed” identity of the film’s protagonist as well as the “mash-up” visual aesthetic of the film’s setting, “San Fransokyo.”

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed