Kandice Chuh: On the Politics and Promise of Hate in Anti-Racist Work

Description

Kandice Chuh, a professor of English, American studies, and critical social psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, will give a talk titled "On the Politics and Promise of Hate in Anti-Racist Work" for the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship; the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute; Department of English; and the Program in East Asian Studies.

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act signed by President Joe Biden in May 2021 legislatively punctuates the cultural discourse that has mobilized hate as a political category. The ubiquity of "Stop Asian Hate" (which, despite its phrasing, generally seems to call for the end of anti-Asian hate) as a slogan announcing solidarity with people of Asian descent corresponds with the established practice of legislating against hate in the U.S. Kandice Chuh revisits that history in this talk as she considers contemporary Asian racialization. What understandings of race and racism accompany such legislative solutions organized around hate? What does the call for the end of anti-Asian hate look like in a transnational context? A global one? A transpacific one? How does the equation of racism with hate hinder or help coalition building? By engaging such questions, Chuh hopes to enhance understanding of mutuality, solidarity, and reciprocity as practices key to short-circuiting racism.

Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) is a scholarly and community-oriented initiative to build anti-racist coalitions across Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore. It takes anti-Asian violence as a site at which to develop intersectional frameworks to engage the heterogenous challenges facing AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) communities and interrogate the effects of white supremacy on academic knowledge produced about minoritized communities. CRAAV, an interdisciplinary initiative at Johns Hopkins founded by Erin Chung (Political Science), Clara Han (Anthropology) and H. Yumi Kim (History), launched in Fall 2021 with the generous support of SNF Agora Institute's Faculty Grants Program.