The Infrastructures of Asian/Pacific/American Studies

In recent years, the concept of “infrastructure” has been picked up by scholars working at the intersections of Asian/Pacific/American Studies, critical ethnic studies, American studies, and other cognate disciplines. These conversations have emphasized the urgent intellectual and political need for a more capacious understanding of infrastructure that, to paraphrase the geographer Deborah Cowen, “exceeds its most obvious forms.” This panel—featuring Wesley Attwell (University of Hong Kong), Adrian de Leon (Simon Fraser), Linda Luu (NYU), Christine Peralta (Amherst), and Sunny Xiang (Yale)—therefore asks: What are the infrastructures that build and sustain Pacific Islander and Asian American life under the ongoing conditions of crisis and emergency? How do we build infrastructures and how do infrastructures build us? How do these infrastructures force us to think relationally across the multiple spaces and scales of empire and its unmaking? And what role can infrastructural thinking play in the everyday struggles to build freedom as a place?