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Research
2024-25 Farley Scholar: Exploring racialization and postcolonial capitalism through Southeast Asian literature
We are pleased to welcome to 間眅埶AV's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) as the 2024-2025 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History.
An associate professor of English at Tulane University, Naruse's appointment will be hosted by the Global Asia Program, with an affiliation with the Department of English between September 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025.
Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Recent courses she has taught include "Literatures of Tourism", "Race, Empires, and Asian America", "Asian Diasporic Literature", "Love and Capitalism", "Postcolonial and Diasporic Southeast Asian Literature", "Literary Investigations", and "Postcolonial Theory". In 2022, she was awarded a Faculty Appreciation Award by the Graduate Studies Student Association for excellence in mentoring and teaching.
While at 間眅埶AV, Naruse plans to teach an advanced undergraduate course in Spring 2025 on "Global Theories of Asian Racialization". Students would be introduced to readings on Asian racialization from the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and Asian studies. These theoretical readings would be accompanied by historical, political, and aesthetic texts such as colonial-era eugenics writings by John Crawford and C. Vlieland, exclusion and hate crime laws in North America, think pieces on Chinese privilege from Southeast Asia, migrant worker literature (from writing competitions held in Taiwan and Singapore as well as Filipinx/Indian call center literature), and social media discourse on Asian Americans (Reddit and Tik-Tok). Taken together, the course aims to center Asia and Asians in theories of race, while decentering North America as the primary site through which to theorize Asian racialization. We anticipate this seminar will be of great interest and relevance to FASS students.
For her community engagement activity, Naruse will organize a publishing workshop for early career scholars working on topics related to Global Asia or Asia and its diasporas. The cross-disciplinary workshop will help attendees establish writing goals and strategize their publishing agenda, while also facilitating a regional support network. Naruse will also hold a special session on how to situate research for scholars working on Asian sites and diasporas often overlooked by postcolonial and Asian American studies, including ones such as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. This session will also be a rare occasion for scholars of these minor Asian sites to converge and collaborate.
Through readings of contemporary literature and state-sponsored cultural productions from Singapore, Naruses first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore, analyzes the dynamics of Global Asiaan alluring location ideal for economic flourishingin the context of Singapores cultural history of postcolonial capitalism. In doing so, it offers new conceptual paradigms for understanding post-colonialism, neoliberalism, and empire.
Other current projects include a co-edited volume with Joanne Leow and Faris Joraimi, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore, a subversive travel guide that undoes the touristic fantasy of Singapore as a glossy, highly modernized playground for the rich. She is also at work on a second monograph, Cold Southeast Asia: Reading Postcolonial Singapore/Malaysia in Asian America, which explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysiaas the comparatively cold Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam Warin Asian American and postcolonial studies.
Naruse earned her PhD and MA degrees in English from the University of Hawai妡i at Mnoa, with a certificate in international cultural studies from the East-West Center. Her research has been supported by a postdoctoral fellowship with the Global Asia research cluster at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2015-16). Naruse served as the inaugural chair of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diasporic Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Forum (2018-19). As former chair of the MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2018-19), she led the delegate assembly through a discussion on power differentials in graduate education.