Critical Literary Consumption

Shanna Tan discusses her trajectory from language learning to translating and how the success of Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop made her name synonymous with cozy reads. We talk how cozy, and language fluency, might mean different things to different readers, the politics of translation, context and society, and her excitement for the upcoming Café. Love. Waiting, which is a book that is very significant to her as a reader.

Dr. Alana Lentin, the author of Why Race Still Matters and The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, discusses how she situates herself and experiences to understand race as a global project that has national and local particularities. She summarizes why she views race as a technology of rules that produces and maintains human differences, which is important for the continuation of white supremacy, and why critical racial literacy is important.

Four years after appearing on Critical Literary Consumption to discuss his debut, When We Fell Apart, Soon Wiley returns with CeCe Downing’s Start Over Summer, a complex beach read. Wiley considers, again, the fluidity of genre, books he thought of while writing CeCe’s story and the question of class that emerges when asking what makes a good partner or relationship. We also talk about the idealization of New England town halls and summers, both of which were subverted in Wiley’s second novel. He also shares stories about his research rabbit holes for his secondary story, on bureaucracy, environmentalism, and zoning laws. And, of course, we talk about the questions and concerns that arise when a man writes a romance.

Best friends Chen Chen and Sam Herschel Wein discuss their collaborative chapbook, Love That For Us, published by & Change Poetry. They share how their friendship and poetics formed, that fateful residency in Portland, Oregon, pop culture as critical history, and silliness and queer joy. As they are long-distance friends, Chen and Sam also reflect on spatial and physical revising for emotional impact, and how co-editing Underblong has helped them co-create, co-write, and co-revise, and disagree.

Saeed Jones traces his poetic roots through his sense of place and placemaking, identity, education, and his experiences writing in multiple genres. Considering how freeing the poetic form can be, Jones talks about the fictional element and the many personas embedded in his poems. Because we grew up in the south, he also reflects on the prominence of the south in his work and how “the south” is its own character (a persona!) and his attempt to correct the Southern canon.

In discussing her books, Fresh Banana Leaves and Growing Papaya Plants, Indigenous scientist Dr. Jessica Hernandez talks about turning her attention from a non-native but displaced relative (banana trees) to a native plant relative (papaya trees) to discuss climate displacement and migration. She also shares her thoughts on the binary of Western science and Indigenous science, writing scientifically and what counts as empirical data, defining the work of an Indigenous scientist, the purpose of a positionality statement, and her general experiences in academia. 

A character who is dissatisfied in her own marriage will likely struggle to be a mother, says Thammika Songkaeo. Discussing her debut novel, Stamford Hospital, Thammika explores the complexity of womanhood, intimacy and relationships, the limitations of intersectionality as a framework, class analysis, colorism in Asia, and the international novel. We also bonded over our experiences in our respective MFA and PhD programs.

Kaila Yu's Fetishized: A Reckoning With Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty is written as memoir-in-essays that serves as media and cultural analysis. We discussed how she situated her personal experiences as part of her research process, analyzing the broader Asian American landscape and history, revisiting her own media, the import scene, and representation.

Tanya Guerrero shares how her love of animals and her volunteer experiences with Trap/Neuter/Return (TNR) shaped her first adult novel, Cat’s People. We discussed the popular trend of cat-centered novels and the porous genre question for stories that straddle literary fiction, popular fiction, and speculative fiction. The conversation ends with Tanya’s upcoming project, about a real-life dog figure set in historical times.

Dr. Karen Throsby, author of Sugar Rush: Science, politics and the demonisation of fatness, discusses how the public and scientific framings of sugar and health are focused on the nutritional gaze of a single nutrient which obscures the more institutional analyses of race and class. Analyzing 20+ years of datasets about sugar in the media, Throsby uses the sugar to discourse to examine politics in the U.K., the pandemic, the austerity campaign, scientism, expertise, bodies, and the future of the sugar discourse.