Speaker：James Kyung-Jin Lee

Time: 19:00-21:00

Date: June 19, 2018 (Tuesday)

Venue: Seminar Hall, Third Floor, BFSU Library （北京外国语大学图书馆三层报告厅）

Language: English

Synopsis of Talk：

This presentation explores the ways in which Asian America is held captive by the figure of the physician in the US. Viewed as exemplary not only for their “heroic” capacities to cure and save lives but also for their implicit able-bodiedness, physicians serve as paragons in upholding the half-century-long discourse of the Asian American as the model minority. But recent non-fiction by Asian American physicians challenge this affiliation by highlighting the limits and paradoxes of contemporary biomedicine. These memoirs both critique the salvific narrative of medical heroism and bear witness to the ways that vulnerability and suffering can open up new ideas of sociality, the clinic as a space for ethical encounter.

Bio of Speaker：

James Kyung-Jin Lee is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and English Department at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). More recently, he co-guest edited (with Professor Jennifer Ho) a special issue of Amerasia Journal on the “State of Illness and Disability in Asian America.” He is currently at work on a book project that explores questions of ill embodiment in contemporary Asian American life writing, and how the turn to illness offers new models of sociality and ethics.