Laura Kina – författare

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances.Using the verb and critical lens of “queering” to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.

An abundantly illustrated look at how queerness is performed within artistic practicePremodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality. Andrew Gayed traces how contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern diasporic artists have remembered and reinvented these historical ways of being in their work in order to imagine a different present. Building on global art histories and transnational queer theory, Queer World Making illuminates contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora. The author focuses on the visual works of artists who create political art about queer identity, including Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, 2Fik, Laurence Rasti, Nilbar Güres, and Alireza Shojaian. Through engaging with these artists, Gayed is seeking to articulate a Western and non-Western modernity that works beyond the dichotomy of sexual oppression, stereotypically associated with the Middle East, versus sexual acceptance, attributed to North American norms. Instead, Gayed traces how diasporic subjects create coming-out narratives and identities that provide alternatives to inscribed Western models. Queer World Making reframes Arab homosexualities in terms of desire and alternative gender norms rather than through Western notions of visibility and coming out, narratives that are not conducive to understanding how queer Arabs living in the West experience their sexuality.

Examines how Native artists kept their culture alive by creatively adapting under colonial ruleBetween 1769 and 1823, the Franciscans established twenty-one missions in California, colonizing the ancestral territories of many Native communities between present-day Sonoma and San Diego. In Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture, Gabrieleno Tongva scholar Yve Chavez highlights how these communities preserved their cultural practices amid colonial oppression. Rooted in Chavez’s ancestral homeland and the neighboring Chumash region in coastal Southern California, her book focuses on Mission San Gabriel, Mission San Buenaventura, and Mission Santa Barbara. Recasting these sites as spaces of Native cultural heritage, Yve Chavez examines how Indigenous artists resisted assimilation while accommodating foreign ideas into their established practices.Drawing on Indigenous knowledge and art historical research of performance and regalia, basketry, sculpture, and architecture, Chavez demonstrates how Native artists navigated colonial power structures, ensuring the survival of their customs during the mission era and beyond. Rather than replacing Indigenous identity, the missions became spaces through which Native people asserted their connection to the landscape and its resources. This analysis not only recasts mission art and architecture within an Indigenizing framework but also serves as a vital resource for understanding the ongoing significance of these sites for the descendants of mission survivors.

War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJp0MDtKqyY&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=2&feature=plcp