Other Lovings

An AfroAsian American Theory of Life

Seulghee Lee

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9780814215098
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814284063
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West.

By assessing love's positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Other Lovings and Racial Ontology
• Chapter 1 Audre Lorde and Affectable Flesh
• Chapter 2 David Henry Hwang and Asian American Love-Being
• Chapter 3 The Amiri Baraka of Surplus Love
• Chapter 4 Jeremy Lin, G Yamazawa, Lyricks: An AfroAsian Commons
• Chapter 5 Gayl Jones and Somatic Wisdom
• Chapter 6 Adrian Tomine and the Love of the Asian American Object
• Chapter 7 Theodor Adorno, Eve Sedgwick, and the Kyoto School’s Optimism
• Conclusion bell hooks’s and Charles Yu’s Love-Being in Practice
• Bibliography
• Index