Emily L. Hue

Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside

About

Emily Hue Emily Hue Emily Hue is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she previously served as a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to completing her doctorate, Emily received a University of Connecticut Predoctoral Fellowship from the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute, with affiliations in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), and Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Emily is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled, “Economies of Vulnerability: Humanitarian Imperialism and Performance in the Burmese Diaspora.” It is an interdisciplinary project which uses visual and performance analysis, ethnographic interviews and archival research to explore how diasporic artists and activists from Burma and other postcolonial nations use bodily abstraction and in some cases, self-injury, to express their vulnerability to challenges of military rule as well as resettlement.

Emily has previously worked in the academic publishing industry. She has also participated as an interviewer and organizer in a community podcast series entitled American Alien. This podcast series connects the lives and practices of Burmese diasporic artists, academics and activists and other cultural producers of color and is hosted by the Flux Factory, a local artist collective space based in Queens, NY. You can find her most recent writing in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, American Studies Quarterly, Amerasia, and the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.

Research

I am currently completing my book monograph, Economies of Vulnerability: Humanitarian Imperialism and Performance in the Burmese Diaspora into a book manuscript. In this project, I combine ethnographic methods with visual and performance analysis to examine current trends of self-injury and bodily objectification taken up by refugee and asylum-seeking cultural producers working within the confines of the international arts market and humanitarian industry. The project draws from ethnographic research involving Burmese communities and their allies at non-governmental organizations in New York City, including protests in front of U.S. embassies, performance art in meditation centers, and dialogues on funding amongst arts non-profit organizations. For example, I examine the work of installation and performance artists who have created niche performance art in New York that critiques military rule and the humanitarian industry through acts of self-negation such as bondage, gagging, and blindfolding on stage. These performance tactics sometimes contest, are complicit in and even hyperbolize asylum seekers’ and refugees’ historical racialization and gendering as victimized orphans, widows and passive receptors of aid. I argue that artists’ extreme forms of self-disciplining on stage have multiplied the uses of “vulnerability,” as contemporary refugees and asylum seekers navigate their their nations of resettlement.

My second book project examines the phenomena of “live but not quite dead” entities as they appear in economies of humanitarian benevolence, acting as both waste and gift. I ask what the transnational circulation of human and human-like parts reveal about the economic, political and social inequities that cohere in modes of care in the 21st century. This research takes up tales of donation and theft of ghostly commodities such as human hair, reproductive matter, and organs in processes of medical cadaver use, organ transplantation, surrogacy, reconstructive surgery, disaster relief medicine, international art, and hair trade. I examine how these commodities are managed in industries of urgent humanitarian relief as well as in circles of social justice dedicated to advancing quality of life. My analysis unmoors accepted notions of agency and the assumed relationality between self and other. Drawing from debates in transnational feminist inquiry, queer studies, medical humanitarianism, and new materialism, this work also considers how these processes shore up unlikely intimacies, in/animacies and kinship between the U.S. and Asia.

You can hear more about these projects in an interview conducted by Cathy Hannabach for the Imagine Otherwise podcast series, produced by Ideas on Fire. The podcast is also available on Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcast outlets. You can find more about the podcast series by checking out @ideasonfirephd on Twitter, @ideasonfirephd on Instagram, and Ideas on Fire PhD on Facebook.

Publications

“On Water, On Land: Sustainability of Refugee Lives in an Era of Ecological Crises,” Ch 36, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003131458/routledge-handbook-refugee-narratives-evyn-l%C3%AA-espiritu-gandhi-vinh-nguyen

“The Guggenheim’s No Country as Refuge: Sopheap Pich and Bordering on Diversity in the Museum,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 29:1, 29-44, 2018 DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2018.1416253

“15 Years After Buddha is Hiding: Gesturing Towards the Future in Critical Refugee Studies,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring 2019.

“Feminist Praxis in Ethnofiction,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Summer 2020, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/feminist-praxis-in-ethno-fiction

“On Transnational Abolitionist Relationalities,” Society and Space, Spring 2021 https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-transnational-abolitionist-relationalities-from-mandalay-to-minneapolis

“Working in Friendship: Writing in the Time of COVID 19,” American Studies Journal Blog, Spring 2021 https://amsj.blog/2021/05/11/working-in-friendship-writing-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

“Afterlives of Rescue,” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Summer 2021, https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/ces-0602

Courses Taught

  • Introduction to Asian American Studies in Comparative Perspectives (ETST 005)
  • Asian American Feminist Theory and Politics (ETST 140)
  • Asian Diasporas (ETST 133)
  • Asian Americans & Foreign Policy: Humanitarianism and its Critiques (ETST 110K)
  • Race and Human Rights (ETST 243G)
  • Asian American Cultural Theory and Politics (ETST 254)
  • History of Ideas in Ethnic Studies (ETST 200)

Contact

Email: spammy@mcspammerson