Emily L. Hue

Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside

About

Emily Hue Emily Hue is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and core faculty in Southeast Asian Text, Ritual, Performance (SEATRiP), at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her book Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2025) 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.

She sits on the editorial board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Journal and is a US Area Editor at the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Culture in the Americas.

Research

In Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2025) 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 nations of resettlement.

An important contribution to emplotting the economies of vulnerability that demand a particular performance of legible suffering from Burmese refugee or exilic artists, and the aesthetic strategies these artists deploy against their capture, not just by successive Burmese regimes but also by the global humanitarian industry and international arts market.

– Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Promise of Beauty

An illuminating study of displaced Burmese artists in the United States who wrestle with the demand for racialized and gendered reenactments of suffering in exchange for arts and humanitarian investment. Its rumination on the artists’ performances, including self-inflicted gagging and binding, offers a nuanced analysis of the coercive tactics of the arts and humanitarian industries that condition yet cannot contain the terms of freedom of expression and movement.

– Chie Ikeya, author of InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism

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

Performing Vulnerability Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora; University of Washington Press, June 2025

“paritta.” Barahm Press, December 16, 2024, https://www.barahmpress.com/folio/hue

“On Water, On Land: Sustainability of Refugee Lives in an Era of Ecological Crises,” Routledge Handbook on Refugee Studies, p. 457–469, 2023, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003131458/routledge-handbook-refugee-narratives-evyn-l%C3%AA-espiritu-gandhi-vinh-nguyen

“Tsedaye Makonnen’s Astral Sea: Critical Refugee Studies and the Black Mediterranean”, American Quarterly, Vol 74. no. 2, p. 441–452, July 2022.

“Cold War Fissures: Burma and China”, Amerasia Journal, Volume 47, issue 2, 2021, p.368–70, 2022.

“On Transnational Abolitionist Relationalities: From Mandalay to Minneapolis,” Society and Space Magazine, Forum on Anti-Asian Violence and Decolonization, May 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/

“Circulating Afterlives of Rescue: Refusing Refuge in Contemporary Feminist Films on Burma”, for Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, special issue on comparative border studies, 2021, https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/ces-0602

“Spotlights: Solidarity and Social Justice in the midst of covid-19”, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 6 (2020) 287–295, 2021.

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

“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

“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

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