Professor James Kim on the Race, Empire and Coloniality Area Group

By Elizabeth Bolger

James Kim, an associate professor of English at Fordham University, discusses the creation of the Race, Empire and Coloniality area group.

EB: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Professor Kim. You created the Race, Empire and Coloniality area group in Spring 2020. What led to the development of this group? 

JK: Among other things, we wanted to bring more visibility to what we consider one of the strengths of our department. There's a wealth of impressive scholars working in these areas here at Fordham. Stephen Hong Sohn, our new Mullarkey Chair, is among the nation's leading scholars of Asian American literature. Chris GoGwilt has done prize-winning work rethinking modernism in transoceanic terms, arguing for the development of a postcolonial philology. The newly arrived Sasha Panaram is doing wonderful things in Caribbean and African American literary studies. Her archival research on Toni Morrison is really exciting. I could go on. But the point is that Fordham English faculty are doing great research in these fields, and we wanted more people to know about it. Of course, we also wanted more chances to talk with one another, support one another, and read one another's work as it comes down the pipe. That sense of academic community was a big motivation for me, personally.  

EB: Absolutely. How do you hope to see this area group grow?

 JK: For now, we're just reading one another's work and keeping up on the literature together, which has been a blast. People are working on some really fascinating stuff. (Ask Chris GoGwilt about the letter K sometime!) In the future, if we can find the time, energy, and funding, we may try to organize some type of event, perhaps in collaboration with faculty from other departments, where we get to share our work with the larger scholarly community. Most immediately, though, I'd like to see the university hire someone to replace the irreplaceable Scott Poulson-Bryant.  

EB: Oh, interesting. I will have to reach out to Professor GoGwilt at some point to hear more! What role do you think this group can play in anti-racist pedagogy? 

Many of the courses taught by faculty in the REC group will naturally address the department's Race and Social Justice requirements for the undergraduate major, as well as the Difference and Intersectionality Requirement. But there are other initiatives afoot. Stephen Hong Sohn and Robb Hernandez, for example, are building an E-Race/Ethnic Studies program that will make anti-racist educational materials available online. They've also built a wordpress site that lists Fordham faculty members "who are engaged in the work of researching, teaching, and advocating for issues related to race, ethnicity, diversity, and social justice." Hopefully, the wordpress site will make it easier for like-minded faculty to find one another and collaborate across departments. And of course, there's a lot of overlap between the Race, Empire, and Coloniality area group and the department's Diversity and Social Justice committee. Quite often, the area group ends up talking about stuff directly related to the work of the Diversity and Social Justice committee.  

EB: Thank you for sharing that website with me! I was wondering if you could tell me more about the courses you teach under this area of study.

JK: Let's see. There's Race and Contemporary Cinema, Asian Diasporic Literatures, Approaches to Asian American Studies, Asian American Critique, and Writing Asian America, as well as a graduate course on Race and Affect Theory. My Texts and Contexts courses are all themed on contemporary BIPOC writers. I also teach the Literary Theories course, where we address some of this stuff, though not nearly enough (it's a crowded syllabus).  I've got plans to develop more courses; but for now, my plate is fairly full. 

EB: What are your favorite aspects of these courses (or course)? Is there one course in particular that you love to teach? If so, why? 

JK: Two things: first, I love seeing students use the theoretical and critical vocabularies I've taught them to analyze artifacts of empire and racial formation. I've gotten lots of great essays from students over the years. A student in my Race and Contemporary Cinema class, for example, did a wonderful analysis of the racial politics of food in that truly awful film The Help. A student in another class synthesized research in affect theory and critical race theory to do a really smart reading of Claudia Rankine's Citizen. One of the big rewards of teaching is seeing the creative ways students use the tools they learn in my classes to generate original, insightful analyses of the culture they inhabit.

Second, I love it when students of color feel like they've found a home or refuge in my classes. Because the university is predominantly white, because the core curriculum is pretty Eurocentric, and because some people folks refuse even to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism, students of color can sometimes find the university a little alienating. I hope my classes give those students a sense of belonging, a chance to learn about ideas that will help them make sense of their lived experiences, and an understanding of the work that needs to be done to build a better world.  

EB: Lastly, I want to ask you more about your research. When did you first study race, empire and coloniality in literature?

My first essay in the field was actually about kung fu movies. And what better place to begin, really? I spent years devouring Hong Kong kung fu cinema! The stuff from that period has some amazing action choreography, but it's hard to get a hold of nowadays. (The Once upon a Time in China series is a great place to begin, if you're interested.) Anyway, the essay is about what happens to the US racial imaginary when the Asian male martial artist migrates to Hollywood. The conventional racial geography suddenly has to extend beyond the boundaries of the nation state and take account of the existence of the global. I argued that the Asian male body gets recruited into a system of triangulated racial desire, ultimately becoming a kind of cipher for whiteness's simultaneous attraction to and repulsion for the Black male body--love and theft, as Eric Lott called it back in the day. Asianness becomes a metaphor for whiteness ambivalently wishing to become Blackness. It was a fun essay to write, a good way to cut my teeth on scholarship in the field.  

 EB: That sounds like a great essay. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!