2024-25 Farley Scholar: Exploring racialization and postcolonial capitalism through Southeast Asian literature

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Cheryl Narumi Naruse to SFU's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) as the 2024-2025 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History.

An associate professor of English at Tulane University, Naruse's appointment will be hosted by the Global Asia Program, with an affiliation with the Department of English between September 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025. 

Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Recent courses she has taught include "Literatures of Tourism", "Race, Empires, and Asian America", "Asian Diasporic Literature", "Love and Capitalism", "Postcolonial and Diasporic Southeast Asian Literature", "Literary Investigations", and "Postcolonial Theory". In 2022, she was awarded a Faculty Appreciation Award by the Graduate Studies Student Association for excellence in mentoring and teaching. 

While at SFU, Naruse plans to teach an advanced undergraduate course in Spring 2025 on "Global Theories of Asian Racialization". Students would be introduced to readings on Asian racialization from the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and Asian studies. These theoretical readings would be accompanied by historical, political, and aesthetic texts such as colonial-era eugenics writings by John Crawford and C. Vlieland, exclusion and hate crime laws in North America, think pieces on Chinese privilege from Southeast Asia, migrant worker literature (from writing competitions held in Taiwan and Singapore as well as Filipinx/Indian call center literature), and social media discourse on Asian Americans (Reddit and Tik-Tok). Taken together, the course aims to center Asia and Asians in theories of race, while decentering North America as the primary site through which to theorize Asian racialization. We anticipate this seminar will be of great interest and relevance to FASS students. 

For her community engagement activity, Naruse will organize a publishing workshop for early career scholars working on topics related to Global Asia or Asia and its diasporas. The cross-disciplinary workshop will help attendees establish writing goals and strategize their publishing agenda, while also facilitating a regional support network. Naruse will also hold a special session on how to situate research for scholars working on Asian sites and diasporas often overlooked by postcolonial and Asian American studies, including ones such as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. This session will also be a rare occasion for scholars of these “minor” Asian sites to converge and collaborate.