Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America(Sexual Cultures)

Winner of the 2023-2024 CLAGS Fellowship Award Illuminates an irreverent queer cultural strategy for grappling with and remaking abject histories of violence Extravagant Camp takes as its point of critical departure the multiple valences of the word "camp": the camp, as a geopolitical space and process of concentrating racialized populations, and the campy as a mode of queer expressiveness. Engaging its double meaning, Chris A. Eng explores how camp and encampment have contoured the figure of the Asian American. The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Illuminating an eclectic ensemble of performances that grapple with Asian American history—from classical works in the Asian American literary tradition to emerging works of theater and film—Extravagant Camp uncovers Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of Asian American racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection. Theorizing Asian American camp as both a performance strategy and reading practice, Eng examines how artists drag up the maligned racial roles of the coolie, the internee, the refugee, and the diva to make different sense of these histories. Extravagant Camp shows how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. Geared toward the extravagant, Asian American camp demands a recognition of queer abjection not as the basis for our undoing, but rather the grounds for a more radical social remaking.

About the Author :
Chris A. Eng is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Review :
"Sensitively traces the complex routes of an aesthetic style that has long been narrowly assigned to gay men. Chris A. Eng brilliantly queers camp by opening up its imposed semantic enclosures through its various iterations in Asian American texts, performances, and historical events. Extravagant Camp astutely demonstrates how camp is a spatial, temporal, and performative site that enables fertile explorations and critiques not merely of gender, but also the frictive historical excesses, limits, and possibilities of nation, race, and sexuality." (Martin F. Manalansan IV, Rutgers University) "Merges conversations around biopolitical camps with queer camp aesthetics, forcing us to contend with questions regarding material politics and the seemingly trivial. Rather than simply privileging one over the other, Chris A. Eng complicates our understanding of both in ways that reinvigorate established discourses surrounding materiality, abjection, and extravagance, breathing new life into these established ideas. Extravagant Camp offers a new and distinct model for many other fields and minoritarian discourses. A rare and gorgeous feat!" (Hentyle Yapp, University of California, San Diego) "Chris A. Eng's discovery of a form of Asian American campiness that uses the maligned styles of imitation, exaggeration, inauthenticity, and kitschy play to investigate the many repressed histories of U.S. extrajudicial violence that racialized Asians in North America is as unsettling as it is convincing." (Chandan Reddy, University of Washington)