By Addie Tsai
Storti opens with considering the self—especially the rhetoric of fragmentation that is often wielded at mixed “Asian/white” people—as “a collection of pieces,” using mixed Asian ceramicist Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s series Half. Through an exploration of Datchuk’s work, Storti considers how “one can see the self as a collection of pieces: torn, together.” (2-3)
“Torn, together” becomes an eloquent framing disjunction in order to address one of her main thematic threads of the whole—the intimacy of violence: “A deceptively simple combination of words, the intimacy of violence theorizes the pervasiveness of violence through the language and practice of intimacy. . . . Brought together, the intimacy of violence extends an invitation to study violence through the ways it courses through patterns of intimacy, including romantic love, sexual desire, domestic living, national belonging, and other relations of closeness. As the theoretical framework for this study, the intimacy of violence reveals the more subtle and obscured harms of the imperial past.” (3)
For Storti (and for us to consider), “mixed race embodiment as a key site for understanding the magnitude of US empire and its role in such a catastrophe.”
Questions to consider: How do we see “US empire,” “white supremacy,” and “imperialism” show up in representations, dialogue, or attitudes of and toward “white/Asian” embodiment and people? Storti spends attention considering mixed race embodiment in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. If you’ve read Vuong’s novel, how did you respond to Storti’s explorations in this particular framework? What did her thoughts illuminate for you? Were there any other mixed race media, especially of the last five years, that came to mind? What other insights or associations did you revisit based on the introduction?
Addie Tsai (any/all) is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel, and Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They are the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Addie is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies.