Dr. Eng will discuss his newly released book, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America.He will also be joined in conversation by current CRAASH member and Hunter College student, Alvi Chowdhury. An audience Q&A and book signing to follow.

What happens when we take the predominantly tragic and heroic narratives of Asian American historical violence and recast them in a queerer, more irreverent light? Eng contemplates this question by amplifying multiple valences of the term “camp,” addressing both the camps as biopolitical sites of confinement and the campy as an aesthetic mode of queer expressiveness. The book talk spotlights how campy performances that imaginatively restage canonical scenes of camps throughout Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines.