Chris A. Eng’s research examines how US ethnic literatures and performances chart imaginative visions that illuminate more capacious accounts of what constitutes national belonging, historical injury, and social justice.
Eng’s work investigates the productive frictions and intimacies between Asian American literatures and queer of color critique. Forthcoming with NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series (Feb 2025), his first book Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America (https://nyupress.org/9781479834662/extravagant-camp/), examines the implications of revisiting “the camps”—sites of biopolitical management—that populate Asian American history through the irreverent stylings of “camp” —a performative practice of queer excess. This book follows an eclectic ensemble of 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. In so doing, 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. This first monograph is the recipient of the 2023 CLAGS Fellowship Award.
Such research interests extend beyond this project and manifest across Eng’s writings, which have appeared in the academic journals American Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Theatre Journal. He also co-edited a two-part forum for Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, titled “Emergent Analytics Toward Alternative Humanities” (https://csalateral.org/archive/forum/alt-humanities-forum/). Moreover, his book chapters on extravagance and on kitsch have appeared in the edited volumes Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1995 and Q&A: Queer in Asian America: Voices in the 21st Century. His 2020 article received an honorable mention for the Crompton-Noll Article Prize, awarded jointly by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and the Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association.
As a Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Humanities for Fall 2024, Eng will be continuing work on his second book project, White Gay Fantasies: A Queer Romance for the Asiatic Presence, which explores why deployments of Asianness prove so fecund at this historical juncture in substantiating the meaningfulness of “queerness” as signaling both a violent experience of alienation and the radical potential for social transformation. Eng argues that a discernible Asiatic presence haunts the repertoires of LGBTQ cultural productions that give expression to the social import of same-sex desire as a potent political force. Despite such frequency, the Asiatic often manifests unexpectedly through seemingly inconsequential roles that are in fact pivotal to upholding white gay fantasies. White Gay Fantasies reckon with the prevalence of the Asiatic appearing varyingly as backdrop, prop, or minor characters that serve as foils for the growth of (white) queer protagonists.
Eng is also an Affiliated Faculty for the minor in Asian American Studies. In the English department, he offers a range of courses such as “American Dreams, American Nightmares,” “Queer Youth,” “Asian American Writings,” and “Gender & Sexuality in Asian American Literature.” His graduate teaching and advising span the fields of American studies, critical ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, as well as theorizations of affect, diaspora, empire, and post45 American literature. At WashU, he has taught the graduate courses “Literary Studies and Graduate Research” and “Critical Ethnic Literary Studies.” Beyond the campus, he has been involved in professional academic organizations, serving on the Minority Scholars’ Committee of the American Studies Association, the chair of the Queer Studies section of the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Asian American Literature forum of the Modern Language Association. He was formerly a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Asian American Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member in the English department at Syracuse University. His work has been recognized by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars through a 2020 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty and by the WashU Graduate Student Senate through an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. In 2023, he received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.