Potholes of the Past: Incorporable Neoliberal Identities, & Trans-Temporality's Affects in R. Zamora Linmark's Leche Dr. Jacob Lau Commentary by Prof. Christine Balance (Asian American Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies)


 Asian American Studies     May 24 2017 | 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM HG 1341

This paper is a trans-temporal reading of R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche (2011), a postmodern novel exploring questions of memory and haunting, mixed race and queer identity in the context of the protagonist’s return to the Philippines after a thirteen year absence. The second part of a duology begun with Rolling the R’s (1995), Leche follows Vincente De Los Reyes’s discovery of his mixed race heritage and the unearthing of his melancholia for his deceased grandfather, a former WWII veteran, through his affective memories of both the beginnings of his queerness and his complicated relationship to the U.S. and the Philippines. This paper articulates Lau’s methodology of trans-temporality, and comes from his book project’s final chapter, which seeks to articulate the superstructure of cis (not trans) normative time as operative on those narratives, bodies, and lives that do not fall under the rubric of transgender through its imbrications with transnational neoliberalism.

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