Congratulations to Susan Thananopavarn, Lecturing Fellow of Thompson Writing Program and a core faculty member for Duke's program in Asian American and Diaspora Studies, for winning the Circle for Asian American Literature Studies’ 2023-2024 Academic Essay Prize.
The CAALS Essay Prize was established in 2013 as an annual award to recognize the best paper on Asian American literature and culture presented at a CAALS-sponsored conference or panel. Since then, the award has expanded to encompass essays presented by CAALS members at the virtual conference, AAAS or ALA. To meet this growth, CAALS now recognizes two award categories: a student award and an academic award.
Thananopavarn won for her paper, “The Story Politic: Envy and Racial Impersonation in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface,” which was presented earlier this year at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Seattle.
In a statement to the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, the Essay Prize Committee wrote, “The committee was impressed by this paper’s engaging and incisive writing and its nuanced critique of liberal multiculturalism in the publishing industry. Situating R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface in relation to contemporary trends in publishing, such as #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices, Thananopavarn illustrates how the novel complicates discourses of racial authenticity and literary freedom. Through its compelling close readings and careful engagement with theories of envy and impersonation, the paper turns our attention instead to the ugly feelings engendered by liberal multiculturalism’s commodification of identities. The committee found this to not only be an insightful reading of Yellowface, casting light on a hotly debated novel, but a compelling analysis of the urgent issues surrounding the cooptation of Asian American identities in our present moment.”