Fields of Interest
Biography
Douglas S. Ishii’s research and writing theorizes Asian American relational racialization after World War II at the intersection of race and class through gender and sexuality. He previously held academic appointments at the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Northwestern University, and Emerson College in Boston. He is currently finishing his first book, Something Real: Asian American Arts Criticism and the Racialization of Sophistication. Something Real studies how the protocols and methods for the study of panethnic and politicized Asian American art emerged from the Asian American Movement (1968-1977). In doing so, the book tracks the afterlife of the Asian American Movement into our moment, one saturated by claims about the ineffectiveness of culture in political dissent. At the same time, it examines how artists, activists, and critics in the post-Civil Rights era have negotiated the depoliticizing zeitgeist of liberal diversity. This project has been recognized and supported with awards by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
His writing on topics ranging from the race-conscious critique of the critique of neoliberalism, the middlebrow politics of diversity, the queerness of Asian diaspora in settler nations, the influence of the Asian American Movement, and Japanese American remembrance have appeared in Camera Obscura, American Quarterly, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and the edited collections Techno-Orientalism, Global Asian American Popular Cultures, and Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, which was a finalist for a 2022 Lambda Literary Award. His 2022 article in American Literature was named the Honorable Mention for the year's Norman Foerster Prize for best essay. Douglas teaches courses on U.S. queer of color literature and theory, multiethnic campus stories, Transpacific Asian American literatures, and race and genre fiction by U.S. authors of color.