Aimee Bahng

Aimee Bahng is author of Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the “Transpacific Futurities” special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies (2017). She has published articles on transnational Asian/American speculative fiction and financialization in Journal of American Studies (2015), Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. (2008).

Her second book project, Transpacific Ecologies, is currently underway, bringing decolonial, queer and feminist thought to bear on the environment, knowledge production, and dis/ability at the site of the Pacific Ocean, which has long served as a proving ground for scientific experimentation and biopolitical securitization.

Bahng is also writing a number of articles about science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose papers are held at the Huntington Library in San Marino. One essay, titled “Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia E. Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer Commons,” appears in the Queer Feminist Science Studies Reader (University of Washington Press, 2017). Bahng has also published an article co-authored by Reena Goldthree in Radical Teacher on “#BlackLivesMatter and Feminist Pedagogy.”

Recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, she was also honored in 2020 with Pomona's Wig Distinguished Professor Award. Dedicated to collaborative intellectual production, Bahng is the recipient of innovative research and teaching fellowships from the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, EnviroLab Asia, Dartmouth College, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Books

Transpacific Ecologies (in progress).

Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Duke University Press, forthcoming March 2018.

Articles

“Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia E. Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer

Commons,” in The Queer Feminist Science Studies Reader (Seattle: UW Press, 2017): 310-26.

“Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction,” Journal of Asian American Studies: Transpacific

Futurities 20:1, special issue, eds. Aimee Bahng and Christine Mok (February 2017): 1-9.

“#BlackLivesMatter and Feminist Pedagogy: Teaching a Movement Unfolding,” with Reena

Goldthree, in Radical Teacher: Teaching Black Lives Matter, eds. Christopher Kennedy, Robyn Spencer, and Paula Austin, v. 101 (Fall 2016): 20-26.

“Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic

Modification,” Journal of American Studies: Fictions of Speculation 49:4, eds. Hamilton Carroll

and Annie McClanahan (Fall 2015): 663–83.

“The Cruel Optimism of Asian Futurity and Reparative Practices in Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot,”

in Techno-Orientalism, eds. Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and David Roh (New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 2015), 163–79.

“Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” MELUS: Alien/Asian 33:4, ed. Stephen H.

Sohn (Winter 2008): 123–44.

“Queering The Matrix: Hacking the Digital Divide and Slashing into the Future,” Critical Studies:

The Matrix in Theory, special issue 29, eds. Myriam Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 167–192.