Making Queer Asiatic Worlds: Performance and Racial Interaction in North American Visual Novels

In this talk, Dr. Christopher B. Patterson (GRSJ) will explore how video games as a global commodity expose the presumptions separating “North America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. He will focus on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel (VN), which offers a counter-discourse to normative modes of play, and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo-Cold War geopolitics. Using critical race theories of performance and digital media, he will show how visual novels created by American and Canadian trans, queer, and women of color designers are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer and seemingly anti-racist worlds through Asiatic digital forms. He will also share his own experience adapting his debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, into a visual novel game that attempts to revise the digital genre conventions of race and queerness to reflect more on transnational forms of capitalism and empire. If video games make the boundaries of Asia and North America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through queer Asiatic irreverence.

Part of the Visual and Material Culture Seminar at the Museum of Anthropology.

Register for this event here.

Christopher B. Patterson (Ph.D., U of Washington) is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of two academic books, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (NYU Press, 2020), as well as two novels, Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), and All Flowers Bloom (2020), both published by Westphalia Press.