Susan Koshy, a professor of English and Asian American studies, relies upon a unique perspective to study and write about colonialism, capitalism, race, gender, and sexuality. The Faculty Fellow with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation and author of “Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation” discusses her new book, how she charted her own path, and how growing up in India affected her ideas.

What are you working on? Why are you passionate about this area of study?

I am writing a book called “Manifest Diversity” that tries to understand what happened to the anti-racist project of the 1960s when it became enmeshed in U.S. imperialism and neoliberal capitalism in the post-Cold War era. How was it captured and redirected, but equally important, where and in what forms does it reappear and renovate? A key challenge in studying this period is reckoning with the contradictory effects of “advanced marginalization,” a time when faultlines within racial groups intensified as some gained access to resources and opportunity but others were left behind. My book looks at how minority writers and filmmakers take up the implications of these racial transformations. This involves approaching political and historical questions about difference—tellingly rebranded as diversity—as also at base aesthetic questions of how difference manifests or is displayed. Aesthetic theory offers a toolkit for discerning and disrupting the established and taken-for-granted rules that determine what is visible and what is not, what is said and what is not, what is heard and what is not.

What I discovered as I looked at a range of films and stories from this period is the recurrence of figures of racial complicity in many different guises—the sellout, the fixer, the best-selling ethnic writer, the ethnic entrepreneur, the sympathizer, the Tiger Mom, and so on. My book sets out to answer the following questions: Why do compromised racial figures and unsettling literary forms become vehicles for understanding contemporary racial transformations? Why are these less-than-heroic figures conscripted for the cultural work of interrupting dominant storylines and mapping a still unfolding present? How do they transform our understanding of agency in the contexts of contemporary empire?

How does your own experiences help deepen your understanding of what you study?

I think our research interests are closely tied to our biographies. The gift of the humanities and the social sciences is that they equip you to understand how your life is enmeshed in historical and social processes that have, as Antonio Gramsci says, “deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”  I think, in my case, growing up in India in the decades after the end of British rule; living a life of constant movement including immigration; the experience of being a religious minority in India, and a racial minority in Britain and the United States; understanding capitalism as a global force as a person from a “developing country”; and experiencing the pervasive pressure of gender and sexual norms, has left a watermark on my work and my professional trajectory. I write about colonialism, capitalism, race, gender, and sexuality in ways that highlight their interaction and continuous transformation across time and place. I cross disciplinary boundaries and work on an unusually wide range of subjects—literature, human rights, racial classifications in the census, anti-miscegenation laws, Asian American fiction, diasporic identity, colonial racial capitalism, sexual capital, whiteness, to name just a few. Much of my work unpacks processes of naturalization, whether as a political and legal process, or as a cultural and social one by which institutions or practices come to appear natural. This may explain why I am drawn in my research to examples of category crisis, the glitches when systems stall or break down, and to moments of transition that unsettle our givens.

Please describe how you overcame an obstacle or challenge to better understand your area of study.

I was trained in the UCLA English department at a time when it did not have any faculty working in Postcolonial studies, my primary research interest. I was able to take one graduate seminar with a visiting professor but other than that, I learned by reading intensively in the field and trying to understand where the blind spots lay. I think that experience has made me much more independent and methodologically inventive than I might otherwise have been.

Please describe a moment when your professional career changed direction. 

I started out teaching Postcolonial literature, but then moved into the field of ethnic studies, when I took up a new position at UC-Santa Barbara. I retrained myself while teaching large undergraduate classes in Asian American studies, reading and publishing extensively across several disciplines, and having two children. All this with the tenure clock ticking!

In hindsight, the ability to toggle between both fields has been enormously generative and allowed me to question some of the dominant paradigms in Asian American studies at a critical moment in its formation. Moving into a different field involved a lot of work but the timing was propitious. It was an exhilarating time to be working in Asian American Studies because its parameters and research priorities were just being articulated and open to contestation.

What kinds of lessons do you make it a point to impart on your students?

I teach my students to think of literary and cultural texts as embedded in a material and political world, and as existing in the weave of other texts, media, and languages. Their work, as readers, as interpreters, is to make sense of how these connections work in the cultural objects (novels, poems, films, photographs, comic books) they encounter in the course. Human beings make culture and are made by it and stories are one of the most important sites for this co-production. We are, as Sylvia Wynter says, “words made flesh.” I want my students to experience the power, the pleasures, and the beauty of stories as a world-building and world-changing activity.

What is your proudest or most significant achievement? How did it affect your career?

I think my most hard-won achievement has been to produce work that has instigated paradigm shifts in the various fields in which I work.  Examples of this are my research on “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” on “sexual capital,” on Asian Americans and whiteness, on minority cosmopolitanism, on the Tiger Mom as a racial capitalist form, and on colonial racial capitalism. Doing this kind of work is particularly difficult in emergent fields. However, the reward of doing this kind of work is to see the field moving in new and unexpected directions.

Editor's note: This interview was originally published by the College of LAS.