Extravagant Camp
The Queer Abjection of Asian America
Winner of the 2023-2024 CLAGS Fellowship Award
Illuminates an irreverent queer cultural strategy for grappling with and remaking abject histories of violence
Published in February 2025 by NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series, Extravagant Camp takes as its point of critical departure the multiple valences of the word “camp”: the camp, as a geopolitical space and process of concentrating racialized populations, and the campy as a mode of queer expressiveness. Engaging its double meaning, Eng explores how camp and encampment have contoured the figure of the Asian American.
The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Illuminating an eclectic ensemble of performances that grapple with Asian American history—from classical works in the Asian American literary tradition to emerging works of theater and film—Extravagant Camp uncovers Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of Asian American racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection.
Theorizing Asian American camp as both a performance strategy and reading practice, Eng examines how artists drag up the maligned racial roles of the coolie, the internee, the refugee, and the diva to make different sense of these histories. Extravagant Camp shows how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. Geared toward the extravagant, Asian American camp demands a recognition of queer abjection not as the basis for our undoing, but rather the grounds for a more radical social remaking.
Cover image: TT Takemoto, Looking for Jiro (2011). Photo by Maxwell Leung. Designed by adam b. bohannon.
White Gay Fantasies
A Queer Romance for the Asiatic Presence (in progress)
Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver. Still from Call Me by Your Name, (Luca Guadagnin, 2017, 56:17).
Chris is currently at work on his second book project, White Gay Fantasies, which argues for the pertinence of Asian American literary critique for prominent representations of queerness that putatively have nothing to do with race. It contends that a discernible Asiatic presence haunts the repertoires of LGBTQ cultural productions that give expression to the social import of same-sex desire as a potent political force. Despite such frequency, the Asiatic often manifests unexpectedly through seemingly inconsequential roles that are in fact pivotal to upholding white gay fantasies. These fantasies install a utopian, post-racial vision of queerness beyond critique, which activates a repair against all social inequalities by showing us how love can triumph over hate.
This project reckons with the prevalence of the Asiatic appearing varyingly as backdrop, prop, or minor characters that serve as foils for the growth and flourishing of (white) queer protagonists. The first half of the book takes up paradigmatic cultural productions that emblematize the work that the Asiatic presence performs for such fantasies—the 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name, the 2014 Broadway hit musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2017 novel Less. Meanwhile, the second half of the book project analyzes works by Asian American writers who inhabit this spectral position to interrogate the fortification of whiteness: Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling 2015 novel A Little Life; Young Jean Lee’s 2018 Broadway play Straight White Men; and Ocean Vuong’s acclaimed debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).
Image credit [from left to right]: Peter Hujar, Orgasmic Man. Designed by Cardon Webb, A Little Life, Vintage, 2016. Front Cover; Straight White Men, Helen Hayes Theater, New York, Playbill, 2018; Designed by Suzanne Dean, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vintage, 2020. Front cover.