Spoiled

“To be spoiled is to be ruined, but to be spoiled also indicates excess, indulgence, and an unfair advantage of power and proportion. Summer Kim Lee offers a brilliant, counterintuitive treatise on the refusal of healing and self-control. Instead, we are presented with a provocative theoretical call for the degraded Asian American subject to reject assimilation and containment and to dwell in unwellness and bad behavior.” - David L. Eng, coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

“Examining what feeling rather than being Asian might be, Summer Kim Lee produces a set of thoughtful close readings that center unruly attachment and a politics of staying with bad feelings. Spoiled is a beautifully written and wonderful contribution to many fields, including Asian American studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, affect studies, and aesthetic inquiry more generally.” - Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined

"Kim Lee moves beyond triangulation, where Asian American subjects are caught between the Black and white binary, by activating this subjectivity as a trope remade into an analogy. Asian American as, rather than is, helps avoid the pitfalls of essentialization, and by extension, instrumentalization." - Liz Kim, The Brooklyn Rail