Jennifer Wang’s research focuses on Asian North American literature, critical race studies, and political theory. She also works in the fields of ethnic literature and postcolonial studies more broadly. She is currently at work on her dissertation project, which explores the relationship between race and ontology through different strands of contemporary theory, such as phenomenology, affect, biopolitics, and new materialism. More specifically, the project aims to track emergent racial forms that arise from aesthetic strategies deployed by North American ethnic literary texts to contend with the waning of an essentialized racial subject and its “identity politics.” Together, the chapters of her dissertation draw on the novels of Susan Choi, Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, and Dionne Brand in order to argue that the “ends of race” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries constitute not its decline but rather its enduring capacity to persist in reconstituted and nonanthropomorphic forms in the wake of essentialized identities.
Jennifer is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown University. She received her B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia and M.A. (English) from the University of Western Ontario. In the past, she has taught a course on “Race, Dystopia, and Contemporary Literature.”
