Sunny Xiang
· Associate Professor of English and American StudiesYale University · Voice Performance
Active 2005–2025
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About
Sunny Xiang is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Northwestern University. Her scholarly focus encompasses race, war, and empire through a wide range of aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. Xiang is particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century. Her first book, 'Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War,' explores the visual and narrative aspects of Oriental inscrutability in relation to U.S. Cold War intelligence operations. Her current project, 'Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics,' investigates how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air and on the skin. Xiang's scholarship demonstrates how aesthetic and cultural approaches can foster surprising conversations across Asian American studies, Pacific studies, critical militarization studies, and feminist science studies. Her research has been published in various academic journals, and she has taught courses on topics such as war and everyday life, comparative world English literatures, and English pedagogy.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Art
- Psychology
- Political Science
- Aesthetics
- Literature
- Psychoanalysis
- Philosophy
- Law
- History
Selected publications
Columbia University Press eBooks · 2020 · 44 citations
1st authorCorrespondingSunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of "Oriental inscrutability" across a wide range of texts. She puts interrogation reports, policy memos, and field notes into conversation with novels, poems, documentaries, and mixed media work.
Bikinis and Other Atomic Incidents: The Synthetic Life of the Nuclear Pacific
Radical History Review · 2022-01-01 · 15 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This article examines a range of mid-twentieth-century American fashions, particularly women’s intimate wear, that went by the name of “bikini.” In doing so, it identifies the bikini as an overt but unremarkable incident of racial and colonial violence. Treating the nuclear Pacific as conspicuously incidental in mainstream atomic culture enables new insights on the visual interplay between white femininity and primitive sexuality—an interplay that, the author argues, was integral to est…
Race, Tone, and Ha Jin’s “Documentary Manner”
Comparative Literature · 2018-03-01 · 9 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingTonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War
2020 · 5 citations
1st authorCorrespondingWhy were U.S. intelligence organizations so preoccupied with demystifying East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century? Sunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of "Oriental inscrutability" across a wide range of texts. She examines how cold war regimes of suspicious thinking produced an ambiguity between "Oriental" enemies and Asian allies, contributing to the conflict's status as both a "real war" and a "long pe…
Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism
Ariel · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations
articleLiterature and Postcolonial Capitalism Cheryl Narumi Naruse (bio), Sunny Xiang (bio), and Shashi Thandra (bio) Aimé Césaire once wrote that the postcolonial world is made up of "societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist" (44; emphasis in original). Césaire's rearticulation of a civilizational stigma as a political stance is difficult to reconcile with today's reality: the major societies in some of the most significant capitalist narratives of the l…
Frequent coauthors
- 18 shared
Joan Heller Brown
University of California, San Diego
- 9 shared
Shigeki Miyamoto
University of California, San Diego
- 8 shared
B. Daan Westenbrink
University of Groningen
- 6 shared
Dayue Darrel Duan
- 5 shared
Charles Keller
Children's Cancer Therapy Development Institute
- 5 shared
Megan M. Cleary
- 5 shared
James Keck
Jackson Laboratory
- 5 shared
Matthew N. Svalina
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
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