James Kim

Assistant Professor of Asian American Literature

A.B, University of Chicago (1994)

Ph.D. University of Virginia (2003)
Department of English


Office:

Fordham University
441 E. Fordham Road
Dealy Hall 514W
Bronx, New York  10458

Email:

bjakim@fordham.edu

Phone:

(718) 817-4028

Fax:

(718) 817-4010

Undergraduate Courses:

Close Reading & Critical Writing
Coming of Age in Asian America

Fictions of Female Deviance in the Long Eighteenth Century

Introduction to Asian American Literature

Graduate Courses:

Home, Exile, and Diaspora in Asian American Literature

Introduction to Literary Theory

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Biography:

I have been fortunate enough to win a number of fellowships over the years, including a Faculty Senate Dissertation Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Virginia (2002-03) and a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Pomona College in Claremont, California (2003-04). Since arriving at Fordham in 2004, I have been happily writing, teaching, eating, and trying to stay out of trouble. My favorite kung fu movie is Yuen Woo Ping’s Tai Chi Master.

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Current Research Projects:

Asian American Anger

Drawing on post-colonial theory, Marxist cultural theory, and critical race theory—as well as recent discussions of affect in disciplines such as philosophy, ethnic studies, and psychoanalysis—this interdisciplinary multimedia project strives to map the political and aesthetic responses available to minoritized subjects confronting histories of racial outrage. Examining an archive that ranges from the fiction of John Okada to the video work of Lela Lee to the poetry of Marilyn Chin to the standup comedy of Margaret Cho, I argue that contemporary Asian American cultural production can be understood as a sustained attempt to think and feel a politically productive form of anger. By exploring this difficult affectÕs capacity to generate oppositional cultures, I clarify the contemporary Asian American condition, critique the hegemony of white feeling, and advocate a push for radical inter-ethnic coalitions.

Dialectics of Loss: Sentimental Irony and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

This project attempts to write the cultural history of a hitherto underappreciated literary device I term “sentimental irony.” Though seemingly self-contradictory, this rhetorical strategy in fact offered eighteenth-century writers an important way to understand and respond to some of the complex upheavals shaping their social world. Drawing on sociology, urban history, and recent accounts of gender and sexuality, I argue that works of sentimental irony constitute ambivalent attempts to grieve the losses entailed by the transition to modernity. Invoking and revising psychoanalytic descriptions of loss, I show how sentimental ironists such as Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith moved dialectically between mourning (letting go of the lost object) and melancholia (lingering with it), alternately exploring and containing the emancipatory possibilities of early modern cultural change.

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Recent Publications:

Journal Articles:

· “‘good cursed, bouncing losses’: Masculinity, Sentimental Irony, and Exuberance in Tristram Shandy.” Forthcoming in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

· "The Legend of the White-and-Yellow Black Man: Global Containment and Triangulated Racial Desire in Romeo Must Die.” Camera Obscura 19.1 (Spring 2004): 151-79.

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