Leslie Bow

Director Asian American Studies Program
Associate Professor, English and Asian American Studies
608-232-7837
lbow@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993
MA, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1988
BA, University of California, Berkeley, 1984

Research Interests

Comparative ethnic studies, Asian American Studies, Asian American literature and history, literature by women of color, feminism, transgender theory, critical race theory, segregation, civil rights.

Current Research

I am currently researching those interstitial communities who came to represent a third caste under segregation. In looking at depictions of Asians, American Indians, and mestizos in the South—those who represented between “colored” and white—I want to explore what goes into the making of social status. I am particularly interested in how portrayals of the Chinese in the Delta and the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina can reveal the identifications and disavowals that are seen to be preconditions of status elevation. I also want to explore the psychology of the “partly colored” as revealed in narrative: how is “middleman” status negotiated by the subject? My project investigates the theoretical dimensions of what I call racial interstitiality, what it means to stand between social categories and how subjects become made within the space between abjection and normativity, between black and white.

Selected Publications

Betrayal & Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (Princeton, 2001). Articles on gender and human rights, Asian American literature, Asian American women in the academy, race and critical location, multicultural pedagogy. Creative nonfiction articles on race, culture, and Asian American representation.