Lilika Ioki Kukiela

Lilika Ioki Kukiela

First Name: 
Lilika Ioki
Last Name: 
Kukiela
Title: 
PhD Candidate
Biography : 

My dissertation examines how Japan comes to function as a not-quite-not-white neocolonial subject of the United States in the postwar period and a not-quite-not-brown Asian American racial category of political ambivalence in the archive of multiethnic American literature and culture. By engaging with theories of brownness and the study of comparative racialization, I argue that Japan is made an “honorary brown” figure for people of color instead of a utopic “brown” subject of interracial relation because of Japan’s legacies of imperialism and its postwar allyship with the U.S.

List of Publications

  • Book Review: Kyle Wanberg, Maps of Empire: A Topography of World Literature. University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 91, no. 3, 2022, pp. 415-416.

People Type:

Research Area:

Areas of Interest: 
  • Comparative Racialization
  • Asian American Studies
  • Multiethnic American Literature

Program:

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