Seulghee Lee, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, has published a new book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (The Ohio State University Press, 2025).
Dr. Lee’s book traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life.
Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Dr. Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West.
Praise for Dr. Lee’s book has been glowing. Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty, writes,
“Animated by theoretical erudition and historical attunement, Other Lovings is timely and perennial. Lee’s sensitive exploration of the overlapping frontiers between Afro-American and Asian American literatures, the romance of coalition and the labor of solidarity, and love’s fragility and sociality’s renewal is an extraordinary achievement.”
Vivian L. Huang, author of Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, also praises the book:
““Other Lovings centers the ‘love bonds’ that make up Black and Asian American sociality. Lee thematizes the strongholds of racial melancholia, Afropessimism, and queer negativity in contemporary thought and offers a dazzling theory of the loving, ‘intramural mega-sociality’ of Asian American racial ontology and AfroAsian life.”