Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

Dr. Gandhi is currently working on her second book project, tentatively entitled Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the U.S. South. This project builds on Antonio Gramsci’s “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” to think through discourses of “the south” at sites often overlooked in Global South studies. This project connects Asian American studies and Black studies to trace how different meanings of “the south” cohere across the transpacific and transatlantic. Asian American scholarship on the U.S. South has largely focused on the racialization of Asian immigrants in a region structured by a Black-white paradigm. Less discussed is how civil war and Lost Cause discourse, so prevalent in southern American politics and culture, is taken up by Asian American writers and artists grappling with the legacies of Cold War/civil war divisions in Korea and Vietnam. Black studies, meanwhile, has largely focused on the space of the transatlantic, though growing interest in the Black Pacific has begun to examine how the ongoing afterlives of slavery intersect with U.S. imperial wars across Asia and Oceania. This project examines art, literature, and cultural production by Asian American, African American, Korean, and Vietnamese writers and artists to trace how “the south” signifies and translates across multiple southern fronts.