Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship Annual Lecture

Yellow Feminist Visibility: On Nellie Wong's Socialist Feminist Poetics

Join us for a virtual lecture by the 2025 Kenneth Karmiole Research Fellow, Dr. Joseph Wei, who drew on primary source materials from the Library's California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) to advance his scholarship on Asian American socialist feminist poetry and literary organizing.

Drawing on archival research from UCSB's California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, this presentation examines the work of the late Asian American socialist feminist poet Nellie Wong (1934–2026). Looking at Wong's correspondences and drafts of essays and poems, Wei takes up her work as a model for organizing yellow feminist visibility in the 1980s — that is, performances of Asian American socialist feminist commitment amidst the conservative backlash against radical race movements of the 1960s. These performances of visibility were important because Wong and her compatriots conceived of Asian American feminists and lesbians as a vanguard class, whose daily work and organizing activities contained the seeds for social transformation.

About the Speaker

Dr. Joseph Wei is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. A scholar of Asian American literature and literary communities, his research spans Asian American poetry and poetics, literature and sociology, and critical refugee studies. He is currently completing his first book, Asian American Literary Organizing, 1970s to the Present, which investigates the role of Asian American literary organizations — from Kearny Street Workshop to Kundiman — in realizing and sustaining models of literary production outside mainstream literary institutions.

This event may be photographed or recorded.