Kai Hang Cheang is a transnational scholar, educator, and cultural critic who writes and teaches at the intersection of queer studies, transgender studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and Asian and Asian American literature and culture. He completed his PhD in English at the University of California, Riverside.
Kai’s research interests culminate in his first book project Sideways Developments: Queer and Trans Literature and Visual Culture in Global Hong Kong. Interdisciplinary in orientation, the project queers the keyword of development in Global South Studies with what he terms sideways narratives drawn from a bilingual literary and visual archive from the LGBTQ+ community in HK and its diaspora in the US, UK, and Canada. The project imagines queer and trans models of personal, communal, and ecological growth and degrowth for the 21st century that challenge linear standards of development in the Global North. Partly an ethnography of the protests of postcolonial HK, the book uses a globally inflected concept of intersectionality as a lens to generate analyses of gender and sexuality in Global HK as experiences and categories that intersect with racial, class, ethnic, citizenship, and ability differences.
As a public-facing scholar, Kai works closely with local organizations like the APANO Action Fund in the US as well as queer and trans youth organizations in China’s two special administrative regions. Kai’s transdisciplinary research is nourished by his collaborations with scholars and community members.
Currently, Kai is a co-PI of an Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation and serves on the curriculum committee of the forthcoming Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies minor, an initiative that is part of the AANAPISI funding that PSU received.
Courses Taught
Introduction to Queer Studies
Introduction to Asian American Studies
Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the US
Transnational Sexuality Studies
Decolonizing Methodologies
Queer Climate Fiction
Recent Publications
“Forms of Solidarity and the Self: A Postcolonial Reading of Yuli Riswati’s Hong Kong Writing.” Feminist Formations, 35.2 (2023): 29-53.
“Queering ‘The Children’s Movement’: A Sideways Look at Political Infantilization in the (Post-) 2014 Global Imaginary of Hong Kong Protesters.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 27.4 (2021): 629-54.
“Minor Character and Minor Orientalism.” Asian American x Latinx Critical & Digital Studies, (2023): https://aaxl.ace.fordham.edu/minor-character-and-minor-orientalism-in-sandra-cisneross-the-house-on-mango-street/
Recent Book Reviews
“Review of Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific by Howard Chiang.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 32.3 (2023):398-400.
“Review of Minor China: Method, Materials, and the Aesthetics by Hentyle Yapp.” Journal of Asian American Studies, 26.1 (2023):111-113.
“Review of The Economic Roots of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong: Globalization and the Rise of China by Louis Augustin-Jean and Anthea H.Y. Cheung.” Hong Kong Studies, 3.1 (2021): 1-7.
“Asian American Sociality after the Anti-Relational Turn in Queer Theory: A Double Review of Stephen Hong Sohn’s Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction and Cynthia Wu’s Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 62.1 (2020): 157-163.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Public-facing Work
“The ‘Asiancy’ of Asian American Fashion: A Commissioned text for the (e-) exhibition Collecting Dissonance in Auto Italia in London by the New York Art collective CFGNY.” (2021): https://autoitaliasoutheast.org/blog/collecting-dissonance-the-asiancy-of-asian-american-fashion/
“Cuteness: The Aesthetic Category of a Dystopic Global Asia.” Periscope: Social Text Online (2018): https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/cuteness-the aesthetic-category-of-a-dystopic-global-asia/
Interview
“Exultant and Cautionary Imaginings at the Interstices of Architecture, Technology and Culture: An Interview with Olalekan Jeyifous.” Science Fiction Studies (2017): 419-423.
Encyclopedia Entry
“Guan Gong.” Encyclopedia of Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms. Ed. Lan Dong. New York, NY: ABC-CLIO. 2016. 329-334.
Selected Journal Articles
“Performativity in Black Internationalist Poetics as Exemplified in Robeson and Hughes.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 39 (2019): 149-168.
“Restaging the Superhero Spectacle: Green Turtle’s Shame, The Shadow Hero’s Reparative Aesthetics, and the Chinese Diaspora’s Speculative Historiography of Golden Age Comics.” MELUS, 43. 4 (2018): 80-103.
“Family Discord/ance: Tone and Countermood in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land.” Pacific Coast Philology, 53.2, (2018): 217-238.