Hi! I am Cheryl Narumi Naruse.
I am Associate Professor of English at Tulane University and my research interests include Asian Anglophone and Asian American literatures, postcolonial theory, and cultural histories of capitalism.
My articles have appeared in journals such as biography, Genre, and Verge, as well as edited collections like The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics and Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts.
I have worked with brilliant colleagues throughout my career:
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With Weihsin Gui, I co-edited the special issue, "Singapore at 50: At the Intersections of Globalization and Postcoloniality," for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
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I co-edited a Periscope dossier of Social Text with Nadine Chan on "Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics and Alternative Globalities," which was based off of an international symposium of the same topic we organized at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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With Sunny Xiang and Shashi Thandra, I co-edited a special issue of "Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism" for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.
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I am currently working on an edited collection of critical and creative works, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore (under contract with Duke University Press), with Joanne Leow and Faris Joraimi.
Education and Experience
I am a proud alum of the University of Hawaiʻi of Mānoa, where I received my Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English. My graduate training was shaped by courses in cultural studies in Asia/Pacific, Political Science, and American Studies. While at UHM, I received a certificate in International Cultural Studies from the East-West Center.
My research has been supported by a postdoctoral fellowship with the Global Asia research cluster at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and by the Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University.
Works in Progress
I am working on my second monograph, Imperialism Askew: the US and Cold Southeast Asian/American Literature, which begins with the observation that American empire and Singapore/Malaysia are rarely discussed together. This conceptual gap appears as a disjuncture between historical archives, which assiduously document American imperial efforts, and postcolonial/diasporic art and literature, which explicitly depict US imperial power only rarely. A similar chiasmatic disjuncture appears in knowledge production: Singapore/Malaysia are a rare mention in studies of US empire and US empire is infrequently discussed in studies about Singapore/Malaysia. This project thus explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysia—as the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War—in Asian American and postcolonial studies. Through analyses of novels, films, photography, political ephemera, student periodicals, conference proceedings, school exams, the book demonstrates how tendency to elide US empire was a complex process, one in which various national and global interests colluded to skew the picture of US empire in Singapore/Malaysia.
I am also working on an article about the young adult novel Yolk (2021) by Mary H.K. Choi, which explores the implications of the "trending Asian" as a new economic type of the twenty-first century.