About

Heidi Amin-Hong is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander cultures shaped by US imperialism and militarism, global capitalist development, and environmental transformation. She analyzes cultural narratives of war, displacement, and climate change, examining ecological collapse as a material legacy of empire, militarism, and capitalism in the US, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Her current book project, "Transpacific Contaminations: Ecological Aesthetics and Cold War Afterlives," reimagines the environmental legacies of the Cold War through Asian American and Pacific Islander aesthetic interventions, exploring war's impact on spaces peripheral to the battlefield and analyzing literary and visual narratives of contamination against Cold War ideologies. Her work highlights how Asian Pacific diasporic writers and artists develop aesthetic forms that emphasize the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories, aiming to restore ecological relations and envision a demilitarized future based on cross-border and cross-species coalitions.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Geography
• Gender studies
• Political science

Selected publications

• <i>Oceanic Becoming: The Pacific Beneath the Pavements</i> . By Rob Wilson

  ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sensing Asian/American Matter

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2026-03-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This conversation between visual artist Candice Lin and Heidi Amin-Hong, scholar of Asian American studies and the environment, explores how Lin’s artistic practices contribute to an understanding of Asian/America as constituted by matters that circulate across histories of empire, racism, and environmental extraction. We discuss how Lin’s art tracks the stories of vibrant matter—such as bacteria, porcelain, clay, lard, and manganese—to remind us of embedded historical pasts, including potential decolonial solidarities that resurface in the circulation and consumption of commodified objects.

  PublisherDOI

• Craig Santos Perez's poetics of multispecies kinship: Challenging militarism and extinction in the Pacific

  2024-12-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Craig Santos Perez’s ecopoetry challenges the “rescue and recovery” narratives of species conservation embedded in processes of settler colonialism and militarism. Reading Perez’s poetry on the extinction of Guam’s avian life alongside the establishment of the Guam National Wildlife Refuge, its environmental impact testimonies, and avian conservation plans, this article develops a theory of ecological kinship that accounts for the dispersed effects of militarized occupation and foregrounds the interdependency of human and nonhuman lives in struggles for species survival and Indigenous self-determination. Furthermore, this article argues that dominant environmental discourses enable and obscure US military control over lands and waters in Guåhan. Through poetic strategies of citation and assembly, Perez portrays a Chamorro diasporic condition that incorporates the subjectivity of the Micronesian kingfisher in captivity, depicting nonhuman animals as intimate kin and active participants in Chamorro histories rather than objects in need of rescue and recovery.

  PublisherDOI

• From Yosemite to the Cold War: Decomposing Settler Mythologies in the Asian American Outdoors

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2023-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: In a moment of rising East Asian global tourism and heightened anti-Asian violence in public space, what does it mean for Asian bodies to see and be seen in the outdoors? Analyzing Dinh Q. Le's daguerreotypes of Yosemite alongside C. Pam Zhang's novel How Much of These Hills is Gold , this article traces an emerging archive of contemporary Asian American literature and visual art that imagines Asian American entanglements with the fraught settler racial histories of US national parks. The article outlines decomposition as a reading practice to propose new ways to read Asian American presence in the environment that do not rely on the recovery or reenactment of settler mythologies of vacant land. Rather, I posit an Asian Americanist ecological approach that turns toward the materialist histories of more-than-human landscapes to reckon with the charged presence of Asian Americans in unceded Native lands. Ultimately, this article illuminates understandings of Asian American relationships to land that further attend to the obscured militarized and settler colonial conditions shaping these environmental relations.

  PublisherDOI

• Transpacific Toxicity: Seadrift, Ecological Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of US Militarism

  ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · 2022-04-14 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When masses of dead fish washed up on the shores of Ha Tinh, Vietnam in April 2016, local divers saw fish bodies collect around a waste discharge pipe from Taiwanese company Formosa Steel’s plant in central Vietnam (Trang, “Timeline”). Formosa representatives blamed the fish deaths on natural algae growth, stating publicly that Vietnam must “choose between catching fish and shrimp and building a modern steel industry” (Reuters, “Vietnam Media”). The multinational corporation’s contamination of Vietnamese waters is part of a longer history of pollution exacerbated by militarized projects across transpacific geographies from Vietnam to Taiwan and Texas. In her 2005 memoir An Unreasonable Woman, environmental activist and fisherwoman Diane Wilson describes another scene of fish deaths in the Gulf Coast of Seadrift, Texas, adjacent to another Formosa plant. In the precursor to her decades-long fight against industrial pollution’s destructive impact on her fishing community, she recounts watching “the suffocating fish break the surface” during an algal bloom: “their silver heads were like little camera lights going off. Nothing could be done” (Wilson 37). Comparing the reflective glow of fish scales to tiny cameras, Wilson portrays the fish as embodied witnesses of ecological violence; emerging from the ocean, their bodies become a medium that produces documentary evidence against corporate negligence. The allusion to “camera lights” also references the documentary aesthetics of her memoir, written in conjunction with her activist work to expose Formosa’s environmental violations across national borders.

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• The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis

  Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas · 2022-12-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350 . A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally produced in a multimedia format, the born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins. The atlas connects five transnational imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for imagining interspecies relationality and co-presence. Mangroves and atolls form portals to speculative futures of non-human existence beyond the climate crisis and the impact of racial extractive capitalism. Anchored in five locales, the collective text brings together a global vision of survivance addressing migration, dispossession, Asian diaspora, Native sovereignty, Black fugitivity, and broader questions of global indigeneity. With life emerging from the ruins, this atlas forms a digital blueprint of suboceanic futures and the practice of interrogating what justice could mean in the far future.

  PublisherDOI

• Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of multispecies kinship: Challenging militarism and extinction in the Pacific

  Atlantic Studies · 2022-06-27 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Craig Santos Perez’s ecopoetry challenges the “rescue and recovery” narratives of species conservation embedded in processes of settler colonialism and militarism. Reading Perez’s poetry on the extinction of Guam’s avian life alongside the establishment of the Guam National Wildlife Refuge, its environmental impact testimonies, and avian conservation plans, this article develops a theory of ecological kinship that accounts for the dispersed effects of militarized occupation and foregrounds the interdependency of human and nonhuman lives in struggles for species survival and Indigenous self-determination. Furthermore, this article argues that dominant environmental discourses enable and obscure US military control over lands and waters in Guåhan. Through poetic strategies of citation and assembly, Perez portrays a Chamorro diasporic condition that incorporates the subjectivity of the Micronesian kingfisher in captivity, depicting nonhuman animals as intimate kin and active participants in Chamorro histories rather than objects in need of rescue and recovery.

  PublisherDOI

• Field Trip: Materialities of Empire in a More-than-Human World

  Verge Studies in Global Asias · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Field TripMaterialities of Empire in a More-than-Human World Heidi Amin-Hong (bio), Keva X. Bui (bio), Sam Ikehara (bio), and Davorn Sisavath (bio) Materialities of Empire in a More-than-Human World Heidi Amin-Hong and Keva X. Bui this field trip highlights the aesthetic potential of more- than- human relationality to unsettle and reimagine the material effects of war and empire across Asia and the Pacific. The essays in this feature coalesce around a desire to develop aesthetic analytics of visual culture that exceed the boundaries of human and nation. Asian diasporic visual culture has sought to make sense of how imperialist violence extends into nonhuman worlds within and from Asia and the Pacific. Scholars of Asian diaspora studies have also pivoted to emphasize the role of matter and the more- than- human world in shaping Asian diasporic and Indigenous Pacific Islander aesthetic responses to the physical and psychic effects of settler colonialism, war, and other forms of domination. This feature is interested in the “vibrant matters” that constitute the Asian- Pacific region (Bennett 2009), a physical landscape that has been shaped by multilayered imperial and militarized projects. We examine the relation between matter and aesthetics as inherently political, charged with a material and affective force that reveals layers of compounded histories in soil, water, plants, and racialized human bodies. As such, we collectively ask, How might Asian, Asian diasporic, Asian American, and transpacific studies contend with the domination and extraction of the nonhuman world, and how might we turn to the nonhuman as another site for rethinking racial formation? How do Asian and Asian diasporic aesthetics harness matter to trouble and remap the zones of racial capitalism and imperialism in service of decolonization and demilitarization? These aesthetic and political projects foreground a decolonial imaginary within the geographies of war, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism that necessitate critical reorientations of human and nonhuman relationships. [End Page 65] The four contributors to this Field Trip demonstrate that Asian and Asian diasporic visual art can chart new relationalities with the nonhuman world in the wake of slow and ongoing material violence of empire. While imaginaries of war and empire often focus on spectacular moments of violence and strife, this Field Trip turns its critique toward what Rob Nixon (2011, 2) terms “slow violence,” or a “violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,” to examine the enduring traces of colonialism and militarization that bear on our present world. Illuminating a materialist approach to analyzing Japanese and American imperial entanglements in the archive, Sam Ikehara reads Japanese postcards of Mauna Kea as part of an imperialist technology that cements settler science approaches through the tourist imaginary. As archival matter, the postcard also functions as a visual technology that imagines material landscapes as available for conquest, occupation, and domination by settler powers. Ikehara demonstrates that the life cycle of snow exceeds these visual technologies, revealing felt histories of the environment that upend structures of settler colonialism. Keva X. Bui’s essay is also attuned to the ecological life cycles catalyzed through Tuan Mami’s performance art, which reflects on the slow violence of the U.S. war in Vietnam and the more- than-human entanglements in its wake. Bui interprets Mami’s work as an aesthetic engagement with embodied toxicity that reconfigures human– nonhuman relations alongside and within the material remainders of war. Resisting nationalist and identitarian concerns that continually linger over designations of “Asian American art,” this feature expands the geographies of Global Asia(s) as constituted by the overlapping histories of colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism that have sedimented in the physical environment. Davorn Sisavath’s essay harnesses the concept of slow violence to consider Lao artist Bounpaul Phothyzan’s We Live, a land art installation that documents Laotian villagers’ everyday negotiations with living alongside water environments damaged by capitalist extraction. As Laos rapidly develops its hydropower dams for export, Sisavath demonstrates that Phothyzan’s art practices foreground an ethic of shared responsibility at the local level alongside geopolitical forces that continue to threaten human and animal life. Expanding on the entanglement of human and nonhuman life under global capitalism, Heidi Amin- Hong’s essay...

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• Militarized Sustainability: Feminist Refugee Memory and Hydropower in the Mekong Delta

  Verge Studies in Global Asias · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Tracing the genesis of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 1966 as a product of U.S. militarism in Vietnam and Japanese imperial ambitions, this essay shows that ADB-funded energy, sustainability, and risk management projects are inseparable from the racialized and sexualized legacies of war and empire. American engagement with hydropower planning reveals how U.S. interests in energy and infrastructural development justified military escalation of the war in Vietnam and established hydropower as a symbol of modernity. Putting artist Tiffany Chung's speculative maps of Saigon in dialogue with the ADB's climate change adaptation reports, this article develops the analytic of feminist refugee memory to articulate an environmentalist perspective that incorporates feminist critiques of war and empire.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories: Ten Design Principles</i>. By Matt K. Matsuda

  ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · 2021-09-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories: Ten Design Principles. By Matt K. Matsuda Get access A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories: Ten Design Principles. By Matt K. Matsuda. Duke UP, 2020. 184 pp. Cloth $89.95. Paper $23.95. Heidi Amin-Hong Heidi Amin-Hong University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Email: haminhong@ucsb.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 28, Issue 4, Winter 2021, Pages 1658–1659, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab079 Published: 17 September 2021

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Frequent coauthors

• Tauren Nelson

  1 shared

• Ana Ozaki

  1 shared

• Davorn Sisavath

  1 shared

• Andrea Chung

  1 shared

• Randa Tawil

  1 shared

• Hashem Abushama

  University of Oxford

  1 shared

• Melanie Puka

  1 shared

• Keva X. Bui

  1 shared