I am also developing a second book project that extends my ongoing interest in literary and economic history.

Entitled The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation, the book offers a new account of Asian American literature as emerging from the Cold War formation of neoliberalism and the rise of the knowledge economy. It traces how three interrelated keywords—human capital, logistics, and automation—gained conceptual coherence and social force through their intimate yet underexamined relation to a history of Asian racialization, a history that finds its literary and conceptual counterpart in the problem of “Asian American character.” What, exactly, does “Asian American character” name, what does it do, and how does it structure the way we read? The book argues that “Asian American character”—as a literary figure, a social type, and a set of cultural, racial, and gendered expectations—materializes within the tension between individual personhood and capitalist abstraction that human capital, logistics, and automation presuppose and reproduce. It further shows how this tension can be tracked through three genres: in Asian American self-help, which recodes the logic of human capital; in the ethnic memoir, which emerges from and becomes entangled with a transpacific history of logistics; and in Asian American literary criticism itself, especially in the ways this genre of critical discourse confronts the contradictions of redundancy that automation has imposed on contemporary artistic and academic labor. A chapter from this new project, on how Chicago School human capital theory remade the model minority myth, was published in the August 2023 issue of Representations.