https://paulnadal.com Paul Nadal Sat, 15 Jul 2023 12:11:13 +0000 https://paulnadal.com en https://paulnadal.com/Landing-Page Thu, 24 Feb 2022 14:41:42 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Landing-Page Paul NadalPrinceton University https://paulnadal.com/Paul-Nadal-Princeton-University Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:03:40 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Paul-Nadal-Princeton-University curriculum vitae [cv] I am an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where I also serve as core faculty in Asian American Studies and an executive committee member of the Program in Media and Modernity. I teach courses in Asian American literature, the global novel, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, and, at the graduate level, critical theory, Marxism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature. My book, Remittances, Literary and Economic, is under contract and forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. A chapter from that book, entitled “Cold War Remittance Economy” and published in American Quar­terly 73.3 (2021) [PDF︎], received two major awards: the Carlos Bulosan Excellence in Scholarship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and the 1921 Best Essay Prize, which is awarded annually by the Advisory Council of the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature." Beyond Princeton, I am a Delegate Representative for Literary Theory and Method at the Modern Language Association (2023–26) and a member of the editorial board of Critical Times, a journal of global critical theory. Previously, I served as a juror for the 2024 Asian American Fiction Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian American Studies, and as a member of the steering committee of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Transpacific Thought and the Problem of Asia” (2024–25), directed by Kandice Chuh and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Born and raised in Tuguegarao, Cagayan, Philippines, I am a first-generation student and scholar. I currently live in Princeton, New Jersey. ︎ @paulnadal_ ︎ nadal@princeton.edu https://paulnadal.com/Current-Research Thu, 04 Aug 2022 01:33:06 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Current-Research Research What can literature tell us about political economy and what can political economy tell us about literature? I am an inter­disciplinary scholar working at the inter­section of literature and economy, with a parti­cular focus on Asian American and Philippine Anglo­phone literature. I read across literary and economic history and bring archival research to the study of narrative. My method is defined by a reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves. I develop this method in my first book, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, entitled Remittances, Literary and Economic, a study of novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora. Framing remittances as a heuristic for reading the entangled circulation of labor, value, ideas, and texts, the book reveals the unexpected role that the development and dissemination of English-language literature played in the twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest exporters of labor. I have presented work from this project at New York University, Harvard, Yale, the University of the Philippines, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke. https://paulnadal.com/Second-Book-Project Thu, 04 Aug 2022 02:06:37 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Second-Book-Project The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation  I am working on a second book that extends my ongoing interest in literature and political economy. Entitled The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation, the book reconceives Asian American literature through its Cold War co-evolution with the post-Fordist 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 counterpart in the formal problem of “Asian American character.” The book asks: What does it mean to read a character as “Asian American”? What conditions govern that recognition? And what kind of work does such recognition perform? Bringing Asian American literature in dialogue with midcentury theories of information, cybernetics, and management, the book shows that “Asian American character” materializes within the tension between individual personhood and capitalist abstraction that human capital, logistics, and automation presuppose but do not themselves theorize. Specifically, it elucidates “Asian American character” as a racial form of value produced by capital’s systematic equivocation surrounding the social determination of labor, doing so across three genres: in Asian American self-help, which recodes the logic of human capital; in the ethnic memoir, whose wartime emergence is shown to be inseparable from transpacific logistics; and in Asian American literary criticism itself, in the ways this genre of academic discourse confronts the contradictions of redundancy that automation has imposed on contemporary intellectual and artistic labor.  Research from the chapter on human capital—on how Chicago School human capital theory remade the model minority myth—was published in the August 2023 issue of Representations; an excerpt from the chapter on automation will appear in a forthcoming Amerasia Journal special issue on “Marxism and Asian American Studies.” https://paulnadal.com/Background Thu, 24 Feb 2022 17:26:35 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Background Background I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of Cali­fornia at Berkeley, under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler. Before coming to Princeton, I held a visiting assistant professorship at The New School in New York City and an Andrew W. Mellon post­doctoral fellowship at Wellesley College. I was born and raised in the Philippines and currently live in Princeton, NJ. https://paulnadal.com/Research-2 Fri, 25 Feb 2022 14:51:19 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Research-2 https://paulnadal.com/Research-3 Fri, 25 Feb 2022 17:28:31 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Research-3 https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-How-Neoliberalism-Remade-the-Model-Minority-Myth Sat, 15 Jul 2023 12:11:13 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-How-Neoliberalism-Remade-the-Model-Minority-Myth Publications“How Neoliberalism Remade the Model Minority Myth.” Representations 163 (2023): 79–99. Special Issue on “Proxy Wars,” edited by Kent Puckett and Yoon Sun Lee. Articles by Karl Britto, Penny Fielding, Kelly M. Rich, Paul Nadal, Vaughn Rasberry, and Jed Esty. Abstract Drawing on archival documents, this essay probes one of the keywords of our times—"human capital," or the idea of education as an interest-bearing asset—to uncover how its late-1950s invention by Chicago neoliberals (Gary S. Becker and Theodore W. Schultz) depended on Asian models of educational performance. It argues that human capital theory's subsequent circulation in US mainstream discourse transformed the model minority myth’s depiction of Asian Americans from hyperassimilable minorities to exemplars of neoliberal economic personhood that I call homo asiaticus neoliberalis. The essay's central claim is that the now popular notion of education as human capital—far from being colorblind or race-neutral (see, e.g., the 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned race-conscious college admissions)—was from its moment of inception a pivotal Cold War instantiation of Asian racialization, in which “Asianness” became a way for neoliberals to exorcise the specter of black enslavement that inhered in their equation of “human” with “capital.”  ︎Download: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.5.79︎[PDF] https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-Cold-War-Remittance-Economy-US-Creative-Writing-and-the Thu, 24 Feb 2022 20:07:25 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-Cold-War-Remittance-Economy-US-Creative-Writing-and-the “Cold War Remittance Economy: US Creative Writing and the Importation of New Criticism in the Philippines.” American Quarterly 73.3 (2021): 557–595.* * Prize Citation: Winner of the 1921 Best Essay Prize in American Literature from the American Literature Association. Special Issue on “Language, Multilingualism, and Translation in American Studies,” edited by Vicente L. Rafael and Mary Louise Pratt. Abstract This essay uses archival sources to reconstruct a literary genealogy of the impact of US creative writing on Philippine literature in English during the early Cold War period. It addresses the ways in which Filipino writers translated the New Criticism they learned in the United States into socially useful literature by engaging a concept of translation as economic exchange. The essay argues that this economic notion of translation not only names a rhetorical conceit of Anglophone writing; it also historically refers to a “Cold War remittance economy,” that is, the large-scale foreign direct investments in postcolonial literary culture by American creative writing programs and private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Focusing on three Rockefeller Foundation fellows—Edilberto K. Tiempo, N. V. M. Gonzalez, and Nick Joaquin—the essay narrates the story of the importation of New Criticism into the Philippines as a confrontation between competing yet analogous values of form: autonomy and organic unity in the literary realm, and sovereignty and fiscal balance in the economic realm. In so doing, the essay models a historicist and formalist reading practice that grasps the relationship between literature and political economy not as homology but as a mediated relationship of mutual determination. ︎Download: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2021.0036︎[PDF]   https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-Carlos-Bulosan-Socialist-Verge-2023 Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:45:19 +0000 Paul Nadal https://paulnadal.com/Nadal-Paul-Carlos-Bulosan-Socialist-Verge-2023 “Carlos Bulosan, Socialist?” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9.1 (2023): 64–69. Abstract Carlos Bulosan (1914–56)—Filipino American, journalist, poet, migrant worker. But also, socialist? Some have insisted that Bulosan is “a proletarian novelist of a decidedly Marxist cast.” Yet the post-1970s recovery of his writings in the United States has tended to reduce his literary radicalism into an expression of a specifically ethnic, rather than an international, Filipino American consciousness. Focusing on America Is in the Heart and The Cry and the Dedication, this essay argues that the retroactive categorization of Bulosan as a “Filipino American” writer has obscured how his long prose works, when read in concert, project an internationalist horizon of Asian socialist futurity. ︎Download: “Carlos Bulosan, Socialist” is available as part of the Verge dossier on “Left Internationalisms in Nationalist Times,”︎ [PDF] edited by Andrew Way Leong and Darwin H. Tsen.  https://doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2023.0003