Description: Tina Chen's Alien Forms and Minor Genres is an innovative exploration of how academia cultivates, manages, and rewards academic labor. Using the multidisciplinary field of Global Asias as her primary example, Chen gives readers a full sense of the backstage labor of institutional scholarship and imagines potential alternatives for intellectual inquiry.
Review Quotes: "Alien Forms and Minor Genres represents Tina Chen at her best: capacious in scope, critically incisive, wondrously imaginative. There is sly humor here combined with dead seriousness. The book, like Chen, is a workhorse of endeavors and inspiration--less a how-to, more a why-to, and always with an eye upon the meta-frames that animate the passionate radicalism of Global Asias."--Christine R. Yano, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Hawai`i
"Undiscipline--I've been sitting with this word since finishing Alien Forms and Minor Genres, struck by Tina Chen's bold approach to make transparent the various ways we have been disciplined into academia. Chen's work is one you will want to not only re-read but pass on to others because you will want to talk through the innovative approaches to seeing what you can't unsee in her deft reformulation of academic labor."--Jennifer Ho, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado Boulder