Name: Racial Virtuality: A Book Launch and Celebration with Danielle Wong
Start: 2026-09-21T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-09-21T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Upstart & Crow Studio

Description

Join us for an evening of discussion and light refreshments to celebrate Danielle Wong’s new book, Racial Virtuality: Information Capitalism and the Suggestive Materiality of Asianness (New York University Press, 2026). Danielle will be in conversation with Christopher Kawika Guillermo and Christine Kim.

Racial Virtuality contends that racialization not only occurs through representation in media, but also through our very interactions with technologies and their unseen operations. By putting memes, social media apps, and digital platforms in conversation with more traditional cultural productions like film, literature, and theatre, Racial Virtuality broadens our understanding of racialization in the digital age and challenges traditional notions of cultural production and subject formation. In doing so, it demonstrates how Asianness circulates as a new media form in a digital marketplace of commodified affects, senses, gestures, and tastes. Racial Virtuality illuminates how Asianness is a specific mode of informational capital, but also a surprising mode of relation and critique.

This event is free, but please RSVP here to reserve your spot. Books will be available for sale and signing.

More about Upstart & Crow:

Upstart & Crow is a not-for-profit creative studio and literary incubator that champions writers, readers and stories, and the role they play in shaping our lives. We develop original programs, support artists and revel in creative projects focused on Literature In Translation / Climate Solutions / Poetry / Civic Dialogue / Community & Skills Building … all with the aim of elevating the role of literature and storytelling in our lives. Find us on Granville Island, Gibsons and online at upstartandcrow.com.

Accessibility:

The main studio of our shop is accessible for folks with mobility aids. There is a washroom on the main floor available for attendees. As part of disability justice and community care for the chronically ill, vulnerable and elderly, we ask that you refrain from attending if you feel sick.

Questions: hello[at]upstartandcrow.com.

More about the author:

Danielle Wong is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and the author of Racial Virtuality: Information Capitalism and the Suggestive Materiality of Asianness (New York University Press, 2026). Her research and teaching focus on new media theory, feminist science and technology studies, and Asian North American studies. Her most recent project is concerned with pre-histories of postproduction and the carceral and imperial logics undergirding everyday editing processes. Wong’s essays have been published in journals and venues such as Representations, Post-45, and Transformations.

More about the moderator:

Christopher Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is Professor at The Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, and the author of seven books, including Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press, 2023), Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), and Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2026). They are the co-editor of two edited collections, Transpacific, Undisciplined and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us, and they were lead designer of the video game Stamped: an anti-travel game.

More about the discussant:

Christine Kim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and a faculty affiliate of UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration program. Before joining UBC, she was faculty at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of the Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race. She is the author of Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012).