In Kandice Chuh's highly influential Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, she made a provocative case for conceiving of Asian American studies as “subjectless”:

Subjectless, Asian Americanist critique might be understood as an epistemological and political project, rather than one conflated with the identity of its subject – it would enable a critique “that consistently puts the field's own boundaries into question in an effort to resist turning into a properly disciplined academic discourse.”Footnote ² As Chuh confirms in her postscript to her latest monograph, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, the need to elaborate “subjectlessness” as a “sufficient alternative in the affirmative,” and not just as a form of negation, is one of her “points of departure” (126). That said, the ambitions of The Difference Aesthetics Makes extend beyond the field of Asian American studies (although, as she insists, its argument is still “deeply informed by the study of Asian racialization in the United States” (129)): considering in detail the problems of “a properly disciplined academic discourse,” Chuh looks to provide a “sufficient alternative in the affirmative” to the institutionalized humanities as a whole. And in this, Chuh provides a lucid, polemical, and extraordinarily persuasive proposal for reconceiving the humanities.

That the humanities and the university are in a state of crisis is an observation that, in recent years at least, has passed into cliché. Chuh's opening gambit is that the humanities and the university, in their current configuration, are not worth defending. Since “[t]he history of the humanities and the disciplinary structures organizing their emergence is of a piece with the history of the civilizational discourses subtending the legitimation of empire and capital, and bespeaks the onto-epistemologies that have come to secure liberal modernity's common sense,” Chuh posits that the crisis in the humanities calls “less for their defense and instead prompts the crafting of a vision of what a defensible humanities might be and do, and how it differs from its dominant iteration” (1–2). In imagining a “defensible humanities” Chuh proposes an “illiberal humanities” that, in contradistinction to the liberal humanities, is “directed toward the protection and flourishing of people and of ways of being and knowing and of inhabiting the planet that liberal humanism, wrought through the defining structures of modernity, tries so hard to extinguish” (2). As Chuh neatly puts it, she is “arguing for the emancipation of the human from liberalism's grasp” (4).

Chuh explicitly looks to “matters of sense and sensibility inhering in knowledge production” in the work of a variety of “minoritized” artists and writers (particular attention is given to Lan Samantha Chang, Allan deSouza, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth Ozeki, Monique Truong, and Sara Sze), reading them using a form of aesthetic inquiry that she defines according to “a deliberate openness to disidentification and defamiliarization” that can elucidate “suppressed ways of knowing and being” and elicit “illumination of the conditions and processes of subordination” (123–24). Through this method, Chuh demonstrates simultaneously the ways that aesthetics makes difference recognizable and the difference that aesthetics makes as critical praxis. While the first two chapters explore “why and how it is that liberalism organizes the humanities in ways that continue to racialize and hierarchize people, contrary to its abstract values but very much in accordance with its historical formation and uses,” the final two chapters go on to consider how, from a “disarticulated, disidentified state,” “alternative humanisms and humanities” can be “unconcealed” (24). In this, the “subjectlessness” of Imagine Otherwise is elaborated into a sketch towards “a praxis of an illiberal humanities” (24).

Chuh's diagnosis – that “[c]ritical acknowledgement of [their] material consequences warrants deliberate disidentification from the liberal humanities” (50) – is highly compelling, and her prescription – an illiberal humanities that affirmatively “foster[s] the emergence of different, defensible practices and arrangements of knowledge” – has major implications for any Americanist's pedagogy and research practice. It is difficult to come away from The Difference Aesthetics Makes without feeling that it makes an exceptional contribution to cultural studies in particular and to the humanities at large.