Where Is the Space for [ Asian ] Anger?

I keep the brackets for Asian because I genuinely don’t know what to call the place I’m speaking from. It’s not quite ethnic, not exactly diasporic, not simply cultural. It’s the accumulation of moving between worlds and holding more than one at the same time. What people call double consciousness but which, in my body, feels more like an expanded perceptual field than anything pathological or lacking.

What I keep returning to is how this double consciousness becomes unspeakable in academia. Western academia (and honestly academia as a whole, because everything about it is shaped by Western foundations) cannot register multiplicity except as a concept. “Pluralism” is a slogan, “interdisciplinarity” is branding. But when you actually live with multiple sensibilities, multiple memories, multiple ways of knowing, the space collapses. There’s no room to linger, dwell, or say “this is not resolvable and shouldn’t be.”

I keep feeling the pressure to narrow myself down, flatten the layers, explain only one strand at a time. I keep meeting people who have no idea that there are worlds they simply cannot reach. These encounters are everywhere.

I can’t write them here or talk about them directly. This is not because they’re villains, but because they’re the “good” ones. The open-minded, generous, progressive ones who think they listen - the people I care about, my cherished friends and colleagues. But they would crumble, get offended, or turn defensive if they ever heard how deeply their inability to truly listen injures me.

And I need to say this too: some of the people who hurt me the most are the ones who insist they also carry double consciousness, while moving entirely within American worldviews, unaware that their self-perception as multiply-situated is exactly what erases mine. And yet, I still find myself understanding them, because their upbringing makes them feel this way, places certain limits on what they can sense, so once again the labor of understanding ends up on my side.

It’s too daily, too subtle, too woven into the “nice” spaces, too embedded in the people who mean well. They would break before they could understand. And I’m tired of being the one who has to calculate that risk every time.

What makes it violent is the moment I say, even gently, “I’m coming from somewhere you can’t reach.” Their defenses rise instantly - they insist they can understand, that I’m overcomplicating, that I’m misreading, that my work is “interesting but unclear” because it doesn’t follow their blueprint of clarity.

It’s the refusal to self-reflect that feels like a slap every time. The way they respond with more insistence, more pressure, more subtle condescension, as if my refusal to be legible to them is a personal attack.

I keep asking myself: why stay in conversation with people who cannot hear me? Why keep offering patience when I know exactly how the scene ends? Why keep protecting them from the anger they’ve never learned to hold?

Because that’s what this is about: I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m allowed to translate anger into analysis, present my frustration as theory, and produce something “useful” out of my emotional labor. My anger is expected to be converted into clarity, scholarship, and teachable moments. Meanwhile, single-consciousness anger is simply… allowed. It is read as passion, investment, urgency — never as threat.

But I’m not allowed the anger itself, the rawness of it, the fullness of it, and to state the simple fact that being unseen and misheard, repeatedly, by people who congratulate themselves on being open-minded, actually hurts.

This is how the myth works: double consciousness is framed as pain, as this sad colonial inheritance. And that framing is precisely what keeps the single-consciousness worldview untouched - by turning other worlds into wounds rather than into forms of intelligence they cannot fathom. As long as our multiplicity is read as a deficit, their singularity gets to remain the universal norm. Single consciousness is that inability to sense anything beyond the singular consciousness they occupy. The assumption that if something feels foreign, it must be lesser, unclear, immature, in need of “guidance.” The way they shrink unfamiliar knowledge into the category of “poor damaged insight” so they can perform grace toward it.

But from where I stand — in Korea, inside a culture with its own layered cosmologies, histories, relationalities — the world outside single consciousness is enormous, textured, alive. There are emotional structures, ethical systems, sensibilities, temporalities that are untranslatable by design. None of this will ever truly register in academia, no matter how many special issues or CFPs claim otherwise. The container simply isn’t built for it.

So I’m writing anger without translating it. I’m writing because I don’t want to keep shrinking myself so their worlds can remain intact. Double consciousness was never the wound. It was the brilliance they couldn’t bear to see. A range of perception their frameworks can’t hold and a worlding they mistake for damage because its scale doesn’t fit into their hands.

This is an actual academic intervention, not a "complaint."

People like Audre Lorde, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, Aimé Césaire, Mimi Khúc have already shown how anger, opacity, and multiplicity work as knowledge practices. What I’m doing isn’t new, and it isn’t informal. It has a method.

The anger that circulates outside academia is not messy or unformed. It’s extremely clear, embodied, articulate. People speak from the body, from lived double-consciousness, from sensory intelligence, and that produces a kind of clarity that’s just as valid as any peer-reviewed “argument,” sometimes more precise.

But academia can’t handle embodied anger. It’s easier for the institution to pretend everything is “professional” and “measured” than to deal with what real people actually feel. Anger gets cut out. Embodied knowledge gets cut out. Anything that might even slightly unsettle the people who run the room gets cut out. It's "dangerous." What does danger mean? Danger to whom? Protection for what?

Outside academia, we have real conversations. Those conversations are grounded, detailed, smart, embodied. They’re not “venting.” They’re theory-in-action. But none of it is allowed at the academic table because the table can’t hold it. I can't count how many brilliant people refuse to speak inside academic rooms because they already know the risk: misinterpretation, retaliation, professional punishment. Everyone is scared because the consequences are real and being misread can cost a future. Fear politics in action, most actively in places that enjoy claiming the opposite, that like to imagine themselves as the exception.

So the truth circulates everywhere except where it could matter most. And the academy mistakes this silence for harmony, as if the absence of expressed anger means the absence of injury. That’s why I’m writing this: I don’t have the same immediate stakes in the job market, so I can afford to say what everyone else keeps swallowing. This is the least I can do - name what everyone sees, what everyone knows -- everyone except the single-consciousness that governs the room.

I’m(we're) done protecting the anxieties of people who cannot hear me and do not know that they cannot hear me. I am(we are) no longer willing to carry the labor of protecting their vulnerabilities while erasing my anger. I am fed up with the psychological labor of babysitting their insecurities and ignorance in silence.

And for all the triggered vulnerabilities: My anger comes from love. From the part of me that still believes communication is possible, that still holds a small, stubborn trust that the academy could hear something if it actually tried. I claim anger as part of love, because it has always been and can never be cut out. Without anger, there is no love, only broken defenses.

Some of us don’t need the academy to confirm what we know. Some of us exceed it by existing.