My book project, “Bodies, Borders, Belonging: Reimagining the Commonplaces of Asian/America,” is a response to the presence and rise of anti-Asian discourse in the U.S. through the analysis of commonplaces about Asian/Americans, conceptual spaces of rhetorical activity that draw on generalized beliefs that reinforce negative ideas about a community, nation, or culture without explicitly expressing racist, xenophobic, or other repugnant ideas that would not be so easily consumed by a broader public. In this project, I reimagine commonplaces to understand how Asian/Americans generate and deploy responses to exigencies that often construct Asian/Americans in terms of their bodies (to enforce difference), borders (as a strategy of both metaphorical and material exclusion and containment), and belonging (as an affective form of inclusion/exclusion). In transforming commonplaces, Asian/Americans claim humanity, respond to racial violence, and make community on their own terms.

---

Morris Young is the Charles Q. Anderson Professor of English, former Director of English 100, and Faculty Affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work focuses on writing and identity, the intersections of literacy and rhetorical studies, and Asian American literature and culture. His current research considers the generation and function of Asian/American rhetorical commonplaces as a response to exigencies of exclusion, marginalization, and containment. This work is being explored in Interventions in Asian/American Rhetorics co-edited with Amy Wan, which seeks to expand and situate an understanding of Asian/American rhetoric to think broadly about the decolonial, feminist, queer, and intersectional work that Asian/American rhetoric can and must do. Other recent work has appeared in The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Volume V: Modern Rhetoric 1900-Present (forthcoming), Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition (MLA 2023), and Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics (MLA 2020). His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. His co-edited collection (with LuMing Mao), Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (2008), received honorable mention for the 2008 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Award.

*Events currently open only to 2026-27 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*