Fred Lee
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fred Lee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fred |
| FAMILY NAME | Lee |
| SIGNATURE | LEE F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3387-6757 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
In Conversation with Kirstie in advance
As former graduate students of Kirstie McClure (1951–2023), we offer these remembrances of our time with her at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Our hope is to put Kirstie’s contributions to historically-inflected political theory into the fuller context of how she worked as a teacher, mentor, editor, and reader. For all of us, and for many years, Kirstie was among our most significant interlocutors. This kind of scholar, who is …
Soil Nutrients and Host Filtering Jointly Shape Distinct Endophytic Bacterial Assemblages in Tropical Island Shrubs Across the South China Sea
Archipelagos in extreme climates offer ideal systems for studying species adaptations to harsh environments. Previously, properties of island soil microbial communities such as structures, diversities, and functions were under the main attentions. Nevertheless, how island edaphic properties shape endophytic bacterial assemblages in native shrubs and how these bacterial communities differentiate across neighboring islands remain poorly understood.…
Grace Lee Boggs on Chinese Political Thought and the Next American Revolution
This essay tracks how Grace Lee Boggs's lifelong engagements with Chinese political thought and US revolutionary praxis co-developed. We first show that Lee Boggs's concepts of roles and revolution drew on Confucian and Maoist philosophy; we next show that Lee Boggs later traced alternative, US-based genealogies of both concepts, just as she engaged more deeply with Asian American activism. Lee Boggs as a reader of Chinese thought tended towards …
On Claire Jean Kim’s Bitter Fruit
Bong Joon-ho’s Okja
This article explores the ethical and strategic thought of Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a film about a Korean adolescent and a genetically modified pig who save each other’s lives. In part one, I convene Bong Joon-ho and Frank Wilderson to explore how human supremacy and White supremacy work together. I argue that Okja connects super-pigs’ suffering to Black, Indigenous, Latino/a, and Asian suffering in the Americas, with the implication that non-White a…
Neoliberal and authoritarian updates on U.S. white democracy
This essay synthesizes critical contract theory and radical democratic theory to contest U.S. authoritarianism and U.S. neoliberalism. Theoretically, I argue that radical democratic theory needs critical contract theory to expose the gendered and raced infrastructure of U.S. liberal democracy, while critical contract theory needs radical democratic theory to reframe race and gender dominance in terms of popular struggle. Historically, I argue tha…
Strange Bedfellows
Strange Bedfellows Fred Lee (bio) Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes. Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 208pp. $19.95 (pb). ISBN 9781517903596. In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes meet the challenge of interrogating a US right-wing racial politics still in the making. Their book aims to account f…
Contours of Asian American political theory
This essay claims that Asian American political theory (AAPT) exists but needs to be more explicitly articulated. I contour AAPT as the practice and tradition of critical theoretical reflection upon Asian American politics. I then situate Claire Kim’s Dangerous Crossings (2015) and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) within this contour. I read Claire Kim’s approach to localized Asian American conflicts as a case of ethically and…
Not All are Aboard
This article interprets Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) as a political allegory. First, we compare Bong’s film to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), two contemporaneous films about ecological crises. We argue that Snowpiercer exposes the limits of technocratic environmentalisms that obscure the links between ecological degradation, capitalist development, and colonial domination. Second, we put Bong’s fil…
Working on the Boundaries of Political Science and Ethnic Studies
Convergence 2 A & Q A&Q Political Science and the Study of Global Asias It is certainly desirable for a social science to be rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is possible given the limitations inherent in the subject matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for policy is context- specific, culture- bound and non- generalizabl…
Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted
This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel (2005) as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the ex…
Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship
This essay examines how two Jefferson biographies represented the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship in the post–civil rights movement era: Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson (1974), a controversial publication that claimed that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other, and Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx (1996), one of the last mainstream biographies to deny that they had any children together. The story in both cases serves as an allegory of …
Contours of Asian American political theory
This essay claims that Asian American political theory (AAPT) exists but needs to be more explicitly articulated. I contour AAPT as the practice and tradition of critical theoretical reflection upon Asian American politics. I then situate Claire Kim’s Dangerous Crossings (2015) and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) within this contour. I read Claire Kim’s approach to localized Asian American conflicts as a case of ethically and…
Not All are Aboard
This article interprets Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) as a political allegory. First, we compare Bong’s film to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), two contemporaneous films about ecological crises. We argue that Snowpiercer exposes the limits of technocratic environmentalisms that obscure the links between ecological degradation, capitalist development, and colonial domination. Second, we put Bong’s fil…
On Claire Jean Kim’s Bitter Fruit
Working on the Boundaries of Political Science and Ethnic Studies
Convergence 2 A & Q A&Q Political Science and the Study of Global Asias It is certainly desirable for a social science to be rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is possible given the limitations inherent in the subject matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for policy is context- specific, culture- bound and non- generalizabl…
Bong Joon-ho’s Okja
This article explores the ethical and strategic thought of Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a film about a Korean adolescent and a genetically modified pig who save each other’s lives. In part one, I convene Bong Joon-ho and Frank Wilderson to explore how human supremacy and White supremacy work together. I argue that Okja connects super-pigs’ suffering to Black, Indigenous, Latino/a, and Asian suffering in the Americas, with the implication that non-White a…
Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted
This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel (2005) as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the ex…
Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship
This essay examines how two Jefferson biographies represented the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship in the post–civil rights movement era: Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson (1974), a controversial publication that claimed that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other, and Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx (1996), one of the last mainstream biographies to deny that they had any children together. The story in both cases serves as an allegory of …
Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship
This essay examines how two Jefferson biographies represented the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship in the post–civil rights movement era: Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson (1974), a controversial publication that claimed that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other, and Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx (1996), one of the last mainstream biographies to deny that they had any children together. The story in both cases serves as an allegory of …
Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted
This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel (2005) as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the ex…
Working on the Boundaries of Political Science and Ethnic Studies
Convergence 2 A & Q A&Q Political Science and the Study of Global Asias It is certainly desirable for a social science to be rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is possible given the limitations inherent in the subject matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for policy is context- specific, culture- bound and non- generalizabl…
Contours of Asian American political theory
This essay claims that Asian American political theory (AAPT) exists but needs to be more explicitly articulated. I contour AAPT as the practice and tradition of critical theoretical reflection upon Asian American politics. I then situate Claire Kim’s Dangerous Crossings (2015) and Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) within this contour. I read Claire Kim’s approach to localized Asian American conflicts as a case of ethically and…
Not All are Aboard
This article interprets Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) as a political allegory. First, we compare Bong’s film to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), two contemporaneous films about ecological crises. We argue that Snowpiercer exposes the limits of technocratic environmentalisms that obscure the links between ecological degradation, capitalist development, and colonial domination. Second, we put Bong’s fil…
Strange Bedfellows
Strange Bedfellows Fred Lee (bio) Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes. Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 208pp. $19.95 (pb). ISBN 9781517903596. In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes meet the challenge of interrogating a US right-wing racial politics still in the making. Their book aims to account f…
Neoliberal and authoritarian updates on U.S. white democracy
This essay synthesizes critical contract theory and radical democratic theory to contest U.S. authoritarianism and U.S. neoliberalism. Theoretically, I argue that radical democratic theory needs critical contract theory to expose the gendered and raced infrastructure of U.S. liberal democracy, while critical contract theory needs radical democratic theory to reframe race and gender dominance in terms of popular struggle. Historically, I argue tha…
Bong Joon-ho’s Okja
This article explores the ethical and strategic thought of Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, a film about a Korean adolescent and a genetically modified pig who save each other’s lives. In part one, I convene Bong Joon-ho and Frank Wilderson to explore how human supremacy and White supremacy work together. I argue that Okja connects super-pigs’ suffering to Black, Indigenous, Latino/a, and Asian suffering in the Americas, with the implication that non-White a…
Grace Lee Boggs on Chinese Political Thought and the Next American Revolution
This essay tracks how Grace Lee Boggs's lifelong engagements with Chinese political thought and US revolutionary praxis co-developed. We first show that Lee Boggs's concepts of roles and revolution drew on Confucian and Maoist philosophy; we next show that Lee Boggs later traced alternative, US-based genealogies of both concepts, just as she engaged more deeply with Asian American activism. Lee Boggs as a reader of Chinese thought tended towards …
On Claire Jean Kim’s Bitter Fruit
In Conversation with Kirstie in advance
As former graduate students of Kirstie McClure (1951–2023), we offer these remembrances of our time with her at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Our hope is to put Kirstie’s contributions to historically-inflected political theory into the fuller context of how she worked as a teacher, mentor, editor, and reader. For all of us, and for many years, Kirstie was among our most significant interlocutors. This kind of scholar, who is …
Soil Nutrients and Host Filtering Jointly Shape Distinct Endophytic Bacterial Assemblages in Tropical Island Shrubs Across the South China Sea
Archipelagos in extreme climates offer ideal systems for studying species adaptations to harsh environments. Previously, properties of island soil microbial communities such as structures, diversities, and functions were under the main attentions. Nevertheless, how island edaphic properties shape endophytic bacterial assemblages in native shrubs and how these bacterial communities differentiate across neighboring islands remain poorly understood.…
Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · History (6 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)