Kiran Saili
Biography
Kiran Saili is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. She holds a B.A. in philosophy from York University, an M.A. in women and gender studies from the University of Toronto, and is currently a graduate fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities for the 2022-2023 academic year. Her dissertation aims at a study of diaspora that is attentive to the disparate afterlives of U.S. empire at the same time that it focuses on the more ephemeral, non-cathartic feelings and affectual registers that shape such subjects’ shared apprehension of “diasporic life” in the first instance. Studying predominately late 20th– 21st-century feminist/queer Asian American and black/queer feminist theory and expressive cultures, her project examines the affective range of contemporary diasporic life that goes unaccounted for under conventional large-scale models such as resistance vs. assimilation and redemption vs. loss. Given how hastily outwardly “non-political” feelings and their oft-female/queer owners find themselves marshaled under such latter terms, this dissertation studies the relationship between affect, aesthetics, and politics to argue for a more careful study of the “weak” forms of feeling considered too passive to do political work.