Ashley Aye Aye Dun will analyze Charmaine Craig’s 2017 novel Miss Burma and situate it within her current research, which studies how Burmese American literature confronts a slippage between ethnic authenticity and authoritarianism, as mediated through the body. Set during the Cold War, Miss Burma is a novelization of the life of Craig’s grandparents and mother, Louisa Benson Craig, a beauty queen of Sephardic Jewish and Karen ancestry. “Karen” broadly refers to a group of ethnic minority peoples in Burma/Myanmar who have long been persecuted by the country’s ethno-nationalist military regime. In the novel, Louisa is crowned the winner of the 1956 “Miss Burma” pageant; in later years, she becomes wanted by the military after joining a rebel political organization claiming to fight for Karen self-determination and freedom from ethnic Burman hegemony. Analyzing the novel alongside discussion of past and present events in Burmese/Myanmar history, this talk will think beyond positivist historicist readings of the novel as well as readings that tend towards perceiving the gendered, mixed-race body as a symbol of futurity with respect to a modern “Burmese” identity or subjecthood. Rather than see the novel merely as a case of woman “performing” nation or ethnic unity, this talk argues that Burmese-ness emerges in Miss Burma as a plurality of corporeal forms–“problem,” “parallel,” and “pretense”–instead of an essentialist, nationalistic truth of identity. Craig’s novel thus highlights the transnational pressures of authentic ethnic representation central to contemporary debates in both Asian American and Burma studies.

Ashley Aye Aye Dun is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “The Slash Between: In/authenticating Burmese American Literature,” and is also assistant editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. For years, Ashley has been involved with activist scholarship that brings attention to the persecution of minorities in Burma/Myanmar. She has helped provide intellectual spaces for the diaspora of Burma/Myanmar to explore the intricacies of their ethnic identities and how they continue to be impacted by the oppression of the Burmese/Myanmar regime. After the 2021 coup, she co-founded Baydar: a Burmese American online collective that serves as a platform for the diaspora of Burma/Myanmar to discuss political movements in the country as well as issues facing their own diasporic communities. Outside of academia, she enjoys writing fiction and is working on her first novel.