Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, and Spectrality in Ling Ma’s "Severance"

This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian novel "Severance" (2018). Emphasizing capacity for symbolic intervention in a era, I argue that text undermines tropes nation-building strategic employment minor feelings, opacity, spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places at odds unifying ideological responses to catastrophic upheaval pandemic. At intersection diasporic literature, constitutes narrative countersite defies U.S.-American ideologies linear progression, exceptionalism, transparency, unsettling foundational tenets national belonging. Drawing Kandice Chuh’s transnational rearticulations Asian studies, Cathy Park Hong’s "Minor Feelings", Édouard Glissant’s notion theorizations spectrality, demonstrate how offsets such Enlightenment master narratives counterimaginaries reconstitute world beyond teleological determinacy.