This talk reflects on acts of writing in times of grief, disillusionment, and emerging fascism. Christopher B. Patterson will discuss their newly published book, Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination, as an example of “brown craft” authorship that seeks solidarity through undisciplined critical methods, merging academic writing with fiction, poetry, and interactive video games. Patterson considers the unique stages of their own creative and academic work through themes of mixed brownness: neurodivergence, queerness, Filipinx American colonial history, and creative resistance. These means of forming “brown crafts” have the potential to refuse narratives of creative acts themselves as a resolution to imperial oppression, directing attention instead to the forms of solidarity, action, and radical imaginings that such works make possible.
Christopher B. Patterson is Professor of The Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia. Their research focuses on literature, video games, and new media through the lens of transpacific empire studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. They are the award-winning author of seven books, which include the prose-poetry collection Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press, 2023), the essay collection Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), and the academic book Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2026). They are the co-editor of two anthologies published in 2024: Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington Press), and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press), and the lead designer of the video game Stamped: an anti-travel game, an adaptation of their first novel. They write creative work under their matrilineal name Kawika Guillermo, and they have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver Canada.
Jasmine Zou
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