Huang and Mendoza’s introduction to the fourth volume of Asian American Literatures in Transition offers a refresher on Lisa Lowe’s formative critical work, Immigrant Acts (1996), published at the beginning of the time period covered in this volume. The authors reframe Lowe’s terms “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” within several watershed moments affecting Asian Americans and other groups in the USA: including the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), the September 11 attacks, the decriminalization of sodomy (2003), the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of these events exacerbated the vulnerability and precarity of some Asian American groups, the turbulence of the time fueled the Asian American literary imagination as writers in this period drew on more representational strategies for their literary experimentations than in previous periods. This volume covers precisely these tensions: artistic proliferations in the face of injustice, recognition in the face of social erasures, innovation in the face of neoliberal white supremacy’s monopoly on wealth and violence.

This essay argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore, and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious, or itinerant.

Silence permeates intimate spaces and intimate relationships. Such intimate silences shape social action, which can establish and maintain fundamental inequalities. The unsaid can be difficult to identify, especially in such contexts. However, by showing how we “tiptoe” around particular topics, a convincing case for the unsaid can be made. Using two case studies, we show how triangulation can be used to make the unsaid noticeable. The first case study is situated in post-apartheid South African paid domestic labor, where dyadic research was used to reveal silences around the topics of black sexuality, male visitors, and employer monitoring. These silences work to maintain privileged white control over intimate black activities. The second case study occurs in the undocumented student movement in the United States, where a comparison between public utterances and individual interviews revealed an absence of talk around intimate partner violence within the public discourses of undocumented students. This absence works to keep inequalities around ongoing domestic violence among undocumented immigrants invisible and unaddressed. In both cases, it was only through multimethod research that the absences and dissonances across the data sets were noticed, allowing for new understandings of the issues and their fundamental inequalities.