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Reorienting Asian America: racial feeling in a multicultural era

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Reorienting Asian America: racial feeling in a multicultural era

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REORIENTING ASIAN AMERICA: RACIAL FEELING IN A
MULTICULTURAL ERA

by

Emily Raymundo

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2017

Copyright 2017 Emily K.A. Raymundo

For my uncle, Fred Raymundo
1951-1997

Table of Contents
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................. I
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................... III
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................1
ONE
Chop Suey: Adapting Asian America in Flower Drum Song .............................................................25
TWO
The End of Whiteness and the Rise of Multicultural Asian America in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft ....73
THREE
Or Something, Or Something: Feeling Colorblindness in Tao Lin’s Taipei ...................................101
FOUR
The Citizen, the Terrorist, and the Monster: John Yoo’s “Torture Memos” ................................131
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................168
NOTES ......................................................................................................................................................175

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………190

i

Abstract

Reorienting Asian America: Racial Feeling in a Multicultural Era argues that the cultural
contradictions of multiculturalism, colorblindness, and global capitalism have caused an
unprecedented shift in the distribution of gendered racial privilege in the U.S. This shift has
revealed the need for scholars to adapt how we conceptualize race and racial categories, which
are always dynamic and in flux. I develop “racial feeling” as an affective method through which
to read structures of racial formation emergent in the cultural productions of the present
alongside those structures that have already crystallized into acknowledged fact. In particular, I
argue that the core tropes and definitions of Asian American culture cohered by Asian American
Studies only partially capture—and sometimes actively obscure—the complex meaning and
meaning-making capacities of Asian America, both historically and in the present.
In the first section of the dissertation, I trace the historical emergence of Asian American
Studies literary methods, arguing that they are embedded both in demographics that no longer
reflect current Asian American populations, and a specific politics of revolt and difference that
no longer translate in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. I do this in Chapter 1 by reading
the history and development of Flower Drum Song—from a 1958 novel to a 2002 Broadway
revival—in the context of Asian American Studies’ institutionalization. In the second part of the
dissertation, I argue that contemporary political and economic catalysts—including the War on
Terror, the rise of state-sponsored capital in Asia, and the global spread of neoliberal
multiculturalism—have fundamentally shifted the meaning, and meaning-making capacities, of
“Asian America”—and therefore, the methods we use to capture and diagnose that meaning must

ii
also transform. The second and third chapters read Chang-rae Lee’s 2004 novel, Aloft, and Tao
Lin’s 2013 novel, Taipei, in order to diagnose the ways in which contemporary Asian American
literature simultaneously fulfills and exceeds the expectations and assumptions encoded in Asian
American literary reading practices. Throughout these chapters, I argue that these novels
generate multicultural and flexible visions of Asian American identity, which challenge settled
assumptions built into the very language of Asian American racial formation and feeling.
Finally, Chapter Four, “Enemy Combatants,” reads the “Torture Memos,” a series of legal
memos written by Korean American lawyer John Yoo for George W. Bush’s cabinet to justify
indefinite detention and torture at the start of the War on Terror, as intellectually parallel to
Asian American Studies. That is, through archival research on Yoo’s education at Harvard and
close readings of the memos, I argue that the memos share intellectual grounds with the field of
Asian American Studies, and even deploy similar strategies of contradiction, nonresolution and
difference to do their racial work. That Yoo does so to such radically different political aims than
Asian American Studies unsettles programmatic assumptions in the field about its own key
tropes.
Reading this diverse archive of Asian American cultural production—including drama,
literature, and legal discourse—I argue that these cultural productions should not be disavowed;
instead, they should be read as part of, or even central to, Asian American culture. Racial feeling,
as a method, is one way that is one way Asian American Studies can reorient in order to better
account for the meaning and function of Asian American culture as it transforms in the shadow
of global capital and neoliberal multiculturalism. More broadly, racial feeling allows scholars to
unearth the embryonic social cleavages and procedures we do not yet—but might soon—call
“race” as it unfolds throughout the 21st century.

iii
Acknowledgements

As a scholar of affect, I begin the project of thanking those who helped this project see
the light knowing that words can only ever gesture to, and never fully capture, what we call
emotions. The words “thanks to” and “gratitude for” are signposts, and insufficient ones at that,
for a lifetime of support and a very deep well of feelings.
That being said, thanks are in order. The Graduate School, the American Studies and
Ethnicity Department, and the Gender Studies department at the University of Southern
California have supported me throughout my time in graduate school. Special thanks are due to
Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, Sonia Rodriguez, and Jeanne Weiss for their constant help and
support, from my first day in the program to my last. I also wish to acknowledge Phillips
Academy at Andover for employing me during the summers and keeping me out of debt.
I have had the pleasure and honor of working with incredible scholars, both at USC and
outside of it, who took the time to comment on, challenge, and sharpen my work. Without
Timothy Billings, Rachael Joo, and Leif Sorensen, I would never have gone to graduate school in
the first place. I also wish to acknowledge the help and support from Laura Pulido, Laura Hyun-
Yi Kang, David Eng, and Chandan Reddy, whose input foundationally shaped many of these
chapters. I also wish to thank my committee, whose support has never been anything less than
generous and whose criticism has always been productive: Jack Halberstam, John Carlos Rowe,
Nayan Shah, and Karen Tongson. Finally, my advisor and chair, Viet Thanh Nguyen, has read
every draft and responded to every annoying last minute email. The thanks due to him are
especially insufficient to capture the amount of labor and time he has spent supporting me.
Academic work is nothing without a deep network of colleagues, interlocutors, and
friends; I have been lucky to find all three, often in the same person. Special thanks to my first
year cohort: Jessica Lovaas, Sophia Azeb, Stephanie Sparling-Williams, Floridalma Boj-Lopez,
Jennifer Tran, Colby Lenz, and Sergio Muñoz-Bata; to my 700 cohort, Joshua Mitchell and
Cecilia Caballero; and to my Filipino Studies Group: Nic John Ramos, Joe Bernardo, Precious
Singson, Mark Pangilinan, Mark John Sanchez, James Zarzadiaz, and Jen Nazareno. I also wish
to acknowledge Nathan Martinez Pogar, Gray Fisher, Chris Jones, David Fox, Jeff Domina,
Sriya Srestha, Celeste Menchaca, Crystal Baik, Jennifer DeClue, Ryan Fukumori, Sarah Fong,
Rosanne Sia, Sabrina Howard, Bekah Park, Lisa Lee, and Christopher Chien, for their guidance,
encouragement, and friendship.
Without the support of friends close enough to share hotel beds, cry, and escape with, this
dissertation would never have been written. Thank to Jessica Lovaas, for long hikes and hard
hugs; to Nic John Ramos and Jenny Hoang, eternal Heathers; to Joshua Mitchell, for movie
dates; to Umayyah Cable, boxing partner for life; to Jih-Fei Cheng, actual role model; to Sophia
Azeb and Viola Lasmana, smore-makers and partners in crime; to Becca Wear, forever a kindred
spirit; to Pat Rielly and Danny Crow, for dry wit and long Skype calls; to Tasha Hawthorne, for
always providing safe harbor; and to Grace Taylor, life partner.
Finally, of course, my family has made me who I am. Love always and so much gratitude
to Marie Burnham and Bienvenida Raymundo, my grandmothers, who I hope would be proud of
me; my father, Henry Raymundo, from whom I learned to pursue creative visions; and my
mother, Jane Burnham, who taught me that women can and should be ambitious and self-
confident. I would be super lame without Joanna Raymundo, my sister, to make me cooler and
funnier and braver at every turn.

iv
My uncle Fred Raymundo was murdered 20 years ago. His loss will always be with me,
reminding me of the multiplicity of violences meted out to the vulnerable. But my nephew, little
MJ, was born in the last months of this project. He is very new, and beautiful, and with him, the
world feels tender.

1

Introduction

During one of his drug-fueld night wanderings through Manhattan, Paul, the Taiwanese
American protagonist of Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei, attends an Asian American Writers’
Workshop fundraiser, “at which a saxophone player had ranted about identity politics until
people, for maybe six minutes, actually began booing.”
1

In Chang-rae Lee’s 2004 novel, Aloft, the white protagonist, Jerry, ruminates on the term
“Asian American” as it applies to his mixed-race daughter and her Korean American husband,
both academics: “I’m to say ‘Asian-American,’ partly because they always do, and not only
because my usage of the old standby ‘Oriental’ offends them on many personal and theoretical
levels […] I must admit I don’t quite yet appreciate what the fuss is about, but I’ve realized
words matter inordinately to Theresa and Paul, and far beyond any point I wish to take a stand
on.”
2

And in 1987, John Yoo, then a Harvard undergraduate writing for the Harvard Crimson,
complained: “I once had a conversation with a Korean girl who verbally assaulted me for
‘repudiating’ my heritage because I had chosen to write for a newspaper, not major in math or
science, and not attend Korean student meetings. In a sense she was right, because those students
who choose to pursue a more mainstream four years here end up leaving much of their ethnic
heritage behind.”
3

This dissertation explores the assumptions, ambivalences, and even antagonisms that
underpin these three writers’ invocation of Asian American as an identity category and

2
ideological standpoint. In particular, each of these men—all subjects of this dissertation—
articulate Asian American identification as necessarily embodying a specific political
orientation: for Lin, the nebulous but negative “identity politics”; for Lee, the politics of those to
whom “words matter inordinately,” and who are easily offended by others’ seemingly innocent
usage of politically incorrect labels; and for Yoo, a dogmatic, prescriptive understanding of
ethnic identity that disbars certain “mainstream” activities from being considered authentic.
While all three writers are aware that the term “Asian American” will be applied to themselves
and their cultural work, they all take the trouble to distance themselves from a pointedly
academic and political understanding of the label.
These understandings of Asian American identity are different from, yet entangled with,
the ways in which Asian American Studies articulates “Asian America.” Reorienting Asian
America: Racial Feeling in a Multicultural Era thus assesses the capacity of contemporary Asian
American Studies, particularly literary studies, methods to fully capture the political, economic,
and social diversity of the imagined community called “Asian America.” Reading a diverse
archive of cultural productions—from Flower Drum Song to the “Torture Memos”—I develop
“racial feeling” as an affective method that seeks to register present and ongoing structures of
feeling that have not yet crystallized, and do not fit neatly into existing patterns of racial, gender,
and class difference. Particularly in light of neoliberal multiculturalism’s capacity for absorbing,
containing, and making use of those very differences, I argue that racial feeling is one way Asian
American Studies can reorient in order to better account for the meaning and function of Asian
American culture as it articulates alongside and within the racial styles, formations, and feelings
of neoliberal multiculturalism.

3
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES AS ARCHIVE
The history of Asian American Studies is one that has been told and retold, rehearsed and
rehashed, in many Asian American Studies texts. Perhaps because of the inherently fuzzy nature
of the term “Asian American”—the “fatally unstable” conjunction of “Asian,” a racial term that
seeks to encompass an almost uncountable number of ethnicities, nationalities, cultures,
languages, religions, and histories, and “American,” a designation of nationality that fails to
adequately resolve or obscure the ways in which “Asians” have been contradictorily excluded
from and incorporated into the American nation throughout its history
4
—Asian American
Studies is a deeply self-reflexive field. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an Asian
American Studies text that does not, at some point, gesture either to the relative inadequacy of
“Asian American” to fully encapsulate the diversity of populations gathered under its name or to
the fact that it is not immediately or “primordially” obvious to whom or what “Asian America”
refers.
5
Early practitioners of the field, like Elaine Kim, grappled with the political utility of the
term, arguing that its potential as a collective designation that could incite political action
superseded its troubling facets. Rigorous, public debates flared in the field around who, and
what, could be considered “authentically” part of Asian America.
6
By the 2000s, however,
Asian American Studies was more likely to be deployed as a “theory,” a “critique,” a
“hermeneutic,” or an “analytic” than as a discretely bounded field and subject.
7

The transition from, as Christopher Lee puts it, an “essentialist” Asian American Studies to
an “anti-essentialist” one is marked by two events in the 1990s: first, the release of Lisa Lowe’s
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics in 1994, a text whose monumental
influence over the field of Asian American Studies and the broader field of ethnic studies cannot
be overstated; and second, the infamous Blu’s Hanging controversy at the 1998 Association for

4
Asian American Studies.
8
In Immigrant Acts, Lowe argues that Asian American Studies ought to
stop attempting to resolve the problem of “Asian America” by defining it once and for all;
instead, the field should prioritize “heterogeneity, hybridity, and difference,” recognizing that
Asian America was both a politically necessary collectivity and always in danger of replicating
the structures of exclusion and oppression that the collectivity seeks to dismantle. Rather than
obeying the liberal humanist imperative to resolve the term into coherence and wholeness, Lowe
argues that Asian American Studies ought to emphasize theoretical models of fragmentation and
heterogeneity.
This theoretical call to centralize the differences inherent in “Asian America” was put to
the test four years later, when Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s controversial novel, Blu’s Hanging, was
awarded a prize at the Association for Asian American Studies. The novel, set in Hawaii like
much of Yamanaka’s work, drew fire for its portrayal of Filipinos in Hawaii, and in particular,
for the character of Uncle Paolo, a young Filipino man who molests his nieces and the title
character, Blu. Critics argued that Uncle Paolo drew on pervasive racial stereotypes that figure
Filipino men as simultaneously hypersexualized and mentally underdeveloped; awarding the
prize to the Yamanaka, an ethnically Japanese American born in Hawaii, was emblematic of the
field’s prioritization of Chinese and Japanese Americans over more marginalized groups, like
Filipino Americans and Southeast Asian Americans. In turn, Yamanaka’s supporters, largely
writers themselves, argued for creative license and freedom of speech. The annual conference
following the announcement of the prize has been described as “highly charged and even
apocalyptic”; when the prize itself was awarded, a large number of association members,
wearing black armbands, stood and turned their backs to the stage. Following the conference, the

5
board of directors agreed to rescind the award and then resigned en masse for fear of legal
reprisal.
9

A friend and fellow scholar, Jenny Hoang, recently wondered if, almost twenty years later,
it is yet possible to narrate the field of Asian American Studies without referencing the 1998
conference. Of course, it is possible, yet I return to the Blu’s Hanging controversy because it
indexes a crisis in the field that was never actually resolved. That is, at least in the field of Asian
American cultural studies, the material question of what the term means, to whom it applies, and
how the term functions has largely been sidestepped. Instead, the field has responded to Lowe’s
call by figuring Asian American Studies as a series of related questions and analytics—for
Kandice Chuh, “a subjectless discourse”
10
—that robustly interrogates the relationships between
citizenship, militarism, migration, labor, identity, and race. In other words, to invoke Asian
American Studies is to invoke an analytic that centralizes the question of how racial and ethnic
identities and categories are produced—by institutions, by states, by the social; and, additionally,
why or to what effect these identities and categories are produced.
11
And, as Mark Chiang
explores, these questions are oriented towards producing, cataloguing, or at least imagining
“resistance” and “justice”—that is, resistance to the forces of state, capital, and society that
produce racial categories as sites of oppression, and justice for those who have been oppressed.
12

Reorienting Asian America takes up these questions, and I use the work of Asian American
Studies theorists to hone my own inquiry into how the racial and ethnic category “Asian
American” is being produced. Yet I also want to return to one of the foundational questions of
the Blu’s controversy: what does the term “Asian American” mean—how does it become
meaningful, and what meanings does it produce? To whom does it apply, and when, and why?
That is, this dissertation centers the term “Asian American” as a productive, rather than

6
descriptive, designation. Following Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Mark Chiang, Colleen Lye, and others,
I argue that “Asian America,” rather than being a discrete and knowable entity—an object—is
instead a discursive construction that appears under certain conditions to do cultural work: as an
ideological “racial form” that coheres national and global preoccupations, anxieties, and desires;
as a disciplinary figure that inscribes subjects and prescribes behavior; and as a strategy for
capital accumulation, either for those to whom the term adheres or for those to whom the term
does not (and sometimes both).
13

To do so, I read Asian American Studies not just as theory but as itself an archive, one that
simultaneously serves as a repository for the various historical moments that “Asian America”
has emerged into visibility and itself continuously produces Asian America and invests it with
meaning. On the one hand, I examine the ways in which the reiteration of the term Asian
American throughout the field’s history has had, despite an emphasis on difference and
heterogeneity, the unintentional effect of producing Asian America as a coherent and knowable
subject. Laura Hyun Yi Kang and Roderick Ferguson have both argued that interdisciplinary
departments, like Women’s and Gender Studies and ethnic studies, are often inadvertently
“complicit with disciplinary power’s penchant for surveillance, documentation, and
categorization.”
14
Thus Asian American Studies, under the aegis of resisting universalizing
narratives that center whiteness, produces proliferating accounts of Asian American subjects,
bodies, experiences, cultural products, texts, and lives that “are more often bound up with, not
liberated from, disciplinary regimes of codification and documentation.”
15
In part because that
documentary practice now entails the usage of the term Asian American without a rigorous
examination of the implications of that term, I argue throughout the dissertation that slippages in
meaning and usage, produced not in one text but through reiteration and aggregation, have

7
resulted in a narrowing of interpretative mechanisms and object selection that does not fully
capture the reality of Asian American cultural production or experience. Indeed, I argue that not
only do these narrowed mechanisms produce a limited understanding of the contemporary
meaning and function of Asian America, but, on occasion, they actively obscure alternative
understandings or interpretations.
That is, throughout the dissertation, I trace the ways in which the field’s turn to
fragmentation, nonresolution, and disorientation as analytical modes that can achieve, or at least
imagine, the political aims of the field tend to limit the field to examining “Asian American
culture” that can, at its base, be read as working towards those same political aims. Viet Thanh
Nguyen refers to this as an “ideological rigidity,” in which partially because of Asian American
critics’ “professional histories, political priorities, and institutional locations,” “Asian American
intellectuals as a whole have tended to see Asian America as a place of resistance and have not
been capable of articulating a theoretical framework that can address Asian America’s
ideological diversity and contradictions.”
16
That is, because Asian American critics themselves
prioritize resistance to the forces of state, nation, and capital (among other things), they tend to
both select cultural texts that can be interpreted as reflecting those priorities, and also deploy
interpretive mechanisms that assure such a reading even when other readings are possible.
I also explore the racial effects of Asian American Studies beyond the closed circuit of
academic intellectual production. Alongside Laura Hyun Yi Kang and Rod Ferguson, Jodi
Melamed has argued that the university has been an important site for generating racial
knowledges and racial meanings, particularly in the era of what Melamed calls neoliberal
multiculturalism (explored in more depth below). That is, in part because civil rights demands
for equal representation under the law were accompanied by demands for equal representation in

8
higher education, and specifically for the creation of African American, Latino, Asian American
and ethnic studies departments broadly, the university has become a key location for the
management and mediation of those civil rights demands and their afterlives. The fictive nature
of Asian American as an identity marker means that it is largely produced by and within
institutional sites, and, in particular, the university. That is, many people who claim the label
“Asian American” (as opposed to ethnically/nationally specific labels, like Chinese American,
etc.) do so only when, and because, they have come into contact with the Asian American
apparatus enabled and installed in universities—not just Asian American studies, but Asian
American student activity groups, Asian American programming, and/or diversity initiatives that
“hail” them as Asian Americans.
17
This is particularly true of contemporary Asian American
writers, who are also much more likely to have gone through M.F.A. programs that further
shuttle them towards identifying as Asian American writers and participating in Asian American
creative spaces, like the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman, two organizations
dedicated to workshopping, funding, promoting, and occasionally publishing Asian American
writing.
18
Thus Asian American Studies is deeply imbricated in the production of Asian
American identity and Asian American culture even beyond the actual bounds of the university.
The porousness between Asian American cultural production and Asian American
academic production has facilitated a familiarity with the critical practices and expectation of
Asian American Studies among Asian American writers. As I argue in the first three chapters,
David Henry Hwang, Chang-rae Lee, and Tao Lin—three writers whose work I examine in
detail—are all highly cognizant of the fact that their work will be labeled “Asian American,”
both by white critics and by Asian American critics. In different ways, each author playfully
acknowledges, accommodates, transforms, and yes, resists the schema of expectations and

9
interpretive mechanisms they know will be brought to bear upon their work by Asian American
critics. This interplay between cultural texts and the field of Asian American Studies, I argue,
produces multiple visions of Asian America; some that can be, and indeed are intended to be,
read by the current strictures of Asian American studies; and some that, utilizing this knowledge,
exceed or evade interpretation by Asian American Studies.
As I elaborate in Chapters 2 and 4, a familiarity with the core concepts and languages of
Asian American Studies, or even ethnic studies broadly, does not necessarily lead to an
alignment with the politics of the field. That is, just because a writer (or, in the case of Chapter 4,
a lawyer) can competently traffic in or reproduce the language and concepts of the field does not
mean they do so in service of a common political goal—yet Asian American Studies’
interpretive mechanisms, which skew ideologically towards resistance and social justice, often
miss or obscure those ideological distinctions. In fact, as I argue in Chapter 4 in depth, there is
nothing inherently political about disorganization, fragmentation, contradiction and
nonresolution, either as modes of analysis or as cultural strategies. Indeed, those very strategies
are the ones upon which neoliberal multiculturalism depends to do its own racial work.

ASIAN AMERICA AND NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM
As I explore in more detail in Chapter 1, Asian American Studies is usually pegged as
originating in the student protest movements of 1968. The activists, students, and artists leading
the movement were primarily at least second generation immigrants, and almost exclusively of
Chinese and Japanese origin. They drew on their shared experiences of exclusion and alienation
to formulate a pan-ethnic collectivity, and formed the field of Asian American Studies around
these two central premises. Yet even as Asian American Studies was consolidating within elite

10
institutions and emerging as a legible, legitimate cultural formation, changes to U.S. immigration
law were radically reshaping the class, national, and ethnic characteristics of the Asian American
population. Where once Japanese and Chinese American communities were relatively
homogenous in their characteristics—both communities having been present in the U.S. since the
1800s, and both having experienced abrupt changes to their legal status in the U.S. that prevented
their economic or social flourishing for generations—the flow of Asian immigrants to the U.S.
after the 1965 Immigration Act ended Asian exclusion was characterized by huge class striations
and ever-increasing heterogeneity. Lowe’s formulation of heterogeneity, hybridity, and
multiplicity was in part a response to the fact that, by 1996, it was undeniable that Asian
America was much more heterogenous than it had been at the inception of the field, and would
only continue to diversify.
The story of changing Asian American demographics and their effect on the field of Asian
American Studies is but one piece of a very large puzzle, which Jodi Melamed and Grace Hong,
among others, call neoliberal multiculturalism.
19
Neoliberal multiculturalism is both a cultural
and economic ideology and a “global racial formation,” one that emerged in response to first, the
“racial break” instantiated by the Civil Rights movement, in which the U.S. state moved from
governing through overt white supremacy to governing through formal racial equality, and,
second, the globalization of capital.
20
At its heart, neoliberal multiculturalism is an “official
antiracism” that nonetheless depends on racial difference in order to do its economic and
institutional work.
21
Thus neoliberal multiculturalism consists of a number of technologies and
governance tactics that function to stabilize this global racial formation, including 1) substituting
“aesthetic and cultural representation” for political representation, so that it is now common
sense that equalizing cultural representation (e.g., equalizing the number of Asian American

11
actors in Hollywood films) will translate into equalized political and economic conditions;
22
2)
selectively incorporating elite individuals from oppressed classes or peoples into visible
positions of power based on their worth within “neoliberal circuits of value,” e.g. their ability to
prove themselves “flexible,” “rational,” “feminist,” and “law-abiding,”;
23
3) commodifying and
proliferating social identities, including racial, gender, sexual, and sub-cultural identities, in
order to expand economic markets and guarantee full participation in those markets;
24
4)
embedding market rationality into analytics of inequality, so that an individual’s success or
failure (economic, social, physical, etc.) is seen not as a result of structural inequities or
impediments, but as a result of their capacity to behave as a rational economic subject by
investing their resources properly, maximizing their returns, and managing their needs by
consuming commodities; and 5) promoting the previous four technologies as the result of a
successful state-led campaign to end racism (and, similarly, misogyny and homophobia) that
then justifies the U.S.’s military and economic intervention into states and governments deemed
insufficiently multicultural, feminist, gay-friendly, etc.
25
The net effect of these strategies is that
older racial formations, which emerged in relation to an overtly white supremacist U.S. state, are
not only not resolved by neoliberal multiculturalism, but in fact stabilized and, often,
exacerbated. At the same time, new racial cleavages and formations are emergent in relation to
neoliberal multiculturalism, premised on its new schema of worth and dignity, which both
overlay older formations and cut new schisms through racialized populations.
Neoliberal multiculturalism then depends on heterogeneity, fragmentation, and the
proliferation of difference in order to continuously expand its reach and perfects its strategies of
governance. It is not a coincidence that, as I observed above, neoliberal multiculturalism and
Asian American Studies share an investment in logics of differentiation and multiplicity.
26

12
Instead, I argue throughout the dissertation that the two formations are foundationally enmeshed,
such that the economic and political relationship between “Asia” and America fundamentally
shaped the structures of neoliberal multiculturalism, and the racializing processes of neoliberal
multiculturalism were practiced and perfected on Asian Americans. Asian American Studies is
thus an archive of the history of the interrelationship between the two formations, while also
being embedded in and shaping their intertwining.
On the one hand, that is, the U.S.’s economic and political relationship to the Asian region
has become emblematic of neoliberalism’s successes and failures. The emergence of the U.S.’s
global financial empire, a precondition of global neoliberalism, was developed and refined in the
Asian region. That is, after World War II, the U.S. installed itself as the arbiter of global
financial relations by financing the rebuilding of Germany, France, Britain, and Japan. Yet as
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue, where in Europe the U.S. deployed its money and banking
services with the aim of rebuilding fully developed states that could function independently from
the U.S., it instead sought to develop Japan while preserving its reliance on U.S. capital and
resources, making its markets accessible to U.S. investors, and investing its own resources in
manufacturing and exporting goods for U.S.-based multinational corporations.
27
Following
subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam, and throughout the Cold War with Russia and China, the
U.S. continued and expanded the practice of financing development in exchange for market
access, financial control, and an agreement to democratize and repudiate communism throughout
the Asian region, most notably in South Korea. Partially in response to the economic growth
facilitated by these strategies, China began to liberalize its markets in 1978—a shift so
significant that, for David Harvey, it ranks as as essential as the elections of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher in the global ascendancy of neoliberalism as an economic regime.
28
The

13
success of these financial strategies were embodied, in the 1990s, by the “Four Tigers”—
Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea—whose spectacular economic growth was
dubbed “the Asian miracle.”
29
President Barack Obama—whose election signals, for many, the
apex of neoliberal multiculturalism—instantiated a “pivot to Asia” as his signature foreign
policy, signaling an intention to cultivate closer diplomatic and economic ties with the region as
a check on China’s spreading power. Alongside this foreign policy pivot, Obama negotiated the
Transpacific Partnership Agreement in his last years in office, a NAFTA-style multilateral trade
deal with twelve Pacific Rim nations, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New
Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Japan.
Yet Asia has also come to embody the failures of globalization and neoliberalism in the
American imagination. The “Asian miracle,” after all, was swiftly followed by the “Asian crisis”
of 1997, in which the speculative bubble created by the U.S.’s and Europe’s rush to invest in
Asia was burst by the collapse of Thailand’s market. The subsequent panicked flight of investors
led to economic slumps in South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia, and
the Philippines.
30
This crisis was an early warning sign of the inherent instability of this global
financial regime, which would hit the U.S. and Europe fully in 2008 (notably, Laura Kang points
out, the 2008 crisis has been labelled a truly “global” financial crisis, as opposed to the earlier
“Asian” crisis). And in the 2016 presidential election cycle, Obama’s pivot to Asia became a
point of ridicule for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who repeatedly insinuated that Obama
had been too soft on China and North Korea. More damningly, both Donald Trump and Hilary
Clinton, the Democratic candidate and Obama’s anointed successor, turned on the TPP, which in
both campaigns came to symbolize a global financial schema that was draining the U.S.’s
resources and leaving Americans “at home” broke and jobless. After his election, President

14
Trump officially abandoned the TPP on his first day in office, declaring instead an “America
first” economic policy that deprioritized America’s role as an arbiter of global finance.
31
Thus,
even as neoliberal multiculturalism may be declining in ideological power, the relationship
between America and Asia remains a powerful symbol of both its successes and failures.
On the other hand, the “model minority” formation was developed on and through Asian
Americans in the domestic space of the U.S., a practice which became central to
multiculturalism’s racializing technologies. First used in a 1966 New York Times article titled
“Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” the “model minority” is a pervasive figure, which
has all but eclipsed all other figurations of Asian Americans in mainstream American
imaginaries.
32
Its cultural reach has only intensified as immigration policies continue to
selectively funnel professional, educated, upper-class Asian immigrants into upper-echelon
economic sectors like the tech industry.
33
As Asian American Studies has explored at length,
model minority discourse is primarily a disciplinary mechanism, which selectively rewards
Asian Americans for their “good behavior” (e.g., economic success, lack of political agitation)
and implicitly castigates other minorities, specifically African Americans and Latina/o
Americans, for their putative failure to achieve the same yardsticks of success. This functions to
keep Asian Americans docile and “in their place,” while the high rates of Asian Americans in
elite institutions and upper economic echelons also serves as a bulwark against accusations of
institutional or structural racism.
34
Neoliberal multiculturalism maximizes and perfects this logic
by cultivating specific elite individuals of color, who can behave properly according to a
neoliberal matrix of rationality, and installing them in visible positions of power as both
aspirational and disciplinary figures for their fellow minorities.

15
Asian American Studies has done an exacting and rigorous job of dismantling the model
minority stereotype. Yet, as Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, the field has done so largely by
highlighting and prioritizing the “bad subjects” of Asian America—that is, those who buck the
model minority stereotype and/or are fundamentally barred from assuming the label at all due to
their class, ethnic, gender, sexual, or cultural identities.
35
This has the effect of eliding the
material reality of the model minority, which is that certain populations of Asian Americans—
though certainly not all—do actually exceed white people in the realms of educational attainment
and financial success.
Nguyen suggests that, rather than emphasizing a rigid “badness” in our interpretive
mechanisms and object choices, Asian American critics need to recognize the flexibility
deployed by Asian American authors to be both “good” and “bad”—or accommodating and
resisting—in order to survive, physically and psychically. Indeed, the flexibility to evade,
survive, and sometimes acquiesce to disciplinary power is another signature strategy of
neoliberal multiculturalism. Yet the writers I examine in this dissertation do not merely flexibly
occupy good and bad positions, or accommodating and resisting positions, relative to the
racializing structures of neoliberal multiculturalism. Rather, they flexibly deploy the language
and forms of Asian American Studies, which are always-already coded as the language and
forms of resistance, in order to access multicultural racial schema that reward their Asian
American identities and bodies with privilege and capital while displacing the burdens of
racialization onto other Asian American identities and bodies.
Thus, while the centrality of Asian/American political and economic relationships to
discourses of globalization sustains the alien/citizen dynamic that first shaped Asian American
subjectivity, the model minority technologies cultivated on and sometimes by Asian American

16
subjects generates new racialized dynamics and cleavages. Yet the current reading practices of
Asian American Studies have difficulty taking these layered shifts in racial formation, and in the
meaning of Asian America, into account.

RACIAL FEELING AS METHOD
Racial feeling builds on a foundational insight of scholarship on racial formation; namely,
that race, as a category of social difference, is always dynamic and in flux. As I argue above, the
reading practices developed by Asian American literary studies, by emphasizing theoretical
visions heterogeneity and multiplicity, often unintentionally freeze “Asian America” as a known
and coherent entity. That is, deploying “Asian American” as an analytic and a set of questions
has the effect of obscuring the fact that the Asian America cohered by Asian American Studies
has a specific institutional and socioeconomic history that constrains and defines its meaning as a
term. Racial feeling, as a reading practice, offers one way of keeping that version of Asian
America in view while being attuned to other versions and visions of Asian America, formed
within different state and social formations, which may not yet be coherent or fully visible but
are nonetheless present. Racial feeling elucidates the ways in which that presence is felt in a text,
by a character or by a reader, and argues that those feelings, even those which have not yet taken
the shape in language, nonetheless have racial effects. In other words, I offer racial feeling as a
method capable of registering both the transformations in race and racial meanings wrought by
neoliberalism and the ways in which older racial violences and meanings linger on.
What does race feel like? This question threatens to teeter over into essentialist notions of
race and racialized bodies, but I offer “racial feeling” as a method or critical reading practice that
draws on the insights of affect theory, phenomenology, and cultural and media studies, and

17
embodies as method the suspicion of wholeness and knowability espoused by Asian American
and queer of color critique alike. Thus, racial feeling is necessarily a “weak” theory, as José
Esteban Muñoz puts it, one that “do[es] not position [itself] in a masterful, totalizing fashion.”
36

That is, racial feeling as method does not seek to prescriptively “stick” affects to certain bodies
according to their race or other social position, nor do I argue that race always feels a certain way
or always summons the same affects in the same arrangements. Indeed, racial feeling does not
take for granted which bodies are racialized in which ways in advance of the description of the
scene. Just as Nikhil Singh argues that social relations are not caused by a priori racial realities,
but rather “produced in advance of stable orders of racial reference and in contexts in which
fields of racial reference are actively destabilized,”
37
the reading practice of racial feeling
accounts for the sedimented history of racialized and gendered affects while at the same time
remaining attentive to the ways in which social relations and bodily feelings produce, as much as
are produced by, uneven racial arrangements and hierarchies.
I use “feeling” as a capacious term, designed to invoke both a generalized structure of
nonconscious and emergent social processes that cluster under the term and a specific literature
produced by queer and queer of color critics on the social function of feelings. That is, building
on Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling,” racial feeling as a reading practice assumes that
race, as a social form and relation, is multitudinous, neither entirely conscious nor reducible to
unchanging and unconscious fact.
38
As more fully articulated and recognized structures and
styles shape the social in ways both conscious and nonconscious, they are simultaneously shaped
by embryonic structures of feeling that have not yet found more stable form—and, eventually,
transformed or supplanted. To trace any social order of the present, then, requires a method
attuned to both the conscious and the nonconscious, the embryonic and the articulated together,

18
as they contradict, contest, confirm, and convene throughout the lived texture of the everyday.
Thus, even when race appears in a text as stable (e.g., one character is Asian American, and one
character is white), racial feeling investigates how those categories are given meaning within the
social; what relationships—differences, similarities, cleavages, connections, orientations—
inform and sustain those categories; and whether those meanings and relationships shift
throughout the text or over time even if the language used to describe them does not.
“Feeling” designates a broad category of social experiences and analytics, and I explore a
range of them throughout my chapters. Classically, “affect” and “emotion” are used as terms to
demarcate the difference between the physiological aspect of feelings (“affect”—e.g., the racing
pulse that accompanies anger or arousal) and the psychological aspect (“emotion”), where
“feeling” is a “capacious term that connotes both physiological […] and psychological states.”
39

Thus feeling encompasses the feedback loop between bodily affects—bodily sensations; bodies’
positions in space; bodies’ relationships to objects—and the conscious emotions, experiences,
and identifications that produce, are produced by, and are deployed to make sense of those
bodily affects. In particular, I explore four specific analytics that cluster under the term “feeling”:
Temporal drag. In chapter 1, I draw on theories of queer temporality to examine how an
adapted text drags past meanings and feelings into the present. By examining a text, Flower
Drum Song, in three different iterations that move through the 20
th
and 21
st
century, I show how
the linear movement of reproductive time, encapsulated in the act of adaptation, is always beset
and burdened by a past that is neither fully present and resolvable nor completely banished from
view. Thus, the racial meanings and feelings congealed under the sign “Asian America” in one
era or critical practice are never completely removed from either past or emergent structures of
meaning.

19
Orientation. In chapter 2, I use Sara Ahmed’s spatiotemporal analytic “orientation” to
examine how racial identifications are produced over a lifetime of work and relationality. I read
race as an orientation, that is, as a social relationship between bodies, objects, and spaces,
invisibly sedimented over lifetimes of repeated gestures. By paying close attention to the
relationship between bodies, objects, and the time and space in which they appear or encounter
each other, racial feeling both unearths the histories etched into such relations and allows for the
possibility that bodies, spaces, objects, and subjects can be reoriented towards different horizons
and trajectories.
Nonconsciousness. In chapter 3, I hone in on the “nonconscious” aspect of affect and
feeling, exploring the seeming disconnect between conscious language and nonconscious
physiological affect exhibited in Tao Lin’s Taipei. Here, the “feedback loop” of feeling breaks
down, revealing the processes through which social formations and personal identifications and
experiences relay between the structural and the everyday, sometimes resolving into coherence
as a racialized identification and sometimes rebounding, refusing to resolve, and remaining
indistinct.
Racial style. In chapter 4, I examine linkages in logic, argumentation structure, strategic
tactics, and linguistics between Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts and the series of legal memos
written by John Yoo to justify indefinite detention and torture. Drawing on Raymond William’s
discussion of generational styles, I suggest that “racial style” describes a broad tactical, aesthetic
mode of thinking and speaking race that emerges in conjunction with other generational modes
and styles. Rather than suggesting a deep shared understanding of racial meanings and political
orientations, racial style encompasses a surface aesthetic that can be flexibly deployed from a
range of political and ideological positions. Racial feeling unearths the contours of specific racial

20
styles as they move from emergent to dominant and, as I suggest in the conclusion, from
dominant to residual.
Throughout, I draw on scholarship by queer and queer of color critics to interrogate the
function of feelings to produce social cleavages and formations. That is, as suggested in the
specific analytics above, feelings are never produced in isolation of larger social structures, nor
are feelings themselves politically neutral. My focus on the present as a temporal framework is
also not meant to produce “the present” as a distinct temporal formation, but rather to uncover
the ways in which social cleavages are always simultaneously crystallizing and crystallized,
always emerging, dispersing, and stabilizing at once. Feelings have a generative social function;
they are able to both effect social transformation and generate attachments to normative social
structures. Feelings also aid in the distribution of wealth, health, and goods differentially across
global populations.
40
Feelings also have political and material histories, whose traces resonate in
the present. Different affects, particularly negative ones, not only effect differential distributions
of life and value but themselves are differentially distributed throughout society, so that some
subjects, particularly those raced, gendered, sexualized and classed as non-normative in one
sense or another, come to both be identified with—that is, seen as the bearers of—and to identify
with specific affects and feelings.
41
By suturing these various functions of feelings together,
racial feeling offers a descriptive model capable of registering both the transformations in race
and racial meanings wrought by neoliberal multiculturalism and the ways in which older racial
violences and meanings linger on.
Racial feeling is also informed by and indebted to queer of color critique. According to
Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, queer of color critique—an intellectual
companion to woman of color feminism—is a comparative analytic that, like Asian American

21
critique, is “fundamentally organized around difference.” It “refuses to maintain that objects of
comparison are static, unchanging, and empirically observable, and refuses to render illegible the
shifting configurations of power that define such objects in the first place.”
42
Importantly, queer
of color critique does not invest in claiming identities or specific positionalities, but rather
investigates how the act of locating, naming, or identifying—and thus making knowable—
forecloses as many possibilities as it generates. Principally, queer of color critique investigates
how formulations of race, gender, and sexuality as discrete formations forecloses an
understanding of how such categories are not only “co-eval,”
43
but also cut and cleave across and
through each other to produce populations that are not just heterogenous, but indeed, sometimes
radically differentiated by their access to knowledge, value, mobility, wealth, health, and other
indices of power.
In contradistinction to Asian American literary studies, however, which also prioritize
difference and heterogeneity, queer of color critique also remains suspicious of comparative
valorizations that enshrine the “abject,” the “non-normative,” or the “unincorporable” as always
already radically oppositional to the “subject,” the “normative,” and the “incorporable.” For
example, queer theory has furnished a rigorous discourse on “homonormativity,” a formation of
gay identity that is compatible with neoliberal multiculturalism, taking up the key terms of a
history of queer activism (equality, freedom) that once marshaled against the forces of state and
capital and redeploys them in the service of making certain forms of gay life amenable to exactly
those structures.
44
Yet queer of color critique, mindful of the ways in which “queer” has itself
often marshaled economic, racial, and even theoretical mobility as the province of certain queer
bodies and subjectivities, receives this distinction with skepticism; as Jasbir Puar suggests, even
trenchant analyses of homonormativity can have the effect of enshrining “queer” as the always

22
radical, always oppositional figure that remains in opposition to anything that appears as
“homonormative.” Puar argues that a focus on queerness as transgression, or as anti- or
unidentity, helps queer studies to elide the ways in which queerness, as much as any
neoconservative homonormativity, is “a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects
with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into
liberationist paradigms.”
45
Thus, rather than settling or aligning with any one critical perspective,
queer of color critique remains attentive to the processes by which any analytic or subject
position orients perspectives, limits meanings, and potentially colludes with systems of
surveillance, discipline, and comparative valuation.
Consequently, racial feeling as method offers multiple critical perspectives. In each
chapter, I offer readings and alternative readings, tracing how Asian American studies’
paradigms might read a text and also how other readings and interpretive mechanisms might
support, contradict, or cut across those initial readings. The point is not to code one reading as
more “just,” more “accurate,” or more “radical.” Rather, this exploration of different reading
practices exposes the processes of interpretation, which each foreclose and generate distinctive
potentialities. At the same time, I resist mechanisms in Asian American studies reading practices
that deploy terms like “multicultural” or “liberal” to signal the incorporable, from which we can
separate “real” or “authentic” minority culture, which is multiculturalism’s unincorporable
remainder. Using the reading practice of racial feeling, I argue that the products, effects, and
identities produced by neoliberal multiculturalism are not outside or exceptional to Asian
American culture, identity, or studies, and it is incumbent upon the field to not dismiss these
products as exceptional to the foundational of Asian American Studies. In fact, these cultural

23
products, texts, identities, and effects might be key to revealing the ways in which racial power,
and thus race, is shapeshifting in the 21
st
century.

Chapter Outline
In the first section of the dissertation, I trace the historical emergence of Asian American
Studies literary methods, arguing that they are embedded both in demographics that no longer
reflect current Asian American populations, and a specific politics of revolt and difference that
no longer translate in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. I do this in Chapter 1 by reading
the history and development of Flower Drum Song—from a 1958 novel to a 2002 Broadway
revival—alongside an intellectual history of the formation of “Asian America” in the context of
Asian American Studies’ institutionalization. By examining three iterations of the novel and play
Flower Drum Song, which both pre- and post-date 1968, I demonstrate that the academic
narrative of “Asian America” as a panethnic, politically-oriented coalition is but one of many
visions of Asian America that surfaced in the twentieth century.
In the second part of the dissertation, I argue that contemporary political and economic
catalysts—including the War on Terror, the rise of state- sponsored capital in Asia, and the
global spread of neoliberalism—have fundamentally shifted the meaning, and meaning-making
capacities, of “Asian America”—and therefore, the methods we use to capture and diagnose that
meaning must also transform. The second and third chapters read Chang-rae Lee’s 2004 novel,
Aloft, and Tao Lin’s 2013 novel, Taipei, in order to diagnose the ways in which contemporary
Asian American literature simultaneously fulfills and exceeds the expectations and assumptions
encoded in Asian American literary reading practices. Throughout these chapters, I argue that
these novels generate multicultural and flexible visions of Asian American identity, which

24
challenge settled assumptions built into the very language of Asian American racial formation
and feeling.
Finally, Chapter Four reads the “Torture Memos,” a series of legal memos written by
Korean American lawyer John Yoo for George W. Bush’s cabinet to justify indefinite detention
and torture at the start of the War on Terror, as sharing origins with the project of Asian
American Studies articulated by Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts. That is, I examine Yoo’s editorial
writing as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1980s alongside Lowe’s depiction of the
multicultural university, arguing that both derive a tactical investment in difference, multiplicity,
and contradiction from their observations of the contradictions of multiculturalism. Yoo,
however, uses those tactics to radically different aims than Lowe, unsettling programmatic
understandings of those very tactics within Asian American studies.
Reading this diverse archive of Asian American cultural production, I argue that these
cultural productions should not be disavowed; instead, they should be read as part of, or even
central to, Asian American culture. Racial feeling, as a method, is one way that is one way Asian
American Studies can reorient in order to better account for the meaning and function of Asian
American culture as it transforms in the shadow of global capital. More broadly, racial feeling
allows scholars to unearth the embryonic social cleavages and procedures we do not yet—but
might soon—call “race” as it unfolds throughout the 21st century.

25

One

Chop Suey: Adapting Asian America in Flower Drum Song

Near the end of David Henry Hwang’s 2002 adaptation of Flower Drum Song, Wang Ta, the
male romantic lead, tells a dancer at his Chinatown nightclub that “if we want to make
something new, we first have to love what is old.” Oft-repeated in the show’s reviews, the
statement serves as Hwang’s de facto thesis statement on his choice to revive Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s 1958 Broadway musical, Flower Drum Song, which is itself an adaptation of a
1957 novel written by Chinese American author C.Y. Lee. Flower Drum Song was, until 2015,
the only Broadway musical to feature a cast of exclusively Asian/American characters, and at the
time of its original production, the play was widely lauded for its portrayal of Chinese American
life in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
1
With the passing of time, the show has become known more
for its racial caricatures and Cold War politics, and has been soundly rejected by many Asian
American critics. Elaine Kim, for example, referred to Lee’s novel and other “native informant
in Chinatown” novels as “humiliating,” and even Hwang admits that the 1961 film version is no
more than “a guilty pleasure.”
2
Despite the promising reviews of its LA run, Hwang’s Flower
Drum Song was not well received on Broadway, and closed at a financial loss. Perhaps more
surprisingly, given Hwang’s fame, the show has also not been taken up by Asian American
cultural critics—nearly fifteen years after its first debut in LA, the only scholarship available on
it remains the original theater reviews.
Hwang’s invective to “love what is old” in order to “create something new” opens a number
of critical questions. What does it mean to love what is old, that is, to love the past, or at least

26
that which has passed? What “new” thing is created out of this love of the past, and why is it
dependent on loving the past, rather than feeling any other way about it? And what is it about
Flower Drum Song that remains, somehow simultaneously, both beloved and unloved?
This chapter draws out the imbrication of temporality and feeling that Hwang points towards,
inherent in the generic act of adaptation—which indicates a liking for the original text, if not a
love—and in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s, and then Hwang’s, specific adaptations of C.Y. Lee’s
novel. Adaptations interrupt the drumbeat of linear time that structures the lived experience of
capitalist modernity—what Jack Halberstam has called “reproductive time,” or the ordered,
teleological, forward progression through which modern subjects understand and articulate
time—by refusing to let go of an artifact of the past, and insisting on its utility or meaningfulness
in the present.
3
Yet they are not reproductions, which carefully preserve a past object;
adaptations also subscribe to, and are inscribed with, the forward movement of reproductive
time, in that they seek to revivify objects that are not just past but passé, in need of technological
or social updates in order to be palatable to contemporary audiences. Adaptations, in Hwang’s
parlance, trim their original passed objects of their unlovable pastness and make them lovable
again.
In the case of Hwang’s adaptation of Flower Drum Song, however, something about the
adaptation process went wrong. Hwang recounts his first encounter with the film version of
Flower Drum Song, which left him “pleasantly shocked”: “Here was a show about love and
culture clash in San Francisco’s Chinatown, about romances between Asian men and women
who spoke without accents… For Baby Boomers like myself, this was nothing short of
revolutionary.” In college, however, Hwang had a politicized change of heart: as “college
student[s] in the late 1970s … We Asian Americans sought to define our own identities, rather

27
than permitting those images to be drawn by mainstream society […] So I ended up protesting
Flower Drum Song as ‘inauthentic,’ though the show remained a guilty pleasure.”
4
Thus,
Hwang’s intent was to craft a more “authentic” Flower Drum Song, one that “would feel relevant
and moving to more culturally sophisticated, contemporary audiences” while still respecting “the
tone and spirit of the original.” Yet, as he worked, he found his original enthusiasm for the work
resurfacing, concluding at the end of his foreword that the search for authenticity is “complex
and elusive,” and that “One era’s cultural breakthroughs may calcify and become stereotypes
through time… If [one’s characters] are well written, they will exude humanity, which is
ultimately ... the most visceral measure of authenticity.”
5

In comparison to the original—which ran for two years on Broadway, another year of
national touring throughout the U.S., and another two years in London, accompanied by a film
adaptation in 1961—Hwang’s version was an unqualified flop.
6
The original had a lasting effect
on the Asian Americans of Hwang’s generation and earlier, as he notes, saying that it “loomed
large” for those Asian Americans who came of age between Flower Drum Song’s release in
1961 and the release of The Joy Luck Club—the next major Hollywood studio production
starring Asian Americans after Flower Drum Song—in 1993. The attempt to strip Flower Drum
Song only to its lovable core—its tone and spirit—while reconstructing its political
accoutrements seemed to have the opposite effect; whatever had first generated simultaneous
pleasure for mainstream white America and ambivalence—seemingly no less pleasurable,
though probably more complex—for Asian Americans seemed to have been inadvertently
stripped away as well.
Elizabeth Freeman theorizes “temporal drag” as an embodied gesture that can destabilize the
progressive narratives—“movement time”—produced not just by dominant economic and

28
cultural structures but also by and within “progressive” social movements themselves. Indeed,
the implied dichotomy between “progressive” politics and “regressive” politics—one already
moving forward into the future, one always already mired in the past—tends to efface the
“messy, transitional” thinking that characterizes the present. Temporal drag, which for Freeman
is exhibited by lesbian artists and filmmakers performing as lesbian/feminist figures that have
been declared passé and part of an embarrassing past that has thankfully been left behind, reveals
“the mutually disruptive energy of moments that are not yet past and yet are not entirely present
either… [and] asks us to imagine the future in terms of experiences that discourse has not yet
caught up with, rather than as a legacy passed between generations.”
7

In this chapter, I take up Freeman’s notion of temporal drag to theorize the ambivalence
with which Hwang and his generation of Asian Americans received Rodger and Hammerstein’s
Flower Drum Song and with which, seemingly, the contemporary generation of Asian Americans
have received Hwang’s iteration. Yet where Freeman emphasizes a mode of bodily performance
wherein the contemporary body dons the accoutrements of an earlier era, Flower Drum Song
instead engages in the adaptive act of covering over a bygone body with the “adornments” of the
contemporary. Thus, this chapter unfolds what I call “adaptive drag,” the process by which, even
through its progressive iterations, Flower Drum Song drags with it unwieldy echoes of scenes,
subjects, and sentiments that continue to be felt in the present even though they themselves may
not be present.
The emphasis on movement time, or the temporal frames produced by social movements
themselves, is crucial here. While each iteration of Flower Drum Song, in its own way, pushes
progressively against contemporary social boundaries, each also slots neatly into the historical
narrative of “Asian America” that Asian American Studies has cohered. Thus, Flower Drum

29
Song’s adaptations generate propulsive energies that are harnessed by both capitalist modernity
and, simultaneously, by the progressive “Asian American” movement, which has, in one
iteration, crystallized into the field of Asian American Studies. Yet at the same time, adaptation’s
ambivalent structure—its simultaneous progressive and regressive impulses—exerts a drag on
such propulsion, sometimes sending it pulsing out in unexpected ways.
In particular, I argue that the adaptive drag of the first Flower Drum Song—C.Y. Lee’s
novel—disturbs the progressive narrative embodied in both Rodgers and Hammerstein’s and
Hwang’s versions, which both attempt to cohere “Asian America” as a unified, coherent, and
natural figure, one whose boundaries need neither to be explored nor explained. Both Lee’s and
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s versions, in turn, exert pressure on Hwang’s progressive vision of
an “authentic” Asian America, finally capable of representing itself to itself on its own terms.
And Hwang’s version’s final appearance as itself a “drag,” that is, a seeming deadweight that
held little appeal to contemporary Asian American audiences, ought to destabilize the surety with
which the field of Asian American studies—and the cultural and intellectual elites that produce
within its milieu, among whom Hwang is counted—characterizes the political and cultural
proclivities of contemporary Asian America.

KNOWN QUANTITIES
Fields of academic study have a tendency to love objects in the same way that adaptations
do: by stripping them of their unwieldy, unlovable edges in order to insert them into what
becomes, over time, a coherent narrative. That is, while individual authors might engage with
texts or timelines in nuanced and nonlinear ways, the aggregate effect of a field of study tends to
slot objects and texts into linear narratives that cohere into “waves” or “generations” or other

30
metaphors of progressive temporality. Just as queer theorists have suggested that individual
identities are temporal fictions that “fuse incommensurate temporal moments into something
singular and coherent,” so to do fields of study tend to iterate and reiterate their objects into
something concrete, coherent, and knowable.
8
So it is that a field’s prehistory—what was before
there was a field, or before this current iteration of the field—comes to be figured, as Elizabeth
Freeman puts it, as “a big drag,” a “deadweight” of politically outdated ideas and cultural modes.
If one is to engage these prehistories, or objects from these prehistorical eras, one must approach
them with the proper attitude: with an apologetic disclaimer (“I know it’s problematic, but…”)
or, more often, with the affect of the adaptation—that is, a willingness to strip out all but a
“core” element that can be highlighted, polished, and deemed relevant and useful.
As might be obvious from the section above, Flower Drum Song is an unwieldy and
occasionally unlovable past object. The novel and the original Broadway adaptation emerged in
what is, for the field of Asian American studies, a murky time in Asian American history: post
the heyday of Asian exclusion (the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943) yet still within
its legal and social shadow (Asian exclusion wasn’t fully abolished until the Hart-Celler Act of
1965); and yet pre-1968, the year of the Third World Strikes that initiated the development of the
first Asian American studies departments, and which has become enshrined in the field as origin
not only of Asian American studies but of Asian America itself.
9

Just as the naming of individual identity activates a “timelessness […] to consolidate the
fiction of a seamless stable identity,” the use of the poles of Asian exclusion and 1968 to orient
histories of Asian American studies, culture, and identities produces Asian America as
something knowable, concrete, and definite.
10
That is, to invoke 1968 as the beginning of Asian
America assumes that “Asian America”—as racial category, community, personal identification,

31
and object of study—exists, definitively, even if its contours are debatable or changeable, and to
delineate the period of Asian exclusion (roughly, 1882-1965) as the core conditions of Asian
America’s possibility further narrativizes Asian America as something not just knowable but
known.
The production of Asian America as a known figure with a linear history often occludes
critical engagement with other significant dates or frameworks in the history of Asian-origin
ethnic groups in the US, from which narratives of incoherence, fracture, and heterogeneity might
be drawn. Madeline Hsu, for example, argues that deeming the entire period from 1882-1965 the
“exclusion” period rather overstates the case, given that during that period, the U.S. state actively
participated in the recruitment and retention of specific “desirable” Chinese and other Asian
immigrants.
11
Emphasis on the exclusion period and 1968 also tends to elide the significance of
the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, which had such a profound impact on the ethnic and national origin,
class diversity, and sheer size of the Asian American population that it’s actually difficult to find
a historical study of Asian America that traverses it—that is, that begins before 1965 and ends
after it.
12
Asian American histories—either those that engage with “Asian America” as a pan-
ethnic formation or those that chronicle one specific ethnicity—tend to end at 1965.
13
While this
is, in part, merely out of academy exigency—the post-1965 past is, perhaps, not quite past
enough—it also speaks to the rupturing power of 1965, which might be so fracturing as to
overwhelm entirely the idea of “Asian America” as a stable and timeless referent.
In addition, as Mark Chiang, Viet Nguyen and Kandice Chuh have all highlighted, a focus
on the 1968 movement tends to instate the experiences and tropes that drove that movement as
the core of Asian American experience. The Asian American movement that crystallized in 1968
was largely driven by a pre-1965 population: the activists, like Richard Aoki, Mo Nishika, and

32
Gordon Lee, who drove the initial movement; the academics, like Ronald Takaki, who
established the first Asian American Studies departments; and the artists and “cultural workers,”
like Frank Chin, Russell Leong, and Maxine Hong Kingston who participated in the Asian
American “cultural revolution” of the late 1960s and 1970s were almost exclusively American-
born and of Chinese or Japanese descent.
14
Accordingly, as Koshy puts it, the “core of the
field”—“the source of the tropes, themes, and paradigms of ethnicity that constitute the
literature”—emerges largely from 19
th
century and early 20
th
century Chinese and Japanese
experiences in America.
15
These experiences were characterized by legal exclusion and social
alienation (not to mention, in the case of the Japanese, imprisonment in concentration camps)—
racialized modes which have congealed under the sign of “Orientalism,” or the social logic of
Othering that rendered, and continues to render, Asian bodies as “foreign” and thus threatening
to the integrity of the nation-state. This core remains essential to how Asian American culture is
both produced and read by Asian American studies: as Colleen Lye points out, “Little has
changed since the days of the Aiiieeeee! anthology when its editors sought to distinguish ‘Asian
American literature’ from literature that only happens to have been written by Asians in America
according to the yardstick of resistance to Orientalist stereotyping […] Asian American culture is
still understood as a reaction-formation to American racism.”
16

With this core of exclusion, alienation, and Orientalism in place, the narrative of 1968
works to construct Asian Americans as united through the experience of these social logics,
despite their different ethnicities, nationalities, religions, languages, class statuses, and histories.
As the Asian-origin population in the US has grown and shifted, Asian American studies has, in
Koshy’s words, added “other” Asian ethnicities (Filipino, South Asian, Korean, and Southeast
Asian) through either “auxiliary formations” or “free-floating idioms of postmodernism

33
(multiplicity, hybridity) that lack any historical specificity or cultural thickness.”
17
That is, while
the Asian-origin population has radically—and perhaps fundamentally—transformed in the years
since 1968, the supposed core of Asian America has not, and those changes have been absorbed
into the theoretical model of Asian America as mere variations on a theme rather than
foundationally discrete histories, tropes, or identities that must be engaged with on their own.
The progression of Flower Drum Song adaptations can, without a doubt, be inscribed into
the pre-1965/1968 narrative with ease; after all, Lee’s novel and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s
productions were all produced pre-1965, and certainly both have been variously deemed as
“inauthentic” representations written not, as the saying goes, “for us, by us,” but rather for white
audiences bent on consuming Orientalist fantasies. Hwang himself, of course, also embraces this
narrative in his own adaptation, as he, with the gift of hindsight, returns to the 1950s to redeem
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s minstrelized characters and bestow upon them the agency and
humanity they seemingly lacked. Yet without the magnetic poles of 1965 and 1968 to orient the
narrative, it also becomes clear that Lee and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s versions were written in
the unstable thick of the Cold War—a particularly vexing moment for Chinese Americans, as I
explore below—while Hwang’s version debuted in Los Angeles mere weeks after September 11,
2001, and by the time it premiered in New York in October of 2002, the War on Terror was in
full swing.
Here, if the imperative to read for national and identitarian progress is ignored, political
and affective continuities surface throughout Flower Drum Song’s adaptations that might
otherwise be ignored. Produced in unstable, wartime cultural milieus, each adaptation freights its
version of “Asian America” not just with domestic concerns about which subjects are allowed
within the space of the nation and the national imaginary, but also with global investments in

34
shoring up America’s image as “the land of the free.”
18
Thus, no adaptation envisions Asian
America entirely, or even mostly, through Orientalizing logics that binarize Asian bodies as
permanently Other and foreign. Instead, they reveal key moments in U.S. history when “Asian
American” was not the sign of the permanently unincorporable Other but, instead, a fulcrum
between those Asian/American subjects who, at any given moment, are unincorporable, and
those Asian/American subjects who are indeed corporable—that is, capable of being embraced
into the nation.
A key figure of this fulcrum mechanism is the Filipina/o, whose presence (and absence) I
trace throughout the ostensibly Chinese American Flower Drum Song. As many Asian
American and Filipino/American scholars have noted, the Filipina/o has become a paradigmatic
figure of the “trouble” with “Asian American” as a categorizing mechanism—largely because
their experiences do not conform to the narrative of legal exclusion and alienation that forms the
core of “Asian American” history throughout the early twentieth century. The vestigial
connections between the Cold War and the War on Terror also, by necessity, recall America’s
first intervention in Asia.
19
Colonized by Spain in 1565, and “won” by the U.S. three hundred
and fifty years later in 1898, the Philippines were a colony of the US during most of the period of
Asian exclusion, and their citizens, colonial subjects.
20
Consequently, while Chinese, Japanese,
and Indian immigrants were legally excluded from entering the nation and naturalizing as
citizens for much of the first half of the 20
th
century, Filipinos were categorized as “noncitizen
nationals,” rendering them ambiguously neither alien nor citizen. Indeed, the major migrations of
Filipinos to the US occurred in the 1920s because of Asian exclusion; young Filipino male
laborers were recruited to the US in order to fill the labor gaps left by excluded Chinese,
Japanese, and Indian laborers.
21

35
The colonial relationship between Filipinos and the U.S. government also affected the
temporal dimensions of anti-Filipino discourse, in contrast to generalized Orientalized discourse.
As Susan Koshy describes, American Orientalism emerged in relation to China and Japan
through numerous sources and discourses—“aesthetic, missionary, commercial, intellectual, and
political/diplomatic”—which allowed for a melding of positive and negative representations and
forced an acknowledgement of the antiquity of East Asian civilizations (even if that
acknowledgement was usually double-edged).
22
In contrast, the conflict between the economic
desire to colonize the Philippines and American democratic ideals resulted in a justifying racial
discourse that coded Filipinos as “a motley colored race comprising innumerable uncivilized
tribes” who were “incapable of self-rule.”
23
Known as “little brown monkeys,” Filipinos were
“perceived as subjects defined primarily by their physical being… While spirituality or
aestheticism was attired to other Oriental cultures such as the Japanese or the Chinese, Filipinos
were portrayed as dog eaters or headhunters, and any propensity they displayed toward
cultivation was attributed to their powers of mimicry.”
24
In particular, as Mae Ngai points out,
“While it was common to view all non-European peoples as backward, casting Filipinos as
‘tribal’ was essential because it denied them the status of nationhood.”
25
At the same time, while
much of anti-Asian sentiment hinged on the inability of Asians to assimilate—their essential
“foreignness”—Filipinos entered the US having grown up under U.S. colonial tutelage: “they
were Christians; they went to American schools and spoke English; they wore Western-style
clothes; they were familiar with American popular culture.” They were, in short, already
assimilated.
26
Thus, colonialism, its justifying discourses, and its cultural effects produced the
Filipino as a subject distinct from other Asians even beyond their legal “special status.” Asian

36
American Studies, then, has had particular trouble incorporating Filipino America into its core
understanding of Asian America as a coherent figure.
Thus, I pay special attention to Filipina/o subjects, bodies, and performances within Flower
Drum Song's adaptations, as they appear and disappear along and within the boundaries of
“Asian America” that each iteration coheres. Throughout, I take my cue from Laura Hyun Yi
Kang, Mark Chiang, Colleen Lye, and others, who suggest that “Asian America,” rather than
being a discrete and knowable entity—an object—is instead a discursive construction that
appears under certain conditions to do cultural work: as an ideological “racial form” that coheres
national and global preoccupations, anxieties, and desires; as a disciplinary figure that inscribes
subjects and prescribes behavior; and as a strategy for capital accumulation, either for those to
whom the term adheres or for those to whom the term does not (and sometimes both).
27
At the
same time, I also read the Asian America that Flower Drum Song coheres as a cumulative
structure of racial feeling, one that rebounds across time and space against its own iterations.
Characters appear and disappear, scenes are reimagined and reembodied, lines transmuted: some
feelings rebound and return with double the impact; others dissipate, though their imprints linger;
the weight of history, of scenes repeated or forgotten, excised or clung to, accretes; Asian
America is made, remade, felt, forgotten, felt anew.
And throughout, adaptive drag exerts a “productive obstacle to progress, a usefully
distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense.”
28
That is, even when
Asian America does cohere—as a sign of progression or regression, inclusion or exclusion,
authenticity or its inverse—its meaning is rendered unstable and always threatening to collapse
in on itself. Such instability, I argue, itself exerts forceful pressure on Asian American Studies,
underscoring the continued contingency of the field and its love object, and the sustained need to

37
continue excavating its forms, meanings, and conditions of possibility, rather than taking its
present—or its presence—for granted.

“GRANT AVENUE, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.”: C.Y. LEE’S CHINATOWN
According to Gordon Lee, the term “Asian American” was coined by grad student Yuji
Ishioka in 1968.
29
Correspondingly, the phrase never appears in C.Y. Lee’s 1957 novel, The
Flower Drum Song. Yet as I argue throughout the following section, Asian America appears at
the boundaries of Lee’s Chinatown, charging these border spaces with racialized, gendered, and
bodily notions of im/propriety, and marking the boundaries of proper Chinese American
behavior and identity. The Chinatown of The Flower Drum Song is insular and seemingly
unchanging, a place where white Americans are referred to as “foreigners” and “The Chinese
theaters, the porridge restaurants, the teahouses, the newspapers, the food, the herbs […] all
provide an atmosphere that makes a refugee wonder whether he is really in a foreign land.”
Transformation, however, creeps in throughout the novel, as the protagonist, Old Master
Wang—who begins the novel remarking on Chinatown’s steadfastness—confronts and attempts
to control the Americanization of his family, particularly his oldest son, Wang Ta. At the close of
the novel, Master Wang takes a walk through Chinatown that mirrors the one he takes at the
beginning, this time imagining that “Perhaps in fifty years […] there would be no more clatter of
mah-jongg behind closed doors, no more operatic music of drums and gongs, no noodle
factories, no old-fashioned barbershops with all the traditional services […] for this was the
world of the younger generation, everything was changing, slowly but steadily.”
30

Lee’s portrait of 1930s Chinese/Americanness is fine-grained, textured with differences of
class, gender, age, and immigration status. From Liu Ma and Liu Lung (servants who scheme to

38
keep their place in Master Wang’s house secure), to Linda Lung and Helen Chao (unmarried
women who seek to escape Chinatown one way or another), to May Li and Old Man Li (newly
arrived migrants who find their citizenship and livelihood imperiled when their long-time
employer dies), the novel is populated with characters who each live their
Chinese/Americanness, and their relationship to Chinatown, differently, dependent on their
social and economic position as much as on their individual quirks and desires. Indeed, it is not
the individual characters who cohere Chinese/America, as their perspectives are intentionally
diverse. Instead, the space of Chinatown itself—as revealed in those opening and closing
passages—both is and pulses with the structures of felt relationships that together crystallize
Chinese America. That is, Chinatown—its very geography, as well as its history, its sensory
textures, its social organization, its conditions of possibility—both shapes and is shaped by
Chinese/Americans as they move in and through it.
And, of course, the historical circumstances that shaped Chinatown—particularly, the
gendered patterns of migration determined by Chinese Exclusion, and the anti-Asian racism that
reinforced Chinatown’s borders—linger to dictate the present.
31
After graduating college with a
degree in economics, Wang Ta, Old Master Wang’s oldest son, is unable to find a job either
inside of Chinatown—because he doesn’t speak Cantonese—or outside of it—because he is only
hirable as a dishwasher in the world beyond Chinatown. And when Wang Ta and his friend
Chang witness a shooting incited by competition over Wang Ta’s old girlfriend Linda Lung,
Chang observes: “I think this shooting is again a result of this peculiar situation—not enough
women to go around. […] You know, the more I think of this situation, the more I believe it has
caused all the tragedies in Chinatown.”
32
Here, not just the affective states of its inhabitants but,
indeed, their lives and deaths are shaped by Chinatown’s shape, the form it and its inhabitants

39
have taken on—and been pressed into—throughout the decades of its history. This affective
relationship mirrors the feedback loop described in the introduction: as smells and sounds are
generated by the inhabitants of Chinatown, as their feet beat paths along its streets and in and out
of private space, these sensory structures linger, become embedded, and take on their own
affective force, so that certain smells or sounds are enhanced, become more visible, and certain
paths become well-tread while others fade; thus the space impresses upon bodies and is
impressed upon, and bodies impress upon the space and are impressed upon.
Though the novel seems little concerned with the world beyond Chinatown’s borders, its
border spaces are imbricated with disabled and unnatural bodies, licentious sexuality, and
interracial relations—usually embodied by Filipino men courting white women. This
enmeshment reveals an anxious awareness of the sociohistorical demand for “proper” and
nonthreatening representations of Chinese Americans. The decades between World War II and
the Immigration Act of 1965 were turbulent for Chinese Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act
was repealed in 1943, partly in deference to China’s status as wartime ally and partly as a
function of the U.S.’s planned post-war ascendance to global political and economic dominance.
World War II had stirred up decolonial activism world wide, and revealed the violent (and
violently racist) contradictions at the heart of Western civilization; consequently, the political
ascendance of the U.S. into global power depended upon its ability to portray itself, both at home
and abroad, as antiracist and anti-imperial.
33
At the same time, wartime discourse had worked to
actively distinguish Japanese and Chinese populations from each other. Where once all Asians
were portrayed as alienating and Other, this shift in public attitude towards Chinese in particular
enabled economic and social movement that had once been impossible for the Chinese. Students,
intellectuals, and other professionals migrated in small numbers to the U.S.; a Chinese middle

40
class developed, flourished, and began to move out of Chinatowns into suburbs and university
towns; and American-born Chinese activists, more fluent in bureaucratic languages than their
previous generations, used New Deal legislation to secure sanitary public housing and other
amenities in Chinatowns themselves.
34

While exclusion had officially been abolished, however, Chinese immigration was still
held to an incredibly restrictive, and uniquely race-based, quota. Unlike all other immigration,
which operated through national quotas, Chinese immigration was limited to 105 Chinese
persons—no matter their national origin. This racial quota prevented the Chinese diaspora (such
as those living in Hong Kong, then still a British colony) from immigrating through more
permissive national quotas, and revealed continued anti-Chinese sentiment despite official
narratives to the contrary.
35
And, of course, the tenuous status of the Chinese as potential
political allies was quickly complicated. The retreat of the KMT (China’s nationalist party, and
the U.S.’s ally) to Taiwan and the subsequent declaration of the People’s Republic of China by
the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 placed Chinese Americans in an unenviable position of
having to demonstrate unwavering support for both the U.S. and the KMT simultaneously in
order to not be coded as communist threats. The entry of the People’s Republic of China into the
Korean War in 1950 heightened this pressure. In response, Chinatown elites across the nation
launched a campaign to affirm Chinese America’s pro-America, anti-Communist political stance.
The U.S. state embraced this campaign, sending Chinese Americans as embassies to other
diasporic Chinese communities in the hopes of affirming the affective and political connections
between the U.S., the KMT, and the global “Overseas Chinese” community. Though such
campaigns transformed Chinese Americans into the face of American citizenship—just a decade

41
after they were first legally allowed to claim that citizenship—they also placed Chinese
Americans under heightened scrutiny and suspicion.
36

This rapid shifts in the hierarchy of national belonging register their reverberations in the
militance with which the boundaries of The Flower Drum Song’s Chinatown harden against
improper bodies, behaviors, and desires. That is, just as the spatial layout of Chinatown is
imbued with the affective structure of Chinese America, its boundaries function to embody the
affective structures, behaviors, and bodies that Lee wants to disassociate from Chinese
America—and these boundaries usually cohere in the figure of the Filipino. The opening
passage, where Old Master Wang walks through Chinatown, has a discrete stopping point: “He
seldom went farther to Kearny, for he considered it as a Filipino town and he had no desire to go
there.” A few pages later, Ta recalls that one of his first attempts to test his father’s patience in
college involved spending “five dollars on a street walker recommended by a Filipino student.”
37

Here, Kearny Street and Filipinotown are not just spatially discrete from Chinatown; they mark a
different assemblage of gendered, sexualized, and racialized structures of feeling, which feel, to
Old Master Wang, improper and alien.
This association is compounded when both Master Wang and Wang Ta, on separate
occasions, leave Chinatown and cross into the International Settlement, where “foreign
foreigners” mingle with white and Mexican women and Filipino men.
38
In a series of scenes, the
connection between the borders of Chinatown, improper sexuality, and disabled bodies is made
abundantly clear. Old Master Wang, on one of his strolls, finds himself at a bar in the
International Settlement where he watches a white woman dance and strip. After the girl begins
to “jerk […] her completely nude body right above Wang Chi-yang’s head,” he leaves the bar,
and on his way home, spots Wang Ta dining with Helen Chao, the pockmarked seamstress, at

42
another International Settlement bar. Later, Wang Ta visits a different bar in the International
Settlement and observes “a short Filipino come out with a tall blonde and get into a waiting taxi.
[…] He wondered why there were so many blondes in the bar. Sitting at the bar arguing with
another Filipino was another one.” Later, Mexican men enter the bar: “Wang Ta watched the two
Mexicans and wished he could be as happy and carefree as they.” The Mexican men try and fail
to seduce a white woman that Ta learns was crippled by a car accident, prompting him to
remember Helen Chao and wonder “why people were so sensitive about their physical defects.”
39

Here, the impropriety of these border spaces rebound and amplify each other, as each encounter
sends Wang Chi-yang and Wang Ta further away from both the physical space of Chinatown and
the set of proper behaviors, desires, and identifications that Chinatown circumscribes and is
circumscribed by. Wang Chi-yang’s initial repulsion at the “unnatural” body of the white dancer
is, by the end of this sequence, transmuted into Ta’s desire exactly for a disabled white body—
and identification with those who he imagines occupy spaces where such desire is legible, even
“happy and carefree.”
The continued identification of Filipinos with sexual impropriety, interracial desire, and
Mexicans (that is, racialized figures that are neither Asian nor white) is not historical accident.
Just as their presence and experiences in the period of Asian exclusion disturbed the tropes of
legal exclusion and Orientalism, Filipinos also disturb the trope of “racial castration.” Seen as
stemming from the vast gender differentials that legal exclusion generated in Asian-origin
populations, racial castration, or the feminization and desexualization of Asian American men,
has been and remains a central concern of Asian American Studies throughout its history.
40

Filipinos, however, seen as barbarous and bodily, were not coded as effeminate or desexualized
during the years of American colonialism and special legal status—rather, they were figured as

43
hypersexual. Like the Exclusion era Chinese and Indian populations, the pre-1934 Filipino
population largely consisted of young, single men under the age of 30. Susan Koshy argues that,
while previous waves of Asian immigration “had also aroused racial antagonism centered on the
threats posed as economic competitors, carriers of diseases, and sexually promiscuous and
morally degraded groups,” anti-Filipino sentiment and violence was “uniquely charged by its
focus on Filipino sexual deviance and the threat it posed to a civilized order.”
41

In part because of the already-established colonial discourse discussed above, which
imagined Filipinos as backwards savages, and probably in part because of their darker skin,
representations of Filipinos were often linked to representations of black men.
42
As with the
representations of black men, Filipinos’ “primitive development” and “childlike” nature
“undergirded claims of both labor docility and sexual promiscuity.”
43
Filipino hypersexuality,
like black male hypersexuality, threatened white sexual norms beyond the scope of the
generalized deviance ascribed to other Asian groups. As Koshy points out, “Dominant accounts
of relationships between Filipino men and white women fixated on the seeming attractiveness of
Filipino men to white women … While Japanese and Chinese immigrant men had also been
perceived as threats to white womanhood, most often the nature of that sexual threat was
conveyed through images of coerced sexual relations.” Unlike the alienating and undesirable
foreignness of other Asian groups, which “left intact the bourgeois ideal of the white woman’s
passionless domesticity,” the imagined desirability of Filipino men “conjur[ed] up the dangerous
possibility that these relationships might reflect white women’s desire and agency.”
44
The
threatening sexuality of Filipino masculinity, and its discursive links to representations of black
male sexuality, disrupts the narrative of racial triangulation that situates Asian Americanness
always in opposition to both blackness and whiteness. As Ellen D. Wu notes, such unsavory or

44
undesired connections between Asianness, blackness, and brownness, did not go unnoticed or
unsurveilled in this period, not only by white bureaucrats and sociologists hoping to prove Asian
capacities for assimilation into whiteness, but also by Asian Americans themselves, particularly
Japanese and Chinese American communities focused on proving themselves capable of
assimilation and worthy of uplift.
45

These two incidents echo and rebound against each other, as the space beyond Chinatown,
the easy commingling of Filipino men and white women, the white woman’s “unnatural” bodily
movement, the physical defects of Helen Chao and the woman in the bar, and the Mexican men’s
seeming ease and comfort cohere a racialized and gendered structure of feeling that both Old
Master Wang and Wang Ta feel excluded from and discomfited by. Notions of propriety,
standards of bodily appearance and ability, and norms of racialized sexual behavior crystallize in
these exchanges, as Wang Ta and Old Master Wang retreat from the borderlands of interracial
desire and Filipino and Mexican men linger and flourish. While the phrase “Asian American” is
never uttered in The Flower Drum Song, then, we might say that its specter appears in these
scenes—not as a panethnic bond but rather as a social, and spatial, cleavage between
Chinese/American and Filipino/American men. Importantly, Chinese American women are also
identified with the border space, particularly Helen Chao. Unlike Old Master Wang and Wang
Ta, however, Helen Chao does not merely enter the border space and exit again; rather, because
of her disfigured face, she seems to linger in the border space—that is, until she is rejected by
Wang Ta a final time and commits suicide in the San Francisco Bay.
Just as different histories accumulate in different geographies and spaces, these histories also
dictate the bounds of gendered behavior and sexual desire, as Chinatown is imagined—contrary
to its reputation—to be a space of proper desire and behavior, while Filipino men and Filipino

45
spaces are imagined—in confirmation of their reputation—as improper and unnatural. And while
Asian America here congeals a social cleavage in the behaviors and geographies of Chinese and
Filipino men, it also represents a bodily threat to Chinese women who cannot take up residence
in either the literal or metaphorical space of “proper” Chinatown.
All mention of Filipinotown, Filipinos themselves, or even white people disappears in every
iteration of Flower Drum Song following C.Y. Lee’s novel. While Wang Chi-yang’s encounter
with the dancing white woman is preserved in a sense in the next two adaptations, Helen Chao’s
suicide is totally expunged from the story. Yet even as these scenes are adapted, transformed, or
eliminated entirely, they continue to exert affective pressure on the iterations of Flower Drum
Song that come after Lee’s, never quite dispelling entirely. Thus, even as each version attempts
to cohere an Asian America that produces a specific type of Asian American subjects—just as
Chinatown cohered and produced specific Chinese American subjects in Lee’s version—they yet
drag with them the cleaving function of Asian America first cohered by Lee’s novel.

VERY MUCH LIKE CHOP SUEY: RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S ASIAN AMERICA
While the Asian America of C.Y. Lee’s novel encodes the anxieties generated by Chinese
Americans’ shifting social positions in the years following World War II and leading up to the
Cold War, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s adaptation’s preoccupation with Cold War politics is
overt. Adapted for Broadway in 1959 and for the screen in 1961, Flower Drum Song was Rodger
and Hammerstein’s third “chopstick,” or “Oriental” musical, following in the footsteps of South
Pacific (opened on Broadway in 1949, released on film in 1958) and The King and I (Broadway
1951; film 1956). Unlike C.Y. Lee, Rodgers and Hammerstein were self-consciously writing for
a national audience—by 1959, they had already been crowned kings of national musical theatre

46
for almost two decades—and, as in their previous “chopstick” musicals, had a pointedly
racialized intent in producing the play: when asked what the play was about, Richard Rodgers
once responded, “The usual thing you hear, you know, is East is East, and West is West, and all
that nonsense. We show that East and West can get together with a little adjustment.”
46
What set
Flower Drum Song apart from its predecessors, however, was its domestic setting—South
Pacific and The King and I were both set outside the territory of the U.S.—and, more strikingly,
its (almost) all Asian/American cast. While the Broadway version still featured some white
actors in yellowface, the film version featured an all Asian-ethnic lead cast, with the exception of
Juanita Hall, a black woman who had previously starred as Bloody Mary in the Broadway and
film versions of South Pacific. Flower Drum Song was the only all-Asian American lead cast in
Broadway’s history until the opening of Allegiance in 2015, and the film held the same honor
until 1993’s The Joy Luck Club.
The adapted musical focuses on the romantic escapades of a quartet of central characters:
Mei Li (the spelling, perhaps predictably, ethnicized), an immigrant of “proper” Chinese
character, arrives to honor her mail order marriage contract with Sammy Fong, an Americanized
businessman who runs a night club in Chinatown. Sammy pawns her off to the family of Wang
Ta, firstborn son of traditional Chinese patriarch Wang Chi-yang, who, unbeknownst to his
father, has fallen in love with Linda Low (adapted from Linda Lung), who he thinks is just a
regular Chinese American girl. Of course, Linda is actually the star performer at Sammy Fong’s
nightclub—and Sammy’s long time girlfriend. After many hijinks, the show closes with the
double marriage of the ideal citizens, Mei Li and Wang Ta, and their comic counterparts, Sammy
and Linda. As in the novel, the phrase “Asian American” is never mentioned in the play itself.
And yet, the figure of Asian America looms large in everything from the music to the

47
choreography to the play’s invented plot, operating as a disciplinary form that separates out
potential “Asian Americans”—or those that are able to be incorporated into the nation—from
those that must remain outsiders. At the same time, the adapted scenes exert an affective
temporal drag that both complicates and intensifies the disciplinary force of Rodgers &
Hammerstein’s formulation of Asian America.
Critics of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song have, for the most part, agreed that
the play operates along the dual axis of Cold War racial politics, which sought to simultaneously
incorporate previously excluded racial minorities into the imagined community of the nation
while still justifying its military interventions in Southeast Asia with racialized logic. That is, in
order to position the U.S.’s version of capitalist democracy as both economically and morally
superior to Russia and China’s communism, the nation sought to project itself as a site of
equality and opportunity—and to do so, it had to embrace the racial minorities it once
excluded.
47
Yet, at the same time, successive wars in Korea and Vietnam—ostensibly to fend off
the encroaching threat of communist China—depended on the reinvigoration of the same
patronizing, imperialist rhetoric that had animated the U.S.’s takeover of the Philippines at the
turn of the century.
48
Thus, though Asians needed to be embraced into the nation, they
nonetheless could not assimilate fully into American whiteness; the retention of outward signs of
Asian ethnicity functioned both as social capital for the U.S. and as justification for the
continuance, and intensification, of militaristic Orientalism.
As critics of the play argue, the incorporation of Asian Americans into the nation, ritualized
in Flower Drum Song through graduation and marriage ceremonies, hinges on the play’s doubled
insistence on both the characters’ exterior ethnicization and interior universal humanity. In
particular, the invented and fairly traditional double marriage plot highlights the conflation of

48
raced, gendered, and sexualized behavioral norms with the ideals of American citizenship,
reimagined in the Cold War to be aesthetically multicultural but fundamentally unchanged—
hence the musical’s central song and set piece, “Chop Suey,” which supposedly celebrates Asian
American existence and yet, strangely, mentions nothing specific to Chinese or Asian American
in its lyrics. As Christina Klein argues, the seemingly paradoxical pairing of the accoutrements
of Asian ethnic difference—accents, traditional dress, flower drum songs—and internal, fungible
American sameness was part and parcel of the politics of the era.
49

The juxtaposition of Linda Low and Mei Li as possible romantic partners for Wang Ta
highlights this doubled Cold War imperative of racial incorporation without assimilation. As
Cindy I-Fen Cheng and Susan Koshy note, the influx of Asian American women after the
passing of the War Brides Act in 1945 marked a shift in Asian Americans’ perceived capacity for
assimilation, as it allowed Chinese and other Asian Americans to form heterosexual, nuclear
family units for the first time.
50
Cheng argues that the “domestic ideal” of suburban-dwelling,
heterosexual, nuclear families functioned as a “gateway” between those who “counted” as an
American and who did not.
51
Yet the transition from a cultural imaginary that figured Asian
women—and Chinese women in particular—as licentious, disease-ridden prostitutes that needed
to be banned from entering the country into cultural guarantors of heteronormative domesticity
was by no means smooth. Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song attempts to balance the
imperatives of all these imaginaries by binarizing the two Asian/American women in the play.
Mei Li, whose signature song “One Hundred Million Miracles,” is a testament to both her
filial piety and her inherent “Chineseness,” embodies the “marriageably feminine” Asian
woman, suitable for incorporation into the nation because she poses no threat to the dominant
structural orders of heterosexual desire, national belonging, and racial containment. Opposite

49
her, Linda Low’s signature song, “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” signals her threatening racial and
sexual capacities both. On the one hand, Linda’s sexual licentiousness—not just her work as a
stripper, but more damningly, her seeming delight in men’s attention—aligns her with the image
of sexual perversion and moral degradation that led to the specific ban of Chinese women and
mass deportation of supposed Chinese “prostitutes” even before Chinese Exclusion was legally
enacted.
52
On the other, her capacity to “be a success in her gender” is just as threatening as her
capacity for sexual pleasure. That is, her prioritization of gender over race or ethnicity—her
explicit lack of “Chineseness,” and her ability to perform ideals of beauty and sexuality
previously reserved for white women—hints at her threatening assimilability, her spectacular
ability to be not a Chinese girl but, instead, just a girl. While Mei Li’s outward foreignness—her
pronounced accent, her clothing—might once have marked her for exclusion from the American
nation, in the Cold War era, these accoutrements instead become the very things that guarantee
her acceptance and Linda’s rejection.
On the surface, Asian America coheres throughout the play in “symbolic ceremonies”
that “pay for the sublime change” of Asians to Asian Americans; that is, the inhabitants of
Chinatown prove their worthiness for American citizenship and civic inclusion by participating
properly—and even enthusiastically—in America’s treasured ceremonies: graduation and
marriage. Yet if Asian America must be ceremonially accessed, the potential that it may be—or
should be—inaccessible to some remains. In this threat, never realized in the play yet somehow
still palpably felt throughout, the cleaving function of Asian America leaches through and
resonates from scenes that have been adapted from the novel itself.
53
While Lee deployed border
spaces and Filipino border bodies to mark the confines of Chinese America, Rodgers and
Hammerstein are not interested in the space of Chinatown or the textures of Chinese

50
Americanness it generates. Rather, they incorporate these border scenes into the space of
Chinatown itself, rendering the disciplinary force of Asian America not through space but
through Chinese bodies and behavior. That is, where once Asian America cohered as a racial
structure of feeling that separated Filipino and Chinese spaces and bodies, it here inheres within
Chinese bodies to separate out viable “Asian American” subjects from nonviable ones.
54

The borderland of the novel, where “jerking white bodies,” Filipino and Mexican men,
and physical defects all coagulated to make discrete the boundaries of proper Chinese America,
appears not in scenes but in the behaviors and affects of Linda Low and Wang Ta’s younger
brother, Wang San. In the novel, Old Master Wang is scandalized by a white woman stripping in
front of him; in particular, the proximity of her body, as well as her seemingly unnatural
movements, unnerve him: “Tong, tong, tong, she jerked her almost completely nude body right
above Wang Chi-yang’s head to the beat of the drum that was rising to a crescendo […] It was
bad luck to have a woman jerk the lower part of her body over his head like that.”
55
In Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s version, it is Linda Low whose scandalous dancing unseats Wang, when
Sammy Fong lures the Wang family, accompanied by Mei Li and her father, to see Linda
perform at his club. In the Broadway version of the musical, Linda enters the stage singing a
reprise of “Grant Avenue,” an ode to Chinatown’s appeal to tourists: “You travel there in a
trolley, in a trolley up you climb […] You can eat, if you’re in the mood/shark fin soup, bean
cake fish/The girl who serves you all your food/is another tasty dish!” According to the stage
directions, “LINDA crosses to the Left not looking where she’s going, and on the line, another
tasty dish [sic] rips off her bodice, a foot or two in front of WANG’S face! […] WANG has had
enough. He rises and walks out, straight across the floor, through the chorus of stripping
dancers.”
56
In the film, though she is no longer singing the reprise of Grant Avenue—cut,

51
presumably, for time—the moment of transgression is punctuated even more starkly: as Linda
(played by Nancy Kwan) dances, she cheekily closes the fans covering her body, revealing first
one breast, then the other. She moves, unknowingly, towards Wang, who sits at the head of the
table, and, just as her eyes meet his, she closes the last fan above her panties. As in the stage
version, he promptly gets up and leaves, followed by Mei Li, her father, and Ta.
57

Where once the “jerking white body” drove Wang out of the border spaces and back to
the interior of Chinatown, here the dancing body is inescapably within, and part of, Chinatown—
so much so that the striptease occurs during a song about Chinatown. While Christina Klein and
Anne Cheng focus—rightly so—on Linda’s “spectacular whiteness,” and Bruce McConachie
emphasizes the exterior markers of Asianness—that is, their visible, ethnically marked
outsides—as “containers” for properly Americanized insides, I want to suggest here that Linda’s
unsuitability for the domestic interior of Asian America is not merely a scopic matter. Instead,
the visuality of Linda’s too-Americanized body rebounds against the affect of the border scene
that her body adapts. Linda’s sexual transgression repeats the sexual transgression of the
anonymous white dancer; her improper body absorbs impropriety and unnaturalness of the white
dancer’s body; and the space of the club, though now incorporated into Chinatown, is still
saturated with border meanings. That is, Linda’s body becomes a border, not between Chinese
America and Filipino America, but rather between Asian America—properly disciplined, Asian
enough to remain outwardly marked but American enough to feel inwardly loyal—and Asian
bodies that just happen to be in America, but are not welcome into it.
Yet Rodger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song does not merely affectively adapt, or
transmute, the Filipino bodies of Lee’s Flower Drum Song into Chinese ones—it also features
Patrick Adiarte, a young Filipino dancer who played Wang San, Ta’s younger brother, in both

52
the Broadway and film productions. Wang San, like Linda Low, is threateningly Americanized;
where most of the other characters speak in “a smidgen of pidgen,” Wang San is hard to
understand because his speech is too riddled with slang—when his father asks him to explain
himself, he simply responds, “That’s bop, pop!”
58
And it’s in fact Wang San who reveals Linda’s
deception first; when she arrives at Madame Liang’s graduation party in a qipao, ready to present
herself to Master Wang as a suitable Chinese girl, Wang San distracts her by asking, “Do you
sing rock’n’roll?” Linda, consummate performer, responds, “I dig that the most!” The two burst
into an impromptu rendition of “You Be the Rock, I’ll be the Roll,” a brief, partnered blend of
swing and cha-cha that culminates with Wang San doing an Elvis roll of his hips while Linda
parades around him.
Trained by Jerome Robbins and Gene Kelly, Adiarte is featured in two other songs, “The
Other Generation” and “Chop Suey.”
59
In both, as in “You Be the Rock,” his dancing erupts in
the middle of the song, and the rest of the action comes to a virtual halt as the other characters
gather around him to watch his spectacle, and the orchestration temporarily drops out as only
percussion underscores the movement of his body. Like Linda, Wang San’s threat to the order of
Asian America is visual: in the film, he’s always clad in Western clothes (usually a baseball
uniform), and his dancing, like Linda’s, marks his body as having an excess, and threatening,
capacity for assimilation. Unlike Linda, that excess is not in the form of excess sexuality (though
he does, as I’ll suggest below, cut across the heterosexual grain of the film). Rather, Wang San’s
excess is in Adiarte’s virtuosity; as he moves effortlessly from soft shoe, to square dance, to jazz,
from pirouettes to split jumps, Adiarte does not perform Americanness but embodies it—even
masters it.

53
Adiarte’s virtuosic body interrupts the action, both physical and musical, and at the same
time, sometimes moves against the heterosexual grain of the film. In “Chop Suey,” a quartet of
women coo about their ability to give their hair a “neat wave,” and Wang San pushes through
them to sing, “Dreaming in my Maidenform bra/Dreamed I danced the cha cha cha”; the girls
beside him begin to cha cha along with him. Here, Wang San’s appearance fluctuates in meaning
and affect through the multiple lenses of adaptation, performance, visuality, and language, as
well as the accrued affects that his Filipino-playing-Chinese-dressed-American body drags with
it: he is, maybe, effete and emasculated here, not interrupting the women but joining them, an
eruption of the fantastic effeminate Asian American man that Rodgers and Hammerstein had so
far avoided portraying; but he simultaneously calls to mind those Filipino men who haunted the
edges of C.Y. Lee’s novel, who were more at ease with women than Wang Ta or the other
Chinese men in the novel, and more mobile. Later in the song, as mentioned above, his solo
dance again pushes through and interrupts a heterosexual couple dancing. Here again, the
racialized gender trouble of his body moves along two different planes: he interrupts the couple,
stopping the action with his dancing, but he also summons the dancers to begin again, and they
rejoin him in an enthusiastically heterosexual finish to the song.
Adiarte’s bodily capacity to stop and start action at will draws attention to the pressure
adaptive drag exerts on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s figuration of Asian America as a newly
emergent, celebratory formation that can only occur in approved spaces and through already-
vetted rituals. Indeed, his virtuosically assimilated body reminds us that, as discussed above,
Filipinos had already been assimilated into American standards of fashion, language, and culture
long before the Cold War made the incorporation of Asians into the U.S. a global imperative.
This fantastic assimilation, so contrary to early twentieth century fantasies of Asians as

54
permanent, unassimilable others, was the product of the U.S.’s earlier experiments in
“benevolent” military intervention, which then sought to contain Filipinos in the Philippines,
where they could do the global work of affirming the United States’ beneficence without
threatening the domestic racial order. Yet Adiarte’s very presence in the play and film belies the
failure of that earlier containment policy.
Simultaneously, his body adaptively drags with it a differentiating force that disallows
Asian America to cohere into a unified and universal category. By mapping the original novel’s
inter-Asian ethnic tensions onto a constellation of Chinese/American subjectivities who are
nonetheless represented by a variety of Asian bodies, Rodgers & Hammerstein suggest that
“Chinese American” and “Asian American” are metonymic, that is, that “Chinese America” is a
synecdoche for Asian America and is therefore, even in its seeming specificity, capable of
representing Asian America as a whole. Thus, if any Chinese subject can be transmuted into a
Chinese American by participating in the correct civic avenues and ceremonies, so too can any
Asian become an Asian American in the same manner. The dually inclusive and exclusive
function of this formation, however, is again disturbed by the vacillating tension dragged into the
forward momentum of the plot by Adiarte’s performance. The multiple layers of in/assimilability
swathing his body remind the viewer that barometers of inclusion and exclusion do not progress
linearly but rather fluctuate unevenly and disperse differentially across varied subject positions
and bodies.
Though his gendered body often exceeds the bounds of the heterosexual, gendered
discipline of Asian America as cohered in Rodger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, Wang
San is not punished for this excess. In contrast, Linda Low is disciplined twice—first, by being
rejected by Wang Ta, the ideal citizen, and then by marrying Sammy Fong, a man so unsuited to

55
marriage (and the civic participation marriage guarantees) that he literally sings about it—“Don’t
Marry Me.” Helen Chao, too, is disciplined; while she doesn’t kill herself as she does in the
book, her ballad, “Love, Look Away,” is staged as a ballet wherein Wang Ta fails to save her
from a cadre of masked men, and at the end, she slips out of Ta’s arms, down a slide of rocks,
into a fog that looks, for a moment, like the swell of the ocean. While Helen appears in the final
scene in the film, she never speaks again, nor is mentioned in the stage directions of the libretto.
In contrast to these women, Wang San is not only not punished, but featured in his exuberance
without comment beyond the ensemble’s appreciative gazes. His gender transgressions and
capacity for virtuosic assimilation do not register as threat but rather vibrate underneath and
across the disciplinary force of Asian America the musical assembles. Here, as in the novel,
Asian America feels differently for men than women; its borders are more porous and flexible,
its edges slightly duller.
Lee and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s versions of Flower Drum Song together reveal an
altogether different Asian America than the one cohered by the Exclusion era/1968 narrative,
which frames Asian America as a panethnic bond and activist formation shaped by and in
response to U.S. Orientalist policy and sentiment. Both wrought in the waning years of the
Exclusion era and the early years of the Cold War, the early Flower Drum Songs instead reveal
an Asian America not defined by exclusion but rather functioning as the pivot between national
inclusion and exclusion. Here, Asian America resonates not as sameness but rather as a
differentiating force that cleaves incorporable Asian Americans from their unincorporable others,
marked not by a monolithic invocation of Oriental otherness but rather a textured and fine-
grained assemblage of acceptable behaviors, sexual desires, and gendered bodily capacities
alongside class and ethnic distinctions. This Asian America was not cohered solely by white

56
elites seeking to shape Asian American communities for their convenience; it was also shaped by
Asian Americans, like Lee and Adiarte, who benefited from the thickening of social positions
available for Asian Americans to inhabit. And while this vision may eventually have been
greeted with ambivalence and even disdain by future Asian Americans, for the decade
surrounding Lee’s initial publication and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Broadway and film debuts,
it was received with pleasure and love not just by mainstream white audiences but also by Asian
American audiences who felt, as Hwang did, that such a vision was “nothing short of
revolutionary.”
60

The post-World War II and Cold War politics that coagulate and generate emotional and
bodily affects in both CY Lee and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Songs seem, at first
glance, to have been banished entirely from David Henry Hwang’s rewritten version, which
debuted in Los Angeles in 2001 and on Broadway in 2002. Hwang’s version, after all, featured a
rewrite of the libretto so complete that not a single line of the original play remained, although
the songs themselves were preserved. Yet I argue in the final section that, while the affective
structure of Asian America is certainly transformed by Hwang’s new libretto, the adaptive
affective force of both the original novel and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical continue to
exert pressure, troubling any streamlined narrative of progress that Hwang attempts to craft in his
new iteration. Flower Drum Song’s adaptive drag also exerts pressure on the seemingly profound
social and racial shifts between the years of the Cold War and the beginning of the twenty first
century, as the “War on Terror,” which shadowed the opening of Hwang’s version in Los
Angeles, itself adapts Cold War logics and narratives, making good on Hwang’s proposed
relationship between the old and the new.

57
LOVE, LOOK AWAY: DAVID HENRY HWANG’S ADAPTED ASIAN AMERICA
David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Flower Drum Song, as explored above, makes much of
its power to transform what is unlovable into something that can be loved by contemporary
audiences. And indeed, the play—and the Asian America it coheres—is much changed; no
longer a spatialized logic of propriety, nor a disciplinary form, Asian America appears in
Hwang’s Flower Drum Song as a strategy for capital accumulation, capable of being flexibly
deployed by both white people and Asian Americans themselves. Yet for all its contemporary
accoutrements, the play failed to capture the hearts and minds of its audience, closing at a loss a
mere six months after opening on Broadway. Its failure was variously blamed on Hwang’s
unfocused script and a lackluster marketing team. David H. Lewis, author of the only published
book detailing both Rodgers & Hammerstein’s and Hwang’s productions, suggests that the
marketing team committed too much time and money—10% of the overall budget—to
advertising in New York’s Asian American neighborhoods and communities and not enough to
courting the patronage of “the musical’s natural audience base”—that is, white cultural
consumers.
61
Actors in the cast speculated both that local Asian Americans were not a “viable
market” or the show’s “primary target audience,” and that 2002’s prevailing social climate—
“The rough winter. The war. The economy. The recession.”—made audiences unreceptive to the
comedic spectacle of the show.
62
Neither Asian American or mainstream white audiences
materialized in numbers big enough to keep the show’s lights on, despite its promising previews
in Los Angeles.
The doubled invocation of Asian Americans as a dubious and unenthusiastic market for the
play and the “war” hint at the domestic and global transformations that set the stage for this new
iteration of Flower Drum Song. The change in attitudes towards Chinese and other Asian

58
Americans during the Cold War was part of a series of social shifts that led to the 1965
Immigration Act, discussed above. The Hart-Celler Act, in turn, was part of a broader swath of
large-scale initiatives and legislative changes in the Cold War and Civil Rights era that marked a
“racial break” in the U.S., during which the U.S. State, for the first time, admitted that race and
racism was a problem of the state.
63
This admission posed radical structural challenges to the
power of the U.S. state and the distribution of economic and social resources, but those
challenges were quickly managed by the ascension of “multiculturalism” and “colorblindness” as
ideologies that could provide surface solutions: “multiculturalism” as a cultural mechanism that
transmuted projects of redistribution into projects of representation, and “colorblindness” as a
legal and institutional language of putative race neutrality that could be used to advocate against,
rather than for, structural change.
64

Thus initiatives and projects instantiated by Civil Rights actions were absorbed, in a limited
way, into social and state institutions. Most notably for this project, the demand for ethnic studies
programs broadly—and Asian American studies specifically—in the late 1960s led to the official
institution of many of such departments in the 1970s and 1980s, and the development of such
departments allowed for the entry of select Asian American authors, artists, and cultural
producers into the “canon” of American culture.
65
David Henry Hwang, in fact, is one such artist
and author; his 1988 play, M. Butterfly, was the first—and only—play written by an Asian
American to win the Tony Award for Best Play. Limited, or “token,” representation for people of
color in otherwise still white cultural elites and canons attempted to satisfy demands for cultural
representation without radically reorienting notions of who produces, or consumes, American
culture. Thus, Hwang himself might have accrued enough cultural capital to stage Flower Drum
Song as, seemingly, a passion project of his own, but the onus remained on the producers to

59
market the play not to Asian Americans but rather to the white cultural elite still largely in
charge of parceling out markers of cultural worthiness and artistry.
However, as discussed above, though the translation of the Asian American activist
movement into the institutionalization of Asian American studies departments might suggest
that, by 2001, “Asian American” had consolidated into a known quantity and a “primordial”
identification, the opposite was the case.
66
That is, though Asian America has coalesced in elite
cultural institutions as a legitimate cultural formation worthy of (limited) incorporation into the
canon, it had only become more complex and fragmented “on the ground.” The 1965
Immigration Act allowed unprecedented numbers of immigrants from all over the Asian
continent into the U.S., but as suggested above, its hierarchy of preferences fundamentally
changed the class, national, and ethnic characteristics of the immigrant population. Later
immigration and refugee acts—such as the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Immigration Act of
1990—further striated the Asian/American population. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and
Hmong refugees fleeing the legacy of the American war in Southeast Asia entered the U.S. by
the millions in the 1970s and 1980s but were offered little domestic assistance or compassion
once they arrived, leading to extremely high rates of unemployment and poverty within refugee
communities. In contrast, the 1990 Immigration Act contained a provision for an “immigrant
investor visa program” (EB-5) that granted permanent residency to foreign nationals investing $1
million in American businesses (or at least $500,000 in a rural area or area of high
unemployment) and creating at least 10 jobs for U.S. citizens. Immigrants from Asia tend to
receive the majority of the share of EB-5 and H-1B visas, which provide temporary visas for
highly skilled workers and are particularly used by the high-tech sector for recruitment; Indians

60
alone, for instance, received 56% of H-1B visas in 2011, while Chinese immigrants almost
maxed out the 10,000 EB-5 visa quota in 2014.
67

The radical class differences instantiated by these changing immigration laws do not just
differentiate Asian Americans by ethnicity and nationality, but led to striation even within ethnic
populations. Chinatowns themselves have seen vast shifts in economic demographics and in
structures of power; Peter Kwong, for instance, argues that the wave of elite and professional
immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong triggered by the Communist victory in Vietnam in
1975 and the subsequent wave of state-led, limited capitalist development throughout Asia
formed a new population of “uptown Chinese.” These uptown Chinese invested their
considerable capital in existing Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco and helped to
develop new “suburban Chinatowns,” like Monterey Park in Los Angeles. Yet such investment
and development only contributed to the exploitation and vulnerability of “downtown
Chinese”—low-skilled and domestic workers, laundry-men and garment workers, and
undocumented immigrants—rather than alleviating their condition.
68
Thus while doubts about
Asian America’s—or Chinese America’s—suitability as a market for Flower Drum Song
emerged largely from a concern about their buying power relative to white cultural elites, they
also marked a growing uncertainty about what, if anything, could be counted on as a core of
Asian American or Chinese American experience, which only grew more fragmented with each
passing year.
Such doubts could only have been exacerbated by the beginning of the “War on Terror.” As
David H. Lewis recounts, the 9/11 attacks occurred while Flower Drum Song was in rehearsal
for its pre-Broadway opening in Los Angeles. When the actors and crew convened for rehearsal
on September 12, “an emotional paralysis gripped the company… It was too much for the

61
company to continue that day.”
69
Later that week, “they paused during a rehearsal to conduct a
company memorial for the lost. They prayed. They sang. They lit candles. Like every other
American, they felt as if their world would never be the same again.” Like every American war
before it, the War on Terror—which spawned the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, smaller military interventions in the Philippines, Somalia, and Kyrgysztan, and
the ongoing campaigns in Syria and Iraq—remapped not only global alliances but also domestic
racial imaginaries. In particular, the War on Terror directed (and continues to direct)
surveillance, suspicion, and violence at Muslim, Arabic, and South Asian bodies. Yet just as it
did in World War II and the Cold War, this targeted suspicion of one racialized population
allowed for the further incorporation of other racialized populations into the national imaginary.
As shown in Lewis’s brief mention of the company memorial in which, “like every other
American [sic],” the Asian/American actors and crew grieved for their country, the War on
Terror marked yet another moment in which some Asian American bodies were marked as
enemy aliens while other Asian Americans were incorporated into the grieving and vengeful
nation.
70

In this cultural milieu, the vision of Asian America that David Henry Hwang’s Flower Drum
Song coheres seems perfectly appropriate. The increasing striation between “downtown” or
“underclass” Asian/American immigrants and refugees and super mobile, economically elite
“uptown” Asian/Americans who move between the U.S. and Asia accruing capital is but one
facet of global neoliberal multiculturalism, which was ascendant in the 1970s and 1980s and, as
scholars of neoliberalism argue, hegemonic by the early 2000s.
71
Under the aegis of this regime
of “managed dissensus,” the power of the nation-state to bestow value, worthiness and care upon
those who earn its citizenship has been displaced by a global system of “differentiated

62
citizenship,” in which “mobile individuals with human capital exercise citizenship-like claims in
diverse locations, whereas other citizens are devalued and vulnerable, in practice unable to
exercise many rights and subject to the state’s disciplining and civilizing/disqualifying regimes
rather than to the pastoral care bestowed on citizens the state believes more worthy.”
72

Correspondingly, I argue that Hwang’s updated and much-changed version of Flower Drum
Song coheres Asian America as an affective flow of accrued social and economic capital,
“sticking” to those who wield it most effectively. That is, Hwang reenvisions 1960s Chinatown
not as an idealistic space for the transformation of (select) Asians into “Asian Americans,” but
rather a fiercely contested space in which white people and Asian Americans each fight for the
right to determine and represent Asian America. The ability—and right—to represent Asian
America depends, the play reveals, on the proper, most flexible vision of Asian America that can
marshal both economic success and cultural authenticity.
Yet, seemingly, Hwang’s vision of Asian America was a drag to contemporary audiences,
both white and Asian American. I argue that this is in part because, as I have suggested, the War
on Terror exerts pressure on such a vision, revealing as it does the other functions of Asian
America that Flower Drum Song’s adaptation drags with it. At the same time, the promise of a
panethnic bond formed through the representation of Chinese Americans-as-stand-ins-for-Asian
Americans did not, in the early 2000s, have the same cultural power as it did in the early 1960s.
That is, the appeal to panethnic Asian America—premised on, and narrated through, the
Exclusion/self-consciousness narrative outlined in the introduction to this chapter—may have
appealed to the institutional and cultural Asian American elite, but it failed to capture the
imagination of actual Asian American audiences, whose experience of contemporary Asian
America—if they experience such a thing at all—is much more freighted and complex than the

63
interplay between exploitative white/exploited Oriental Other that Hwang’s Flower Drum Song
invokes.
According to Hwang, his intent in rewriting Flower Drum Song's libretto was to “write the
book that Hammerstein might have wanted to write had he been Asian American,” that is, to
preserve the spirit and intention of the musical—to represent Asian America to US audiences—
through a more authentic Asian American perspective.
73
In Hwang’s version, which was
rewritten to the extent that not a single line from the original libretto appears in it, Wang Chi-
yang and his son Ta run a struggling Chinese opera theatre, The Golden Pearl, in San Francisco’s
Chinatown in the late 1950s; the theatre is unprofitable except for Ta’s once weekly “nightclub”
night, designed to attract white tourists with star performer, Linda Low. When Ta watches newly
immigrated Mei Li perform a traditional operatic dance, he’s inspired to create a new number: “a
fresh off the boat maiden turns into an All-American girl,” with a little striptease thrown in. The
new number is wildly popular with white audiences, and soon, with the help of agent Madame
Liang, the Golden Pearl is converted into Club Chop Suey. Wang, seduced away from his loyalty
to traditional opera by the growing audiences, transforms into Uncle Sammy Wong—a play on
Uncle Sam—a nightclub host who trades on Confucius jokes and popping out of Chinese takeout
containers.
74
Eventually, Ta begins to fear they’re going too far in selling out their own culture.
After some romantic business afterthoughts, Ta marries Mei Li, Wang marries the club’s agent
Madame Liang, and they agree to have one night a week at the club dedicated to Chinese
opera—as performed by Mei Li and Ta.
At the behest of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation, Hwang had to preserve the music
and the lyrics of the songs, but the contexts in which they appear are so radically different as to
upend their meaning. For instance, “Chop Suey”—initially performed as a celebration of

64
Madame Liang’s graduation from “citizenship school”—is, in Hwang’s version, the second-act
opener that signals Wang’s steep descent into Oriental kitsch and his cringe-worthy embrace of
the “Uncle Sammy” character. The stage directions reveal the parodic nature of the production:
“Onstage at the very flashy Club Chop Suey, several months later. Reflecting their new-found
prosperity, the theatre now features neon, smoke and over-the-top ‘Oriental’ motifs. Wang in his
stage persona of Sammy Fong is discovered in a giant take-out container. He is dressed as a
chef, and backed-up by Chorus Boys who dance with giant chopsticks.”
75
Later, as the song
continues onstage, Wang goes backstage to regale Ta with his new ideas for his act:
Wang: Son, have you thought about our new idea?
Ta: The “Swinging Confucius” number?
Wang: I come out as: Master Confucius, Ancient Oriental Wise-guy.
Ta: You guys ever think we might be going just a bit too far?
Wang: (as Confucius) Confucius say, Two whites don’t make a Wong. (as himself) What
do you mean, “too far”?
Ta: What happened to the “New Chinatown”?
Liang: Sure, we'll give the tourists what they want, but we’ll have the last laugh.
Ta: You don’t care that you’re making us look ridiculous?
Wang: Sammy Fong is not ridiculous!
Ta: No? Has Sammy Fong looked in a mirror lately?
Wang: All the time. And whenever I do, I thank Sammy Fong. Because without him, I
would turn back into just another Chinaman. And so would you.
76

Here, Hwang criticizes the seeming authenticity and sincerity of the original Chop Suey by
revealing the economic and racial machinations at work behind the performance, and which
assembled to make the performance work. That is, Wang’s version of Chop Suey is a cynical
attempt to sell white America’s racism back to white audiences by degrading himself in front of
them. This recoding of “Chop Suey” retroactively works to unseat, and make cynical, the
supposed sincerity and joy of the original Chop Suey number, and at the same time, suggests that
the original musical’s popularity is accounted for by similar racist mechanisms:
Asian/Americans selling white America the version of Asian America they could consume.

65
Wang’s comments about being “just another Chinaman” without Sammy Fong exposes the
economic and material force behind the original musical’s disciplinary use of “Asian America”
to separate worthy citizens from unworthy citizens; those that can “give the tourists what they
want”—or perform Asian Americanness to the strictures of white America’s desires—will have
“the last laugh,” while those that can’t will be left behind, materially and figuratively.
Wang and Liang’s vision of “New Chinatown,” referenced above, is simultaneously
economically driven. After Ta denounces Wang’s vision as ridiculous, Madame Liang soothes
Wang: “Don’t worry about Ta. Here’s my new deal: a Chinatown in every city, and a Club Chop
Suey in every city.” They burst back into song: “Boston, Austin, Wichita and St. Louis/Chop
suey!/Peking Duck and Mulligan stew/Plymouth Rock and Little Rock, too./Milk and beer and
Seven-up and Drambuie—/Chop suey!”
77
Asian America coheres here not as a disciplinary
figure or a spatialized logic but as a franchise that can be repackaged and sold throughout the US
with slight but insubstantial regional variations—that is, a commodity. This commodification
works within the logic of multiculturalism to direct material capital towards Asian Americans—
Wang and Liang, as well as their performers—without fundamentally destabilizing the structural
power of white supremacy.
Of course, this vision of Asian America as commodity is not one the play itself actually
endorses: in an early draft of the play, Wang’s willingness to minstrelize his own identity
eventually drove him to a second-act breakdown.
78
In the era of multiculturalism, “Asian
American” is only a viable strategy for capital accumulation if it accumulates social, as well as
economic, capital for those deploying it, and the accrual of social capital often operates through a
discourse of “authenticity.” In a global system of commodified differences, that is, authenticity
or “realness” gains social (and sometimes economic) capital in an ethnic or racially identified

66
market. Racial and ethnic authenticity functions as a seeming protection against commodity—in
that it guarantees “realness,” in contrast to commodification’s duplicatable, franchisable fakes—
but actually works in aid of commodification, by making commodification psychically viable for
those whose culture, labor, or identity is being commodified.
Just as in the original, Wang Ta and Mei Li are the ideal, though in Hwang’s version, it’s
not their proper performance of citizenship that makes them so—rather, it’s the balance of
economic and social capital they’re able to strike, so that the performance of Asian America is
psychically, socially, and economically viable simultaneously. They do this by striking an
“authentic” balance between racist minstrelsy and nonprofitable cultural performance—by
reinstating a Chinese opera night, one night a week, which they feature in as star performers.
Here, Asian America remains a strategy for capital accumulation, only one that actually
functions more effectively than Uncle Sammy Fong’s racist minstrelsy, being both psychically
and economically viable. And, similarly, because it endorses a more “authentic” and less
minstrelized version of Asian America, Hwang’s version deploys Asian America in order to
accrue social capital for Hwang as well.
Yet Mei Li and Wang Ta are both, in Hwang’s version, played by Filipina/o actors: Lea
Salonga and Jose Llana, respectively. Paradoxically, the same bodies that once aided in
generating Asian America as a social cleavage here embody the ideal form of Asian America as
strategy. Just as Patrick Adiarte’s virtuosic dancing embodied both the racial castration that
marked Filipinos being folded into a panethnic Asian American masculinity and, simultaneously,
dragged with it echoes Filipinos’ colonial figurations as sexual threats distinct from other
Asian/American groups, here Salonga and Lllana’s idealization both embodies “progress” in the
form of inclusion and drags with it the adaptive affects of versions, and histories, past. Lea

67
Salonga, in particular, drags excess bodily meanings onto the stage even beyond those that her
body adapts from previous iterations of Flower Drum Song. Salonga was first discovered in the
Philippines during a search for the perfect actress to play Kim, the Vietnamese ingenue at the
heart of Miss Saigon, the Broadway adaptation of Madame Butterfly. Producers had originally
gone to the Philippines in search of an actress Americanized to be able to carry solo Broadway
numbers and yet “Asian” enough to be deemed authentic (that word again) by American
audiences—thus the turn to the Philippines, where the remnants of their colonial relationship
with America produced, apparently, the perfect blend of Asian and American.
79
Like Adiarte’s
dancing, Salonga’s virtuosic talent both exceeds her racial signification and cements it, as its
power is enough to secure her starring roles and solos usually out of the reach of Asian/American
women and yet is continuously deployed as a marker of Asian/American ethnicity—beyond Miss
Saigon, Flower Drum Song, and 2015’s Allegiance, for instance, Salonga is also known as the
singing voice of Princess Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin and Mulan in Disney’s Mulan.
No surprise, then, that in the adaptation’s shuffling of songs and contexts, Salonga as Mei
Li ends up singing “Love, Look Away”—Helen’s suicide-proxy ballad from the Rodgers and
Hammerstein version. In Hwang’s version, Helen has been transformed in Hai Lung Chao, a
potential love interest for Mei Li who tries to convince her to return to Taiwan with him. Here,
Asian America as disciplinary racial form—a seeming relic of the past—has been thoroughly
absorbed and transmuted into the opportunity for Wang Ta and Mei Li to prove their worthiness
in this new multicultural schema. Of course, after Mei Li sings “Love, Look Away,” Wang Ta
appears—holding her father’s drum, which she pawned for passage—and convinces her to stay.
The drum, like Chinese opera, here signifies an ideal marker of multicultural “authenticity,”
which links Mei Li to her Chinese past through aesthetics and commodities but not through any

68
genuine interpersonal or sustained connection. Says Hai-Lung to Mei Li, trying to convince her
to leave the US: “Chinese should live where they can be proud to be Chinese.” Mei Li: “I think
… that’s possible here.”
80

Here, the affective drag of adaptation works in full force, as the original Helen Chao’s
suicide has been totally excised from this version and yet continues to exert pressure on the
present narrative. Helen Chao, once identified with the border spaces of proper because of her
spinsterhood and disfigured body, appeared in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical as an
example to be disciplined for her failure to conform to the gendered and sexual norms of Asian
America. In Hwang’s version, her suicide (and even its strange visual references) have been
commuted into two characters: Mei Li, to sing Helen’s song, and Hai-Lung, who returns to
China after Mei Li rejects him, unable to economically or psychically sustain his life in the U.S.
Hai Lung’s return to China and Mei Li’s triumphant iteration of Love Look Away—in which she
secures a happy, ideal ending—here represent a less disciplinary and more flexible, or more
“progressive,” vision of Asian America. Of course, Helen doesn’t get a happy ending; Mei Li
does, who has been afforded a happy ending in every single iteration of the text; and so “Love,
Look Away” discomfitingly continues to discipline Helen’s disabled body even as it has been
expunged from the stage. At the same time, Salonga herself, whose virtuousic voice is
commodified as a universal talent while simultaneously dragging with it a long past of
colonization, both embodies the triumphant ideal of Asian America as strategy for capital
accumulation and drags with her the echoes of those nameless Filipino men who constituted the
boundary of proper Chineseness exactly because of their threatening capacity for assimilation.
Here, despite the play’s attempt to convert Asian America into a flexible strategy which
triumphantly clings to the Asian Americans that master it, Asian America’s old function as a

69
disciplinary, cleaving force between those Asian/American bodies that can be incorporated into
the nation and those that can’t lingers in the shadows and surfaces at inconvenient moments.
Salonga’s presence—embodying Filipino America, and Asian America’s, virtuosic present—also
insistently reminds the audience of the ease and relative speed with which specific bodies and
populations traverse this boundary; that is, she reminds us that the boundary between who is
incorporable and who is unincorporable can shift at a moment’s notice, dependent on both
domestic and global forces.
Thus the seeming progress of Asian America—its conversion into a flexible strategy of
capital accumulation which, suitably, sticks most convincingly to the Asian American cultural
producers who can negotiate multiculturalist demands for authenticity and economic viability—
is dragged always invisibly backwards by the affective connections that linger in the space
between what was deemed too old to love and what could be made new. And indeed, what is
“new” about the sociopolitical era that enabled Hwang’s adaptation itself exerts a similar
regressive drag, insistently returning to the political meanings and functions of Cold War Asian
America even as the act of adaptation announces that such political meanings are outdated and
now meaningless. Hwang’s vision of an Asian America that could finally authentically represent
itself to itself was, in the end, a drag, subsumed by the dampening, politically regressive climate
of the early 2000s—that is, as dancer Eric Chan put it, “The rough winter. The war. The
economy. The recession.”
81

Just as each new iteration of Asian America does not simply succeed and improve upon
the iteration that came before it, Hwang’s Flower Drum Song is drenched with the echoes of its
history, which sometimes produces euphony and, at other moments, cacophony. The cacophonic
texture of history crackles against Hwang’s attempt to streamline Flower Drum Song, and,

70
similarly, against the fiction of Asian America’s seamless, stable development throughout
history into a known and quantifiable element in the present.

READING ASIAN AMERICA
In the original programs of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Broadway and national touring
versions of Flower Drum Songs, actor biographies made pointed reference to their citizenship
status and ethnic and national heritage. Phrases like “American of Korean extraction,”
“Californians of Japanese birth and American citizenship,” “native of Seattle,” and “a retired Lt.
Colonel in the U.S. Armed Forces, who fought in Bataan,” made potent political claims about the
Americanness of the Asian American actors performing in the show. Jack Soo, the actor who
played Sammy Fong in both stage and film versions, even explained that he had named changed
his name from Goro Suzuki to the Chinese-sounding Jack Soo in order to escape anti-Japanese
racism that might bar him from employment.
82

Forty years later, in David Henry Hwang’s version, Flower Drum Song closed with a
reprise of the play’s signature song, “One Hundred Million Miracles,” as Mei Li and Ta finally
marry. Mei Li announces, “As I begin my new life, I give thanks to all those who came before
me. My father…” Ta adds, “My mother, and their ancestors before them…” and Mei Li finishes,
“…Whose legacy was passed down to me the day I was born (turns to face the audience) in
Soochow, China.” Ta also turns to face the audience, and adds, “The day I was born—in
Shanghai.” Then each of the characters step forward to face the audience in turn. A few of the
characters name the places of birth specific to character, like Linda, who had already mentioned
she was born in Seattle. Once the main cast are done, however, the stage instructions state that
“Each member of the ensemble now states the actual place of his or her birth.” The print version

71
of the libretto preserves the locations spoken on opening night, ranging from “Providence, Rhode
Island,” to “Fremont, California,” to “Toronto, Canada,” to “Okinawa, Japan.”
83

As this chapter suggests, those intervening years have seen two dominant modes of
reading emerge that can help us interpret these chronicles of origin, nationality, and citizenship.
The first, out of which C.Y. Lee’s and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s versions emerged, is a
(neo)liberal multiculturalist mode of reading. This reading mode interprets the gap between these
two iterations as progressive, such that Asian Americans who once had to pointedly claim their
American citizenship could now announce their diverse origins without fear of alienation. That
is, a liberal multiculturalist mode of reading would embrace Hwang’s version as progress
because its Asian/American cast no longer had to defensively claim American citizenship but
could, instead, comfortably revel in their diversity.
Hwang’s version might be understood to emerge out of both a (neo)liberal multicultural
mode and its counter, an activist/academic Asian American reading mode. Rather than endorsing
the progression between the two iterations of Flower Drum Song, the activist/academic Asian
American reading mode might instead comment on the similarity between the two instances. For
such readers, the actors’ revelations in both instances demonstrate the ways in which American
citizenship, both legal and civic, has always been undergirded by systematic racial exclusion in
the domestic sphere and neocolonial military interventions in the global. That is, the citation of
both birth places and citizenship claims might remind those reading in the activist/academic
mode that “we are here because you were there,” that is, that the presence of Asians in America
will always be inescapably be tied to American empire, and that the presence of Asian
Americans will always grind against America’s attempt to forget or obscure that empire’s history
and present.
84
Yet such readers might also remark on progress, even if of a different kind: the

72
movement from representation by white cultural producers to Asian American cultural producers
is also meaningful to Asian American activists and academics, in that it demonstrates that “Asian
American culture” has progressed out of the silence of the exploited and vulnerable and into its
own “voice.”
I offer in this chapter, and in the dissertation as a whole, a third reading practice, which
resists the call—equally powerful in both (neo)liberal multiculturalist and activist/academic
reading modes—to solidify the meaning, function, and boundaries of Asian America. Instead, I
chronicle an Asian America that sometimes covers over or subsumes economic, gendered, and
ethnic differences—and sometimes doesn’t. That is, the reading practice of racial feeling does
not take for granted the primacy or inevitability of Asian America as a social structure. The
differences in feeling and history represented by “Californians of Japanese birth and American
citizenship,” “a retired Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Armed Forces, who fought in Bataan,” and
“Okinawa, Japan,” might, in one moment, congeal into a panethnic Asian America. Yet they
might at another moment disperse into incompatible and incommensurate social claims and
positions. Reorienting Asian America sets out not to uncover the true shape or function of Asian
America but rather to understand the conditions in which Asian America solidifies as something
legible, useful, and known—and to trace the alternative meanings, functions and forms that do
not ossify but remain emergent, or submerged, within Asian America.

73
Two

The End of Whiteness and the Rise of Multicultural Asian America in Chang-
rae Lee’s Aloft

Chang-rae Lee’s 2004 novel, Aloft, opens with Italian-American protagonist Jerry Battle
surveying his suburban Long Island neighborhood from the comfort of his private seaplane.
“From up here,” the novel begins, “a half mile above Earth, everything looks perfect to me.” A
few pages later, Jerry flies over his own house, noting that the house is “forever unmistakable”
because he “had a roofing contractor lay in slightly darker-shaded shingles in the form of a wide,
squat X.” This mark, he explains, was for the benefit of his ex-girlfriend Rita, “for she always
asked me to point out our place from the air, which I did but to no use, as she could never quite
find it anyway.” Despite the fact that the “x” did not have its intended effect for Rita, Jerry adds,
“I must say the sight still always warms me, not just for the raw-meat feeling that I’ve marked
my spot, but for the idea that anyone flying or ballooning overhead might just wonder who was
doing such a thing, this mystery man calling out from deep in the suburban wood.”
1

These opening passages set the stage for the novel’s central concerns. Jerry’s solo flight
above his neighborhood, his continued emphasis on his lofty perspective (compounded, of
course, by the title), suggests that in Aloft, location—both social and spatial—is everything. The
opening metaphor—the house with the “x”—reveals that the novel hinges on schematics,
emotional and visual, that are hidden in plain sight. That is, what should be easily visible and
identifiable is somehow difficult to see, requiring excess signification in order to be legible. At
the same time, what is valuable for its sameness to its surroundings at one perspective level (at
ground level, suburban homes are created to look the same) must be made visibly different at

74
another level for recognition. Yet even from a similar vantage point, visibility and recognition
hinges not only on spatial location but also gendered social orientations, as Rita—a Puerto Rican
woman, and one woman of color in a series of women of color that take up the seat next to Jerry
throughout the novel—never recognizes the house even with the x, while Jerry not only
recognizes it visually, but feels a deeply gendered resonance with it, imagining himself a
“mystery man calling out from the deep.” Here too, the novel hints at one of its central tropes:
the disenchanted, suburban white man plagued with ennui, searching for a more visceral
connection than the one afforded him by his privileged lifestyle. In a 21
st
century twist, Jerry’s
ennui is not resolved by forming a sexual connection with a younger white woman or even by
reinvigorating his status as patriarch; Jerry is instead rejuvenated through his connection to his
Korean American son-in-law, Paul Pyun.
While Chang-rae Lee’s earlier novels, Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999),
have been rigorously taken up by Asian American literary critics, Aloft has been treated with
relative critical silence.
2
On the surface, this appears to be because the novel’s focus on the
experience and perspective of its white protagonist, Jerry Battle, alienates critics invested not just
in Asian American authorship but also in the representation of Asian American experience. In
this article, however, I argue that Aloft’s chilly reception by Asian American Studies is not
because of its portrayal of whiteness, but specifically because of its portrayal of Asian American
identity. That is, although the versions of Asian American identity that the novel unfolds are
multiple, the text as a whole is incompatible with longstanding definitions of Asian American
culture as disruptive and unsettling to the hegemonic ideologies of global capitalism and white
supremacy. Instead, Aloft advances a vision of Asian American identity that not only aligns with
but also aids, abets, and extends the structures of privileged accumulation, flexibility, and

75
in/vulnerability which form the category once called “whiteness.” Just as the suburban home’s
visible signifiers of difference or sameness appear and disappear at different vantage points
throughout the novel, “Asian American” and “white” as social positions—and indeed race as a
relation of difference in general—refuse to be fixed in the novel, instead always operating
through multiple registers of social belonging, interpersonal connection, and material histories
simultaneously. I suggest, in the first section of this article, that this conception of Asian
American identity is not only antagonistic to the politics espoused by most of Asian American
literary studies, but illegible to the field’s current reading practices.
Aloft has mainly been read as a critique of whiteness, and the end of the novel seems to
signify the end of whiteness as worlding power. Yet such a vision does not necessarily conflict
with the racial arrangements of neoliberal multiculturalism. That is, while Aloft might envision
the end of “whiteness,” it also envisions a world in which some Asian American bodies can
come to extend or inhabit the space of structural power formerly called whiteness. Specifically,
previous readings of Aloft have focused on the Asian American women in the book, whose
racialization and gendering do unfold along expected material and affective patterns; that is, their
presence in the novel is undergirded by racial and gendered trauma, which prevents them from
flourishing—or even surviving—in the space of the suburbs. The sole Asian American man in
the book, however, travels within a different grid of affective networks, and it is his shift in
social and spatial orientations in the novel that reveal Aloft’s emergent, multicultural vision.
3

Rather than dispelling the power of whiteness, Aloft merely extends its boundaries while
reinforcing the structures of privilege that enabled whiteness in the first place.
Aloft reveals the ease with which trenchant critiques of whiteness and Orientalism can
travel alongside, and even enable, narratives of multicultural ascension. The novel’s

76
simultaneous visions of Asian American identity as both compatible with Asian American
Studies’ political investments and reading practices and antagonistic to those practices highlights
a need to reenvision those reading practices. In the era of multiculturalism and global capitalism,
racial differentiation is easily made useful to capital both as a way to deepen labor exploitation
and encourage consumption via the proliferation of markets. Given an economic and cultural
order in which the covering over of racial difference may no longer be a primary imperative of
mainstream literature, the function of Asian American literature must be reconsidered.

READING ALOFT AS ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The “racial asymmetry” between Lee, a Korean American who immigrated to the U.S. as
a child, and his narrator Jerry Battle, an Italian American whose family has been embedded in
the fabric of New Jersey suburban life for at least two generations, has made the book difficult to
read within the rubric of Asian American studies, since, unlike Lee’s first two novels, the
representation of Asian American experience does not appear to be immediately central to
Aloft’s construction.
4
The suggestion that the whiteness of the protagonist makes Aloft illegible
to the field of Asian American literary studies, however, begs the question, what is legible to the
field? That is, what expectations and assumptions are encoded in the reading practices of Asian
American Studies that make Aloft such an unwieldy or undesirable object?
In other words, what does it mean to say that a text is “Asian American literature”? Such
a designation encodes a set of assumptions and reading practices that have been developed over
the forty years of the institutionalization Asian American literary studies. These reading practices
focus the critic on a set of interrelated questions about the content and the form of the designated

77
text, centered on how the text reflects what might be called “the Asian American condition.”
That is, Asian American literary critics tend to ask what traces of Asian American history might
be found in a text’s content or form; how the structure of the text might elucidate the
contemporary experiences, mindsets, and structural positions of Asian Americans; and how the
author’s identity as an Asian American might have shaped the form or content of the text. These
are logical questions, and indeed, parallel the type of questions that have emerged from ethnic
studies more broadly, which tends to read an author or artist’s subject position, and the material
conditions out of which a text emerged, as not only part of but paramount to the interpretation of
a text.
Where Asian American Studies might differ from other branches of ethnic studies,
however, is that the answers to these questions are already partially assumed by many Asian
American literary critics; they are not the open questions they appear to be. As I argue below, the
relationship between “Asian American history” and contemporary “Asian American experience”
is, to many Asian American critics, self-evident, and indeed, the defining feature of Asian
American identity and subject formation. That is, because of the inherent fuzziness of “Asian
American” as an identity marker or community formation—explored in the introduction—critics
have turned to a sociohistorically-based definition of “Asian American,” rooted in the legacies of
exclusion and exploitation that Asian/American communities have been subject to throughout
U.S. history. This assumed relationship, however, has the effect of closing down interpretive
possibilities that might read Asian American identity, or race in general, as a dynamic form
whose relationships to both past and future are not necessarily predetermined or predictable.
The elision between Asian American identity and Asian American history is visible even
in the field’s earliest texts. Widely cited as the first book-length academic study on Asian

78
American literature, Elaine H. Kim’s aptly titled Asian American Literature: An Introduction to
the Writings and Their Social Contexts both raises and answers several of the questions inherent
to the designation and use of the term “Asian American.” Announcing the book’s intention to
“trace the topography and rich textures of the Asian American experience as it is expressed in
Asian American literature,” Kim defines Asian American literature as “published creative
writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent.” She
immediately points out, however, that “this definition is problematical.”
5

First, Kim highlights the fact that this definition leaves out “writers in Asia, or even
writers expressing the American experience in Asian languages,” as well as “literature about
Asia written by Asian Americans in English, except when it is revealing of the Asian American
consciousness.” Later Kim also acknowledges that the four ethnic groups she concentrates on are
hardly representative of all Asian American populations in the US, “beg[ging] the tolerance” of
those from South and Southeast Asia who find themselves underrepresented, as “there is
relatively little literature in English expressing the sensibilities of very new population groups”—
though she adds that “Korean American literature… is hardly more plentiful than Vietnamese
American writing at the moment.”
6

Second on the list of problems with her definition is that “the term Asian American is a
controversial one.”
7
Because “Asian American,” like the term “Oriental” it supplants, was
developed through a racialized discourse that renders Asian bodies permanently Other and
foreign, to use the term Asian American is to “accept an externally imposed label that …
distinguish[es] us from other Americans primarily on the basis of race.” That is, to examine the
literature of four different national groups as a unit accepts the racialized premise that these
groups share something fundamental, despite their cultural and ethnic differences. Not only that,

79
but as Kim remarks, “the vast majority of persons of Chinese, Vietnamese, or Samoan ancestry
would not, if asked, describe themselves as Asian and Pacific Americans.” She argues, however,
that “we [Asian Americans] are bound together by the experiences we share as members of an
American racial minority… it is no accident that literature by writers from those groups is often
much concerned with this shared heritage.” For Kim, despite its fundamental controversial
status, “Asian American” is a useful designation precisely because the racializing forces that read
Asian-origin national and ethnic groups as “the same” have produced a “shared heritage” that are
the joint legacy of the experiences of all these groups together. This shared designation has the
potential to activate pan-ethnic cooperation and community, which in turn can generate shared—
and thus, perhaps, more powerful—resistance to exactly those racializing structures that
produced such a community in the first place.
In her brief preface, then, Kim raises the specter of the problematic nature of “Asian
American” as a term—its definitional trouble, as well as its possible irrelevance to the people
whom it purports to describe—and then quickly pivots away from that problem to a solution: to
define “Asian American” culture not through who produces it, but through how it functions. This
pivot towards function over definition is best exemplified in Lisa Lowe’s landmark book,
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Lowe argues that “Asian American” is a
“distinct ‘racial formation’ […] defined not primarily in terms of biological racialism but in
terms of institutionalized, legal definitions of race and national origin.”
8
As she details
throughout Immigrant Acts, this racial formation has been shaped by a series of legal acts and
decisions—such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment of WWII, and the
Korean and Vietnam wars—which all stem from, and affirm, the perception of the Asian body as
always foreign and always outside the imagined space of the American nation. Thus, though

80
these experiences were not actually “shared” by various Asian-origin communities (only the
Japanese were interned; Filipinos were technically American citizens and thus allowed to travel
to the US in the period of “Asian exclusion,” for instance), the fact that such legal acts were
driven by a shared logic means, for Lowe, that they have had similar effects on the subject and
community formations of those who experienced them. By centralizing heterogeneity, hybridity,
and difference as the key theoretical models of Asian American studies, Lowe argues that rather
than attempting to erase the differences generated by the multiple national origins, histories of
empire and racialization, and gendered and classed experiences of those who fall under the rubric
of “Asian American,” those differences could be mobilized to put pressure on the processes and
structures that racialized these diverse populations as “the same” in the first place.
The definitional slippage between identity, history, and function resonates throughout
Asian American studies, but has specific implications for the study of Asian American literature.
Patricia Chu argues that American culture “is a site for imaginatively transforming readers and
protagonists into national subjects by erasing or containing their particular differences”;
9
or, in
Lowe’s words, “It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as
‘American.’”
10
That is, by collectively shaping the national imaginary—the ways in which
national citizens are imagined to speak, behave, live, and desire—culture offers a shared terrain
that mediates the material differences between individual citizens. This function of national
culture is particularly salient to America, where equal political representation is promised yet
never fulfilled, leaving American culture, and aesthetic representation, “as the key site for the
resolution of inequalities […] that cannot be resolved on the political terrain of a representative
democracy.”
11
American national culture thus collaborates with and works alongside capitalism
to cover over the inevitable material inequities that capitalism produces. Thus, when Asian

81
American authors to insert their voices into national culture, through literature, their work is an
assertion of belonging within the national imaginary, “claim[ing] Americanness for Asian
American subjects.”
12

The project of “claiming Americanness” is particularly visible within the genre of the
Asian American bildungsroman, a form that has dominated Asian American literature.
13
The
bildungsroman, a developmental, “coming of age” narrative of subject formation, and is typically
a narrative of protagonists “striv[ing] to become good citizens of their nation, a task that requires
them to relinquish their particularity and difference”; its main ideological function has been to
assimilate subjects into the nation.
14
As such, it seems logical that Asian American authors,
whose racialization stems from their exclusion from the nation, would utilize such a form to
claim their position within America. The narrative cohesion often presumed between narrator
and author, where the narrator is read as a stand-in for the author herself, also offers an
opportunity for self-representation—which is paramount, “given the centuries-long hostile and
dehumanizing caricatures of Asians as yellow perils, model minorities, dragon ladies, and kung-
fu masters.”
15

The bildungsroman, however, is a genre of subject formation, and if Asian American
identity is formed primarily through the experience of exclusion by the American state, then any
account of Asian American experience necessarily documents, recalls, and incorporates that
history within it. Elaine Kim proposes, in her preface, that “understanding Asian American
literature within its sociohistorical and cultural contexts is important… because, when these
contexts are unfamiliar, the literature is likely to be misunderstood and unappreciated.”
16
Lowe
adds that while Asian American bildungsromane may attempt to produce cultural assimilation
and integration, “these same narratives are driven by the repetition and return of episodes in

82
which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and
racial boundaries of the nation.”
17
Where American culture seeks to erase particularities and thus
fulfill the promise of equal representation, the “particularities” erased and forgotten are not just
differences of race, gender, and class, but also the American state’s active—and often violent—
role in creating and maintaining those differences. Asian American literature, according to this
formulation, cannot participate in such forgetting; for even to name an Asian American subject is
“at once making a claim of achieved subjectivity and referring to the impossibility of that
achievement.”
18

It is from this tension that Lowe derives her famous formulation of Asian American
culture “as contradiction,” that is, “as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions
materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation.”
19
Other
critics, like Kandice Chuh and Jodi Kim, have built upon this essential foundation, declaring
Asian American culture “an unsettling hermeneutic” and Asian American a “term in difference
from itself” and a “designation of the (im)possibility of justice.”
20
Importantly, these
designations are not just in reference to the content of Asian American culture. That is, they do
not merely refer to the fact that Asian American literature unearths forcibly forgotten histories in
terms of plot. For these critics, “contradiction,” “unsettling,” and “difference” are also aesthetic
qualities of Asian American literature: “its aesthetic is defined by contradiction not sublimation,
such that discontent, nonequivalence, and irresolution call into question the project of abstracting
the aesthetic as a separate domain of unification and reconciliation.”
21
That is, just as the
narrative of the bildungsroman moves the citizen-subject from particularity to universality, Lowe
suggests here that the aesthetics of national literature also move towards abstraction; in order to
be read as “objectively” or “universally” relevant, the formal qualities of canonical literature

83
mirror the narrative context by embodying equivalence, resolution, and reconciliation. In
contrast, Asian American literature not only enacts contradiction but also embodies it through
formal elements—most particularly, through what Sianne Ngai might call “tone.”
22
Ngai defines
tone as “an affective-aesthetic idea […] which is reducible neither to the emotional response a
text solicits from its reader nor to representations of feelings within the world of its story,” but is
instead “a literary text’s affective bearing, orientation, or ‘set toward’ its audience and world.”
23

For many Asian American critics, even when an Asian American text includes resolution for its
characters, or prompts feelings of reconciliation from its readers, its tone is nonetheless one of
non-resolution and contradiction.
Thus, the centrality of Asian American experience is not the only qualifying factor that
determines what counts as Asian American literature to Asian American Studies; its tone is
equally important. While Aloft’s white protagonist may present cognitive dissonance at first to
those expecting an Asian American novel, then, a white protagonist does not necessarily bar a
text from being read as Asian American.
24
Indeed, two Asian American critics have found ways
to circumvent this racial asymmetry, and to recuperate Aloft as an oppositional novel, which, like
other Asian American novels, does not claim universality but rather refracts and troubles the
desire for such a claim. Both Mark C. Jerng and Stephen Sohn capitalize on the symbolic
significance of the suburban house—located in the “middle of the middle part” of Long Island,
which, as Sohn points out, places it in or nearby the original Levittown—and the characters’
positions within it as revealing of the material histories of exclusion and exploitation that shape
such neighborhoods.
25
Noting that almost every character except Jerry is non-white, Jerng argues
that by viewing the racialized world through Jerry’s ostensibly universal gaze, Aloft renders
Jerry’s whiteness visible. In this reading, Lee deploys Jerry’s whiteness not just to particularize it

84
by revealing the way whiteness coheres only in relation to other racial categories, but also to
critique a specific liberal, multicultural mode of perceiving race, one that admits aesthetic racial
difference and yet denies it any material effects.
26

To destabilize Jerry’s refusal to acknowledge the material effects of race, Aloft would
have to reveal those effects elsewhere in the text. Stephen Sohn takes up this aspect as he focuses
on Daisy, Jerry’s first wife and a Korean immigrant who commits suicide in the house’s pool
before the novel begins. Sohn reads Daisy’s performance of toxic domesticity as motivated not
by biological illness but by the social “madness” generated by pressures to assimilate into an
unwelcoming culture. Jerng and Sohn’s readings collide at the end of the novel, as the racialized
trauma that Daisy’s death embodies finally proves to be so devastating—so disorganizing—that
Jerry’s universalized position is not merely shaken but shattered. Just as Asian American literary
critique promises it will, a history of racialized trauma rises irresistibly to the surface despite
decades of repressive efforts, and destabilizes any attempts to move forward without reckoning
with it as such—the act of covering over the trauma of the past is revealed to only ever be
temporary. Only after Jerry faces the truth of Daisy’s suicide—represented by him finally re-
excavating the pool for his grandchildren to use—and begins the painful process of actually
facing the trauma of her death can his family be reconstituted and the home be remade.
Notably, however, the home is finally remade without Jerry in it. Though he began the
novel flying “a half mile above Earth,” Jerry ends the novel in the hole in the ground that once
was the pool, as his reconstituted family proceeds without him: “Now where’s Jerry? somebody
says, the barely audible sound traveling just above and far enough away from me that I don’t
immediately answer. It’s okay. No problem. They’ll start without me, you’ll see.”
27
Jerry’s
prophecy that the family will carry on without him heralds the disappearance of the white

85
patriarch, as family head, as universalized narrator, and, importantly, as the idealized national
citizen that the reader can or should identify with. It might even, in fact, signal the disappearance
of whiteness itself, as the fantasy of the centrality of whiteness to normative social life is
interrupted, permanently. Simultaneously, the fantasy of the suburbs themselves—remember, the
novel began with a picturesque unfolding of the American dream in real time—in the end comes
closer to approximating the demographics of the suburbs in the 21st century: as Karen Tongson
points out, the suburbs today “have been globally restructured, reconstituted as service
economies, and repopulated as residential apartment communities for low-wage immigrant
workers reliant on service sectors for sustenance.”
28
Thus Lee also dispels the myth of the
suburbs as a haven for white normativity, and instead portrays them, finally, as a place where
non-normative, multicultural families can flourish.
But if the novel does such an admittedly excellent job at unearthing the traumatic histories
of exclusion from the nation suffered by Asian Americans, and of deploying those histories to
interrupt the fantasies of universality and white normativity, why then does it feel so, well,
resolved? That is, despite the very clear ways Aloft aligns itself with expectations of Asian
American literature, its affective-aesthetic tone would be difficult to call disorienting,
disorganized or irresolute. Instead, the novel is very clearly oriented towards a specific future—
one in which, yes, the white patriarch might have disappeared, but the structures of privilege that
once enshrined him, though expanded, remain intact. The family, after all, has not dissolved but
been reconstituted; the suburbs, too, have been renewed; the organizing, worlding power of the
white patriarch has been conceded—but to whom?
Aloft portrays, quite self-consciously, exactly the long history of racialized material
difference, as wealthy white protagonist Jerry Battle repeatedly meditates on his own racial

86
identity and its material and historical buttressing while all around him, to put it bluntly,
Asian/American women drop like flies. Despite this, Aloft’s tone is one of orientation and
resolution, as Asian American and white men are aligned and oriented towards a global future
wherein whiteness is replaced with “multicultural” privilege. Current Asian American Studies
reading practices can make meaning out of the initial racial structures and hierarchies, sometimes
(though not always) yielding the type of oppositional, anti-universal politics that such practices
read for. A reading practice that pays close attention to the dynamism and deviousness of racial
categories, however, reveals a different vision of Asian American identity--one capable of
remaining aesthetically distinct from whiteness and yet being folded into the category of power
“whiteness” once described.
This other vision of Asian America is illegible to current Asian American Studies reading
practices because, as I suggest above, it unsettles longstanding definitions of Asian America that
collapse description with oppositional function. But the fact that this vision of multicultural
Asian America travels alongside and within more recognizable and legible formations of Asian
America suggests that this is not merely a question of desirable or undesirable politics, good
subjects or bad.
29
Instead, it might suggest a fundamental shift in the relationship between ethnic
literature and national literature, which itself puts pressure on Asian American Studies to
reimagine its reading practices.
Specifically, Aloft's capacity to traffic in both memories of Asian America's traumatic past
and, as I detail below, dreams of Asian America's multicultural future suggests that national
culture may no longer be functioning solely through promises of universalized abstraction. The
transition from Fordism and the trade of national resources to the mode of capital variously
called transnational, global, or flexible accumulation has fundamentally changed not only the

87
organization of capital but also the modes of social organization that capital creates, maintains,
and depends upon; as such, literature and other forms of national culture also function differently
within a system of capital that is organized globally rather than anchored through the nation-
state, and that depends on differentiation, proliferation, consumption, and commodification
rather than regulation, production, and stability. As Grace Hong points out, this has particular
effects for the effect and function of race within culture: “Global capital reproduces itself exactly
by manipulating racial, gender, and sexual difference for the purposes of accumulation. In other
words, if ‘Asian American’ or ‘Chicano’ or ‘African American’ are categories that assert
racialized subjectivity as a critique of white supremacy and the corresponding logic of
assimilation, they are now equally ways of identifying and producing consumer bases, or
alternatively, pools of exploitable labor.”
30

For Hong and other scholars of late global capitalism, universalized, homogenous
citizenship is no longer the subject formation used to discipline and recruit worker-citizens.
Rather, that discipline takes place through the commodification of difference, as racialized and
gendered identity categories become markets of targeted production and consumption, wherein
“consumerism and commodification […] instantiate a new form of universality.”
31
Thus,
national culture no longer needs to suture together citizens through a collective imaginary of
assimilated and homogenized behavior. Instead, culture can function to further particularize and
differentiate populations in the name of creating new consumer markets and creating and
maintaining exploitable populations at the same time.
If the essential function of national culture needs to be reconsidered in the era of global
capital, then so does the function of Asian American culture, and the reading practices Asian
American critics bring to bear on such culture. For readers of Aloft, the need for reconsideration

88
is most visible in the seeming disconnect between the ways in which the text drags the material
history of Asian America to the present and the novel's aesthetic-affective tone of resolution and
progress. One of neoliberal multiculturalism’s trademark technologies is, in fact, the separation
of race as aesthetic (and, I’ll add, -affective) difference from race as material difference. That is,
multiculturalism does not seek to cover over visible signs of racial difference in the service of a
fantasy of national racial belonging. Instead, multiculturalism recruits visible racial difference
both as proof of an underlying material equity and as a means of extending the reach and flow of
capital. Visible and aesthetic racial difference within multiculturalism, then, does not rupture a
national aesthetic imaginary, but rather functions in the service of that imaginary to cover over
both entrenched and newly emergent material differences. Even aesthetic and affective
references to the violent and traumatic history that formed recognizable racial differences can be
made without disturbance to multiculturalism’s vision of the racial present and future, as long as
the relationship to that past history is figured as aesthetically and affectively resolved. Thus,
multiculturalism severs the link between the affective-aesthetic of racial difference and the
material and historical conditions of racial categories. A contemporary Asian American text
might retain the affective qualities and racial feelings of earlier Asian American literature—
maintaining a tone of disorientation and irresolution—without invoking, or indeed emerging
from, the material conditions of difference that produced such affects in earlier texts. Or,
alternately, as Aloft does, a text might invoke and highlight those material conditions of
difference to different affective effect, drawing from another structure of racial feeling entirely.
To read Asian American literature for the way it unearths and references the historical
violences and material conditions that have produced contemporary Asian American identity,
then, may no longer have the eruptive potential it once had. Such readings may in fact aid in

89
covering over the new ways life and death chances are being distributed in global capitalism
between those seen as fit or unfit for participation within “neoliberal subjectivity and its moral
calculus.”
32
I thus return to Aloft to unearth exactly these emergent structures of racial formation
and feeling, as they track between visible and invisible, conscious and nonconscious. That is, in
response to Raymond Williams’ “open question” about how it is that social structures relay
between conscious choices, seemingly fixed and stable unconscious fact, and embryonic and
emergent nonconscious feelings, I track the way Aloft highlights the material conditions of
difference that animate Asian American identity while simultaneously transmuting those very
conditions.
33
While Aloft's characters enter the novel with bodies and subjectivities that map
fairly neatly onto sedimented racial categories, I argue, the ending of the novel leaves them
spatially and racially rearranged.

THE END OF WHITENESS?
I suggested above that multicultural aesthetics permit reference to the material and
historical conditions that create race, as long as those dynamics are figured as past and resolved,
and the multicultural present and future can unfold untouched by such differences. While Aloft’s
present is, like other more recognizably Asian American novels, certainly complicated and
haunted by the traumatic racial past, that past is resolved by the end of the novel. Indeed, the
multicultural future that Aloft suggests in its closing pages is exactly one in which the traumatic
relationship to the past is finally overcome. In the following section, I argue that rather than
opening the possibility of a world without whiteness—or at least a world that is not worlded
through whiteness—Aloft instead opens the possibility that some Asian American bodies might
come to extend or inhabit the space of privilege formerly called whiteness. That is, rather than

90
dispelling the power of whiteness, Aloft merely extends its boundaries while reinforcing the
structures of privilege that enabled whiteness in the first place. The world can go on without
Jerry at the end of the novel—but not because it does not need a man like him anymore, but
because Paul Pyun, his Korean American son-in-law, has taken his place.
Jerng and Sohn’s readings, though compelling, rest on the assumption that “race,” and the
accompanying power structures that make race legible and meaningful, are fixed to the bodies of
the characters as they enter the novel. Arun Saldanha, however, reading a famous passage in
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, argues that race is not just a fixed self/other dialectic,
but rather a way of describing “how certain bodies stick to certain spaces, how they are chained
by hunger, cold, darkness, mud, poverty, crime, glances full of envy and anxiety.”
34
That is, race
does not inhere in bodies but instead congeals and operates through bodily relations, not only
between bodies, but also between bodies, objects, and the spaces that surround them. Saldanha
adds, “Race is devious in inventing new ways of chaining bodies. Race is creative, constantly
morphing […] What defines races is not rigidity or inevitability, but its ‘lines of flight.’” Indeed,
as Nikhil Singh points out, racial categories are always dynamic and in flux; often, what we
might describe as a relation of “race”—that is, a relation of differentiation, disparity,
vulnerability, or violence, for instance—occurs “in advance of stable orders of racial reference
and in contexts in which fields of racial reference are actively destabilized.”
35

That is, to assume that because Jerry, as the signifier of hegemonic whiteness (albeit an
“uneasy whiteness”), is no longer in the picture, whiteness is no longer in the picture is “based on
the unexamined premise that whiteness is a fixed racial category.”
36
Like any other racial
signifier or structure, whiteness is not necessarily a fixed property of the body. Matthew Frye
Jacobson, for example, argues that historians of race have, in freezing whiteness as a social

91
category, missed what he calls the “vicissitudes of whiteness”; he argues that whiteness, like any
other racial formation, is a contested category that has been subject to challenges, consolidations,
and corrections throughout its history.
37
In essence, just like “Asian American,” “whiteness,” is a
racial category that coheres a specific assemblage of structural relationships and feelings that
distribute value, privilege, and life chances throughout a population. Sara Ahmed calls this an
“orientation”: “Whiteness is lived as a background to experience… which orientates bodies in
specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space … which in turn shapes what bodies ‘can
do.’”
38

When understood as an orientation rather than a property of specific bodies, “whiteness”
can be assumed by bodies that do not appear to us as “white.” Indeed, this flexibility is a
signature innovation of neoliberal multiculturalism: “As economic citizenship becomes more
central to racial procedures and while whiteness as property is still operational, globalization also
creates multicultural as a new form of whiteness, or rather the category of whiteness and its
privileges are sublated into the category of multiculturalism.”
39
“Multiculturalism,” that is, is a
new name for an expanded version of the structural privilege and power once called “white
supremacy.” While it signifies as “the end of whiteness,” multiculturalism in fact extends the
worlding power of whiteness by extending its reach.
40

Read with an understanding of whiteness as orientation, Aloft is still oppositional to a white
supremacy-based cultural project of abstraction and universalism. Yet, simultaneously, Aloft
collaborates with the dictates of multiculturalism, which expands the category of whiteness as
orientation to include some—but certainly not all—nonwhite subjects. In particular, Paul Pyun,
the Korean American fiancé of Jerry and Daisy’s daughter Theresa, comes to signify the
multicultural subject capable and worthy of being incorporated into the privileges of whiteness.

92
Like Daisy, Theresa dies in an overdetermined location—the cockpit of her father’s plane—and,
like Daisy, her death is at least partially driven by her own toxic performance of gendered roles
(in this case, Theresa refuses to seek treatment for her fatal cancer in order to carry her child to
term). Through their affective experiences of and responses to loss, the novel aligns Paul and
Jerry, positioning Paul not just as Jerry’s worthy successor but, in fact, as more worthy than Jerry
of the privileges he assumes. Jerry and Paul’s affective kinship, which initially coheres as a
product of racial difference, is transformed throughout the course of the book to a structure of
shared racial feeling, predicated on the shared ability to escape trauma and to survive (and
flourish) in the symbolic space of the suburban home. The novel’s tone, one of resolution and
orientation rather than fragmentation and disorientation, does not stem from the racial feelings
that generate and are generated by Daisy and Jerry’s relationship, which cohere in an older
structure of Orientalism and white supremacy. Instead, they stem exactly from Jerry and Paul’s
shared structure of racial feeling, which coheres within the emergent racial categories of
multiculturalism.
Certainly, Paul enters the text as an already-given ethnic body—he’s introduced to the
audience by Jerry musing, “I guess if you put a gun to my head I’d say he writes about The
Problem of Being Sort of Himself—namely, the terribly conflicted and complicated state of
being Asian and American and thoughtful and male.”
41
Unsurprisingly, this characterization has
led reviewers to read Paul as Chang-rae Lee’s avatar in the text. Here, reviewers’ anxiety that
Jerry sounds “too much” like Chang-rae Lee is assuaged by confirming that Chang-rae Lee’s
voice—and body—can be located elsewhere in the text, outside of and separate from Jerry, in a
character who is more “like” him.
42
The metaphor of familial “likeness” as it applies to race—in
that all members of of a racial category are said to be “like” one another, in ways that they are

93
not “like” members of other races—is one effect of static racial readings, that is, of presuming
that race is a fixed quantity of bodies. Yet if race in general, and whiteness in specific, is an
orientation—a specific way of facing the world, as well as a force that organizes which and how
objects and spaces unfold around you and for you—then who is “alike” is less material than who
is aligned, that is, who faces the world in the same way.
Despite Jerry’s conscious differentiation between himself and Paul, which rely on
assumptions about racial un/likeness (“He’s not like me at all […] we come from dissimilar
peoples and times and traditions and hold nearly opposite views on politics and the world”), he
nonetheless feels an affective connection with Paul that extends beyond their racial difference.
43

That is, although he is drawn to Paul initially because of his racial difference—just as he is to
Daisy and his Puerto Rican girlfriend Rita—his interest actually extends beyond this, towards
recognition of a shared consciousness. He seems capable of offering empathy to Paul as he is not
to either Daisy or Rita, remarking of Paul’s struggles with writing, “But that’s the case with
almost everyone in the broadening swath of middle age, isn’t it, that we’re all fatiguing in some
critical way?”
44
Jerry later confesses, “Paul is one of the few people who can always draw me
out.”
45

This striking affinity with Paul, marked by their ability to communicate, stands in contrast
to Jerry’s relationships with Daisy, Rita, and Theresa, all of which are marked by refusals to
speak and inability to communicate properly. Jerry often remarks on Daisy’s inability to speak
grammatically correct English, particularly when she’s upset, and he concludes a long section on
Theresa’s tendency to correct his word choices by saying, “This jibes with my own sharpening
feeling that I can hardly understand anybody anymore.” Paul, too, has trouble communicating
with Theresa, as he confesses to Jerry after they’ve moved in to Jerry’s house: “‘But you know

94
what, Jerry? She might be right about our communication.’ ‘What the hell are you talking about?
All you two do is talk.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said wearily […] ‘But maybe not in anyway that counts.’”
46

Paul and Jerry’s ability to understand each other—to speak each other’s language—and inability
to understand or speak to others traverses pre-given racial categories, as Paul’s fractures his
relationship with Theresa (despite their racial “likeness”) while Jerry’s cements his “difference”
from Daisy and his daughter.
This kinship through shared language is certainly gendered, seeming to privilege gendered
sameness over racial difference. Yet the racial implications of this kinship are affirmed at
Theresa’s funeral. Paul attempts to deliver a eulogy for his wife, but is unable to. Thus, Jerry
delivers Paul’s eulogy rather than reciting his own: “It was beautifully somber, serious, elegantly
lyrical stuff [...] and even though they knew it had been written by Paul a number of people
complimented me on the moving, heartrending words.”
47
Ahmed suggests that whiteness, in its
invisibility—its presumed presence—is “what lags behind:” “White bodies are habitual insofar
as they ‘trail behind’ actions: they do not get ‘stressed’ in their encounters with objects or others,
as their white-ness ’goes unnoticed’ […] When bodies ‘lag behind,’ then they extend their
reach.”
48
Precisely a body’s ability to “lag behind” and go unnoticed is what secures its ability to
extend, to reach beyond itself, so that what a white body can do appears to be what “any body”
can do. But at the funeral, when Jerry reads Paul’s words, it is in fact Paul’s body that lags
behind, such that even when people know that Paul wrote the speech, it appears as though the
words (and sentiments) are Jerry’s. In effect, Paul’s body lags behind so that his reach may
extend; Paul’s mourning, not Jerry’s, becomes the universal language of mourning, through
which all mourners present can experience their own grief. In this instance, universality as a

95
mode of identification is not so much disturbed as it is expanded, so that it can issue forth from
Paul’s body as well as Jerry’s.
Thus, though Paul entered the text fixedly and consciously different from Jerry, the
mourning of Theresa’s death—and Daisy’s death, before her—allows Paul and Jerry to align,
and thus to figure as extensions of each other. The loss of a wife, the resultant future of raising
children alone, and both men’s repressed guilt that they might have caused their wives’ deaths
(Jerry through mishandling Daisy’s mental illness, Paul by impregnating his wife, which led her
to decline to seek treatment for her sickness), unite Paul and Jerry through a shared experience, a
shared and inherited past that organizes their worlds into likeness.
However, is not merely their shared, masculine experience that makes Paul worthy, or
capable, of inhabiting and extending Jerry’s racial orientation. Importantly, Jerry’s defining
characteristic throughout the novel, by his own admission, is his capacity for flight—that is, his
desire and ability to detach from the traumatic present, as manifested in his constant
romanticization “of perfect continuous travel the pleasures found not in singular marvels of any
destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures.” Throughout the text, Jerry
repeatedly declares, in the face of Daisy’s death, Rita’s leaving him, and Theresa’s illness, “Jerry
Battle hereby declines the Real.” This flight from trauma—in fact, this escape from experiencing
trauma, even as it plays out in front of him—is explicitly connected to his whiteness:
For if you took an accounting of all who proceed us, our alive and semi- alive relations from Forest Hills to
Thousand Oaks to Amelia Island and to everywhere else they’ve rooted themselves with a vengeance, you’d
have some kind of portfolio of golden twentieth-century self-made American living, all those spic-and-span
houses and Gunite pools and porcelain- and crystal-filled curio cabinets and full-mouth braces for the kids
and the double wall ovens set on timers to bring the roast rosemary chicken and casserole of sweet-sausage
lasagna to just the right crisp on top as Dad pulled the white Lincoln up the driveway, their contribution to
our Great Society being the straight full trickle-down to my generation of Battaglias and Battles and
Battapaglias and the rest of us with the sweetheart deal of a Set-It-and-Forget-It existence. Like everybody
halfway decent and useful I of course recognize that one’s character should rightly derive from privation,
crucibles, pains in the ass, so I guess my only semi-rhetorical question is from what else does it come, if

96
there’s always been a steady wind at your back, a full buffet at your table, and the always cosseted
parachuted airbagged feeling of your bubbleness, which can never brook a real fear?
49

Jerry’s inability, then, to “brook a real fear,” derives in his own estimation exactly from the
comfort afforded him by whiteness (shored up, of course, by the class privilege that white
suburban life affords him). Here, we can see clearly what Sara Ahmed means when she explains
that “in the case of race, we would say that bodies come to be seen as ‘alike,’ as for instance
‘sharing whiteness’ as a ‘characteristic,’ as an effect of such proximities, where certain ‘things’
are already ‘in place.’”
50
According to Jerry, the domestic markers of white suburban life—
pools, curio cabinets, braces, lasagna—cluster around “Battaglias and Battles and Battapaglias,”
both the cause and effect of “golden twentieth-century self-made American living.” Similarly,
these “creature comforts,” which are already in Jerry’s reach, are precisely the things that keep
him out of reach of trauma, such that he can witness it but not experience it viscerally himself.
Thus, the two symbols that the novel opens with—the plane, and the suburban home—
unite to perfectly describe whiteness as orientation, where the security of a stabilized position of
social value enables social mobility and the capacity to escape trauma. The “spic-and-span
house” and Jerry’s “private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too,” are
contiguous spaces that work together to organize and unfold the world for Jerry. Tellingly, when
Jerry cedes his space in the home to take up his place in the earth, Paul takes Jerry’s place in the
master bedroom. Paul’s gendered access to a shared, masculine language is then cemented by his
physical presence in Jerry’s racialized spaces; his access, then, is dictated not just by his
masculinity but by the entanglement of his racial and gendered identity. Just as tellingly, Daisy
dies at the house, and Theresa dies in the plane.
Jodi Melamed argues that, neoliberal racialization does not merely create new racial
categories and structures but can also reinscribe older forms, “intensify[ing] technologies for

97
disqualifying, civilizing, and disciplining people of color without class privilege, renewing older
racial schemas.”
51
Daisy and Theresa prove incapable—and therefore unworthy, or vice versa—
of sustaining their lives within the contiguous spaces of the suburban home and the plane. Their
incapacity is marked in the body, as Daisy’s mental illness and Theresa’s cancer are the
ostensible causes of their deaths. Those bodily traumas are themselves markers of inherited racial
trauma (before she dies, Theresa confesses that she has known all along that Daisy killed
herself), and simultaneously, the very vulnerability of their bodies to trauma is itself racialized.
And of course, their bodies, and bodily traumas, are not just raced but gendered—like Daisy's
toxic domesticity, the intensification of Theresa’s illness is marked by Theresa’s (increasingly
pathological) attempts to fulfill the role of the “good mother,” as she sacrifices the health of her
own body for the health of her unborn child.
As Melamed and Grace Hong both point out, women of color and racialized immigrant
women are often drawn outside the bounds of “neoliberal subjectivity and its moral calculus.” As
the new social relations of production created by neoliberal multiculturalism both cut across and
reinscribe existing racial categories, “terms of privilege accrue to individuals and groups, such as
multicultural, reasonable, feminist, and law-abiding, that make them appear fit for neoliberal
subjectivity, while others are stigmatized as monocultural, irrational, regressive, patriarchal, or
criminal and ruled out.”
52
Women of color and racialized immigrant women are more susceptible
to these accrued terms of stigmatization because they are often already coded as irrational and
regressive, and are more vulnerable to the material conditions of exploitation that produce
subjects as “monocultural,” “patriarchal,” or “criminal.” Within a multiculturalist framework,
Daisy and Theresa are characterized as irrational not because their racial and gendered difference
renders them unable to conform to a specific mode of (white) middle class normativity, but

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because their attempts to conform appear irrational within a world order in which race as
aesthetics (determined by established racial categories) is not necessarily connected to race as a
differential relation of material conditions (determined by both established racial categories and
emergent racial procedures). Their unworthiness for multicultural subjectivity, like a Moebius
strip, appears complex and multi-faceted, but in fact only has one side that feeds into itself in a
twisted loop: they cannot survive because their bodies are unfit; their bodies are unfit because
they bear marks of gendered and racialized trauma; they bear marks of gendered and racialized
trauma because their bodies are unfit; their bodies are unfit because they cannot survive.
In contrast, Paul’s defining characteristic—“You don’t have to sugarcoat it, Jerry. I know
I’m a pushover”—is actually what proves him worthy for multicultural subjectivity, as it allows
him to adapt to the cocoon of the suburban home without significant trouble.
53
By the end of
Theresa’s illness, Paul has given up writing entirely, concentrating on caring for his wife, and,
after her death, he is “ensconced in the master bedroom” according to “the all-agreed-upon-
plan.” And the alignment—the family line—of course does not end with Paul, but is continued
by Paul and Theresa’s child, Barthes Taejon Battle, whose face, Jerry notes, “is distinctively un-
Caucasian”; in fact, not only does the child not look anything like Jerry, “which is how it has to
be,” but, he notes, “I can’t quite see his mother in him either, not yet, as he is an exact replica of
the infant Paul’s parents have shown us in pictures from his baby album.”
54
As Paul and Barthes
take residency in the master bedroom of the suburban house—not quite the plane, but still
“inside the world and outside of it, too”—their “un-Caucasian” appearance signals the flowering
of a multicultural, antiracist world, but at the cost not only of Theresa’s life but also her presence
in the family line. Whiteness is both extinguished and extended simultaneously; racial categories
are cleaved apart and cut deeper along gendered lines together.

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Asian American critics are right to read Aloft as not only interrupting the universality of
whiteness but also imagining its end. Read this way, despite Aloft’s white protagonist, the novel
is distinctly Asian American, in that it espouses the values that characterize Asian American
literature and thus appeals to Asian American literary studies. Of course, there’s the rub—to stop
at affirming Aloft’s place within Asian American literature misses the way the text, and “Asian
American literature” as a genre at large, can and does collaborate with neoliberal
multiculturalism. In fact, Aloft’s capacity to be read as antiracist within a discourse of white
supremacy and Orientalism is exactly the characteristic that covers over, and thus enables, its
cooperation with the racial orders of global capitalism. That is, by insisting that “whiteness” and
“non-whiteness” emerge from and can’t be separated out of specific historical–material
conditions, the text covers over the way race as aesthetic difference is actually being extracted
out of material conditions as the actions of the plot move forward, fundamentally transforming
those very categories that seem to enter the text as fixed and known.
Though Aloft vacillates between different structures of racial feeling, it ends on a structure
of alignment, orientation, closure, and harmony, feelings which emerge and cohere in a racial
order in which Jerry cedes the social power of white subjectivity to Paul and Barthes,
multicultural subjects par excellence. Within this social order, racial feeling emerges from race-
as-aesthetic-difference and race-as-material-conditions-of-difference, though not necessarily
evenly or simultaneously. In the next section, I turn to Tao Lin’s novel Taipei, which unlike
Aloft, does generate the racial feelings of ennui, dissonance, and disorientation previously
assumed to characterize Asian American literature. However, where Aloft’s racial feelings are
generated in and by spaces and relations heavily saturated—in fact, overdetermined—with
meaning, Taipei’s racial feelings emerge from and generate virtually no meaning. While the

100
novel is sometimes shadowed or inflected by older racial structures, it more insistently points to
the newly emergent structures of race and class that take shape within the structures of global
capitalism.

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Three

Or Something, Or Something: Feeling Colorblindness in Tao Lin’s Taipei

The opening passages of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee are notoriously disorienting.
Without preamble, the reader is confronted with two block paragraphs lacking punctuation: the
first is in seemingly dictated, scholastic French, while the second is a stilted and overly literal
English translation, which does not place punctuation where ordered but rather spells the
punctuation marks out: “Open paragraph It was the first day period She had come from a far
period […]” By the end of the second paragraph, the dictation has dissolved into incoherence:
“there is but one thing period there is someone period from a far period[.]”
1
The text that
follows this opening is no less disorienting or fragmented; indeed, as the book progresses, what
little narrative or formal coherence emerges is undone in each new section. Dictee, and the
disorientation and fragmentation that characterize its entirety, is notorious in Asian American
Studies because its embrace as Asian American literature marked a fundamental turning point in
Asian American reading practices, as the field pivoted from a focus on sociohistorical realism
and testimony to both formal and theoretical “heterogeneity, hybridity, and difference.”
The opening passages of Tao Lin’s Taipei are similarly disorienting, although in this case the
disorientation comes from dislocation rather than mistranslation. Lin’s hyperrealist novel begins,
It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward
Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned to not speaking and was
beginning to feel more like he was ‘moving through the universe’ than ‘walking on a sidewalk.’ He stared
ahead with a mask-like expression, weakly trying to remember where he was one year ago, last November,
more for something to do than because he wanted to know, though he was not incurious. Michelle, to his left,
drifted in and out of his peripheral vision—far enough away for pedestrians to pass unknowingly between
them—like a slow, amorphous flickering. Paul was thinking the word ‘somewhere,’ meditatively as both
placeholder and ends, when Michelle asked if he was okay.
2

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Where Cha’s opening disorients the reader by refusing to ground the passages in context or
narrative, Lin’s disorients by showering the reader in a plethora of contextual details—names,
ages, neighborhoods, months—that refuse to resolve into meaning. Both texts immediately
problematize the act of reading and the relationship between literature and “the real,” but they
achieve this disorientation through different strategies. Where, in Dictee, the reader is disoriented
and confused, the reverse is true in the opening passages of Taipei: it’s fairly obvious to the
reader what’s happening—the narrator, Paul, and his friend or girlfriend Michelle, are walking to
an event in New York—but Paul himself seems strangely out of joint: his expression is “mask-
like,” his thought process “weak” and “amorphous,” and even the word he concentrates on to
ground himself—“somewhere”—is vague and dislocated.
In this chapter, I read Taipei alongside Dictee to consider the possibility that, just as
Dictee’s embrace into the Asian American literary canon required nothing short of a reimagining
of Asian American reading practices and methods, so too might Taipei. That is, like Dictee,
Taipei nominally falls into the category of Asian American literature, if only because both its
author, Tao Lin, and its protagonist and narrator, Paul, are Taiwanese American. Yet, also like
Dictee to the Asian American literary critics of the 1980s and early 1990s, Taipei’s form and
ideological content runs counter to, and often pointedly resists, the reading methods developed
by Asian American literary studies. Where Dictee’s formal and narrative innovations prompted
Asian American literary studies’ turn towards the transnational, the fragmented, and what
Christopher Lee calls “the anti-identitarian,”
3
I suggest in this chapter that Taipei has the
potential to reorient the field towards new structures of racial formation and feeling that emerge
from “multicultural” and “colorblind” ideologies and socioeconomic arrangements. My reading
deploys racial feeling as a method attuned to the nonconscious as much as the conscious in order

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to highlight these emergent structures and the ways they interact with, cut across, and are
sometimes covered over by the sedimented, conscious structures of Orientalism and other older
racial formations.
This chapter also extends the argument about Asian American critical reading practices
laid out in the previous chapter about Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft. Aloft vacillates between two
structures of racial feeling: an older, “Orientalist” structure of exclusion, dissonance, and trauma,
and a newer, “multiculturalist” structure of alignment, resolution, and coherence, where certain
Asian American subjects can align with, and even replace, whiteness and white subjects. Taipei,
my reading suggests, offers a slightly different structure of racial feeling, which we might call
“colorblind.” Here, neither whiteness, Asian Americanness, nor any other register of racial
difference orient the world for the protagonist, Paul. Instead, Paul is oriented through the
transnational circuits of consumption and labor that enable his flexible inhabitance of the US and
Taipei, which sometimes resonate with and along conscious racial divisions and sometimes
resonate along emergent class divides that cut across older racial lines. That is, race sometimes
appears in the text as a conscious recognition of aesthetic, if not material, difference. More often,
it appears as nonconscious affect, which resonates with, vibrates in, and shadows the present
without necessarily resolving into meaning.
Just as, twenty years earlier, Cha’s fragmented and hybrid constructs of identity and the
process of subject-making both advanced and undid the work of Asian American Studies—in
that it extended the reach of the field while reorienting and reworking the field’s fundamental
assumptions—the contemporary “race neutral,” or post-race political and identity formations
forwarded by Aloft and Taipei might usefully be staged as central to Asian American culture and,
thus, to Asian American literary critical practice. To reorient Asian American literary studies

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towards the multicultural and the colorblind is not to suggest that Asian American Studies
embrace those politics. Rather, it is to more fully account for the function of Asian American
culture as it transforms in the shadow of global capital.

CANONIZING DICTEE, READING TAIPEI
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a Korean American performance artist, film maker, and
writer who circulated and performed her work in the avant-garde art scenes in 1970s San
Francisco and New York before her death in 1982. Published posthumously in the same year,
Dictee was read primarily by Cha’s white avant-garde peers for the rest of the decade. It was not
until the 1990s that the text was finally taken up by Asian American critics, a turn in reception
first heralded by the publication of Writing Self, Writing Nation, a collection of essays by Asian
American literary critics dedicated to the text, in 1994, and followed by the publication of Lisa
Lowe’s tremendously influential Immigrants Acts in 1996, which reproduced Lowe’s essay from
Writing Self, Writing Nation as integral to its central argument. By the mid-1990s, as Timothy
Yu chronicles, the text was a staple on Asian American literature syllabi and widely accepted as
part of the Asian American literary canon.
4

As the essays in Writing Self, Writing Nation reveal, Dictee was deliberately chosen to
steer the field away from the cultural nationalist, masculinist, and essentialist paradigms that the
authors felt had come to characterize critical concepts of Asian American identity. The published
text was based on a panel that Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, L. Hyun Yi Kang, and Shelley Sunn
Wong had presented at the 1991 Association of Asian American Studies Conference. As Elaine
Kim states in the preface, they “shared a sense of urgency about the need to bring Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha’s work to the attention of Asian Americans.”
5
This urgency was driven by both

105
broad shifts in the Asian/American political landscape and by personal revelations about the
limited nature of an Asian American identity defined by “exclusionary attributes” or a Korean
American identity defined by exclusively nationalist ties.
6
For Shelley Sunn Wong, broad
political and historical changes in the 1980s drove both the critical silence that characterized
Dictee’s initial reception and the field’s new embrace of it; she cites the major demographic
changes in the 1970s and 1980s in the Asian American population (discussed in depth in Chapter
1) alongside the growing power of the women’s movement and the institutionalization of
postmodern theories and methodologies as a “historical conjuncture” that radically shifted the
“oppositional strategies” and “the very social and ideological coordinates” that had previously
defined Asian American critical frameworks.
7

Each author marks, at the beginning of her essay, initial personal, as well as critical,
resistance to Dictee’s form and voice. For Elaine Kim and L. Hyun Yi Kang, the text initially
resisted their expectations of identification with the content and Cha herself, particularly in its
constant references to European high culture: Kim notes, “I was struggling at the time to define
and claim a Korean American identity […] What Dictée suggested, with its seemingly
incongruous juxtapositions, its references to Greek mythology, and its French grammar
exercises, seemed far afield from the identity I was after,” while Kang confesses, “It angered me
that the text was not always accessible, that it seemed to speak to a highly literate, theoretically
sophisticated audience that I did not identify with […] I believed that I, as a Korean/American
woman, should be able to immediately understand and identify with the work of another
Korean/American woman, and since that instant mirroring/attraction did not happen, either there
must be something “wrong” with me or with her.”
8
Timothy Yu argues that the expectation of
identification and “mirroring” that these critics brought to bear on the text stemmed from the

106
confluence between emergent Asian American literary modes and Asian American critical
reading methods in the 1980s. For Yu, the 1980s marked a period in which Asian American
literature abandoned the avant-garde and political paradigms of the 1970s for an “understated,
first-person […] ‘workshop’ style,” that differed only from mainstream literature in its tropes and
themes. This dovetailed with the emergence of an Asian American critical paradigm that focused
exclusively on the sociohistorical content of Asian American literature, dispensing with
questions of form or style entirely—a paradigm first articulated by Elaine Kim herself, in her
1982 study, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social
Context.
9

Indeed, though Kim chronicles a reversal in feeling and opinion about Dictee, she
continues to argue that the sociohistorical content of the text is more politically important than
concerns over the text’s form or style. For Kim, the value of the text is that its feminist retelling
of Korean folk tales, juxtaposed against continual references to Korea’s oft-erased history of
colonial occupation by Japan, carves out a “third space, an exile space” for “a Korean American
woman whose shifting identities conform to neither Korean nationalist nor Western feminist
narratives.”
10
She concludes her essay by arguing that “I am not so troubled by Korean and
Korean American responses to Dictée that focus on Cha’s Korean references even to the point of
ignoring other facets of the text. […] I am far less tolerant of readers who, in their eagerness to
explore the affinities between Dictée and other “postmodern” texts, have found it possible to
discuss Cha’s work without alluding in a significant way to her Korean heritage.” For Kim, then,
her embrace of Dictée as an Asian American feminist text was achieved by finding a way to
circumvent the difficulties presented by the text’s form in order to extract its sociopolitical
content.

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The other authors in the collection also draw out the sociopolitical context and content of
the text, but they put a larger emphasis on form, both its difficulties and its critical potentialities.
For each of the remaining critics, Dictee’s multivocality, fragmentation, and refusal to resolve
into a developmental narrative variously trouble singular or essentialist models of identity and
the relationship between language, literature, reality, and reading publics. In particular, all three
authors focus on the text’s relationship to language and representation, arguing that “in the prism
of Dictée, representativeness (founded on the identity of a single type) and authenticity
(predicated on original, unmediated essence) are refracted and returned as difference and
mediation.”
11
That is, by troubling readers’ expectations of a realist (that is, unmediated)
representation of sociohistorical realities with which the reader can identify—expectations
brought specifically to bear on Asian American and other ethnic literature—Dictee’s form
challenges notions both of unmediated, authentic identity and of literature’s capacity to faithfully
represent that identity even in a realist mode.
The embrace of Dictee, and the concomitant turn away from realist, autobiographical
genres and purely sociohistorical reading modes, marked such a foundational shift in the field
that Lowe’s Immigrant Acts is often pegged as the beginning of a new critical era. Christopher
Lee calls the beginning of this new era the “post-identity turn,” arguing that narratives of the
field’s development mark the years from 1990-1995, and Lowe’s work in particular, as the
critical foundations of contemporary iterations of Asian American critical practice.
12
Indeed, as I
show in Chapter 2, the reading modes and critical expectations first articulated in Lowe’s work
and in Writing Self, Writing Nation continue to resonate throughout Asian American reading
methods. In particular, in landmark studies like Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise and Jodi
Kim’s Ends of Empire, critical emphasis on formal fragmentation, multivocality, and

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indeterminacy continues to travel alongside investments in anti-essentialism and strategically
destabilized notions of identity, authenticity, reality, and representation.
The linkages assumed and generated between fragmented form and anti-essentialist politics
produce an “idealized critical subject” in Asian American Studies; that is, an Asian American
subject who “is defined by its oppositional relationship to U.S. society rather than cultural, racial,
or ethnic identity.”
13
These linkages also, as I argue in depth in Chapter 2, conjure an idealized
critical Asian American literature; that is, a body of work whose forms (fragmented, nonrealistic,
unsettling), tropes (metaphors of realism, identity, and language), and political content all work
in harmony to further the political investments of Asian American Studies: to unsettle
Asian/American nationalisms, racial formations, gendered hierarchies, and economic structures.
Enter Taipei. Internet mogul and self-promoter extraordinaire Tao Lin has been referred to
both as “the most interesting prose stylist of his generation” and as “someone who hates words”;
his newest semi-autobiographical novel, Taipei, has been hailed as a “relentless work of
vision,”and yet “reads as though it were the result of strict parameters imposed by a perverse
contest… to use as few interesting words as possible.”
14
Taipei follows Paul (yes, another Paul),
a Taiwanese American writer and internet sensation, as he travels around the U.S. and Taipei,
ingesting any drug that he comes upon, and embarks on multiple half-hearted and largely virtual
romances. Seemingly capable of provoking hyperbolic emotion on either side of the spectrum of
enjoyment from its audience, Taipei is, nonetheless, a uniquely affectless novel, one that flirts
with recognizable plot structures and character tropes—combining elements of love stories,
bildungsromane, and hedonistic substance-fueled road trips—while simultaneously refusing to
make good on the emotional trajectories of identification and resolution each genre depends on.

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As explored in previous chapters, Taipei was written in a distinctly different literary market
—not to mention global socioeconomic order—than Dictee. The institutionalization of Asian
American Studies—and the attendant development of a literary canon—that the writers of
Writing Self, Writing Nation were witnessing in its beginning stages progressed immensely in the
twenty-year gap between that volume and Taipei. Most starkly, as I argue in Chapter 2, “Asian
American literature” became in the interim a known and quantifiable category, with its own
catalogue of expected tropes, politics, and forms. Tao Lin certainly recognizes that his critics
will be tempted to categorize Taipei as “Asian American” literature; he flirts with several
recognizable tropes of the genre, like the return home to his diasporic origin and a fixation on his
own sexual dysfunction, and yet, as with all the other familiar literary scenes he invokes, he
ultimately refuses to invest them with the expected meaning. Though Taipei’s protagonist, Paul,
and author, Tao Lin, share a racialized identity, this identity is not leveraged to burnish the text
with the sheen of racial authenticity, as Stephen Sohn argues that the contemporary ethnic
literature market encourages authors to do.
15
Instead, the text is deeply suspicious of any claim to
authenticity, racial or otherwise. As I suggest in this chapter, however, Taipei’s resistance
towards authenticity or “truth” neither emerges from nor produces a racialized resistance to
universality. Instead, the novel’s self-conscious referentiality encompasses and enfolds both Tao
Lin and Paul’s racial identity.
Like Dictee, Taipei is so pointedly antagonistic to the expectations of its readers that the
text becomes, at times, unreadable (and, to many critics, deeply unlikeable). At the same time,
the difficulty of the text’s form, again like Dictee, seems to be partially the point; in blocking
readers’ desire to access the authenticity or emotional investment they desire, Taipei calls such
desires to attention. The prose often relies on rote and robotic cataloguing of ages, times, and

110
objects instead of description—“After the reading Lucie, 23, introduced herself and Amy, 23,
and Daniel, 25, to Paul and Mitch”— and, when Paul feels any specific emotion, it is often
couched in distancing quotation marks or qualified by ambiguity, i.e. “sort of” or “vaguely”: “All
he felt towards her, to his weak amusement, was an unexamined combination of indifference and
vague resentment, which he described as... ‘strong aversion,’ only half joking. Paul’s next email
to Charlie said ‘I feel like I “hate” her’ and that it seemed... like she also ‘hated’ him, that they
‘hated’ each other.”
16
Even simple, seemingly affectless actions are conveyed uneasily and
cushioned with qualifiers: “Paul openly stared at her for around ten seconds, then moved chips
and guacamole onto his lap (partly because he felt anxious about Laura seeming to refuse to look
at him) and focused on steadily eating while repeatedly thinking ‘eating chips and guacamole.’
He looked at his hands, and felt his mouth and throat, doing what he was thinking, and felt
vaguely confused. Was he instructing his brain? Or was he narrating what he saw and felt?”
17

Deployed to frame the phrases that Paul uses, to himself or to others, to describe his
feelings and actions, the quotation marks point to an uneasy acknowledgement that conscious
language is insufficient at capturing the array of uneven, nonconscious affects that are
experienced as “feelings,” while at the same time, naming those feelings within language itself
can generate new affects and feelings. For scholars of affect, consciousness is “subtractive… [a]
limitative, derived function that reduce a complexity to rich to be expressed.”
18
Brian Massumi,
resisting the classical distinction between affect (physiological sensations) and emotion
(psychological states), suggests that the key distinction between emotion and affect is that affect
is an autonomous energy; it is an intensity that impinges and impresses upon the surface of the
body, triggering autonomic responses which can only belatedly—and narrowly—be translated
into language and cognition. Emotion, then, is “qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual

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point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions”— that is,
emotion is affect translated into language, made recognizable through a cognitive process that
interprets and condenses the effects of nonconscious intensities into known quantities.
19
Paul's
use of quotation marks cast doubt on this process, suggesting that, while language and
consciousness might insufficiently capture nonconscious affect, language might also be deployed
to produce nonconscious affects and feelings that did not register before.
Thus, like Dictee, Taipei deploys language to draw attention to the very insufficiency of
language to represent or capture reality or personal experience. Yet unlike Dictee, the text’s
antagonism towards realism, language, and identity, is not oriented towards an oppositional or
alternative relationship or identity. For Asian American critics in the 1990s, the key to embracing
Dictee was in finding how its stylistic and formal mechanisms carved out a hybrid cultural
perspective, one that “validates Korean American identity” and “inscribe[s] a very fluid and
heterogeneous Korean feminist subjectivity.”
20
Taipei, in contrast, deploys hyper-realism—the
novel is persistent in describing every quotidian detail of Paul’s thoughts and actions, no matter
how inconsequential—not to suggest antagonism, or even ambivalence, to the erosive forces of
narrative and identity, but rather to portray a profound indifference to the entire question of how
identity, racialized or otherwise, shapes experience.
Paul’s relationship to the term “Asian American” illustrates this indifference. Although—
somewhat surprisingly—“Asian American” is never put into quotation marks in the text of
Taipei, the novel nonetheless casts similar doubt on its meaning as a label for Paul or for the
action of the novel, partially by using it extremely sparingly. Almost none of the characters,
beside Paul himself, are racially marked (or physically described in any in-depth way); and
though Paul himself moves back and forth between Taipei and the US and does speak Mandarin

112
with his family, he never refers to himself as Asian American, and the text betrays no interest in
portraying these typical racial markers as though they have any fundamental impact on Paul’s
character. The only time “Asian American” is used even vaguely in relation to Paul is in the
scene referenced in the introduction, when Paul and his friends attend an Asian American
Writers’ Workshop event, “at which a saxophone player had ranted about identity politics until
people, after about six minutes, actually began booing.”
21
Paul’s very presence at the event—and
the inclusion of the event at the text—suggests that Paul does have some connection or
identification with the term. At the same time, the very immateriality of this particular reference
stages the irrelevance of the term to Paul and, presumably, Tao Lin.
The question of racial feeling might seem ill-suited to a text dedicated to cataloguing how
nothing feels like anything much at all. To be without emotion is not to be without affect or tone,
however; the affective-aesthetic mode of Taipei is one of disorientation, detachment, and
consumption, and the text is rife with the sensory overload, physical animation, and deadening,
numbing over-saturation that all spring from life in the era of transnational capitalism and
flexible citizenship. In the world of Taipei, the circuit of nonconscious affect and conscious
emotion never quite completes or aligns; feelings don’t always translate into meaning, and
meaning doesn’t always translate into feeling. I argue that this disconnect between feeling and
meaning is what makes the text inscrutable to the current strictures of Asian American critical
reading practice; it is, at the same time, representative of a “colorblind” articulation of “Asian
American” and other modes of racialized living within neoliberal multiculturalism, and is thus
crucial for Asian American studies to reckon with.
In the following sections of this chapter, I stage three readings of passages from Taipei in
which particular assemblages of racial feelings seem to congeal or rise to the surface in

113
unexpected ways. In each, these feelings summon or echo the racial feelings of older racial
orders: alienation, discomfort, and disorientation reign supreme, and, just as with Aloft, it’s
tempting—even easy—to read these scenes solely within that older, recognizable racial schema.
Yet these fleeting feelings never fully resolve into meaning; they don’t function as the “absent
center” of Taipei, that is, as the obscured key that, once revealed, resolves the incoherencies of
the novel into a whole, and wholly recognizable, narrative. Instead, I argue, the indeterminacy of
these feelings is emblematic of the uneven affect of neoliberal multiculturalism, which does not
always successfully cover over the racialized damage inflicted by sedimented racial formations
and feelings. At the same time, colorblindness itself generates new feelings, where new
flexibilities, mobilities, and privileges enabled by access to real and cultural capital within global
capitalism cut across older racial formations and create new social cleavages which are not yet—
but might soon be—understood as “race.”

Otherworlds
In Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Aihwa Ong takes up the
idea proposed by many scholars of postmodernity and neoliberalism: that “flexibility” serves as a
descriptive model of both the governing and accumulative technologies and the lived condition
of neoliberalism.
22
She argues that the flexible regimes of capital accumulation and sovereignty
configured by neoliberalism have caused mutations in how citizenship is lived and shaped in the
tension between the regimes of the individual family, the nation-state, and the global market.
Focusing on middle and upper-class Chinese overseas migrants, Ong suggests that these
populations embody a transnational and flexible strategy of accumulation, capable of
“convert[ing] political constraints in one field into economic opportunities in another, to turn

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displacement into advantageous placement in different sites...”
23
She suggests that these flexible
citizens are multiply embedded within not just Western hegemonic neoliberalism but also
Chinese modernity, and emphasizes their agency in benefiting from multiple nation states and
globalization while escaping their disciplinary effects through mobility. At the same time, Ong
observes the limitations of this type of flexible accumulation of social and actual capital; she
shows not only that certain modes of social capital do not always travel (resulting in privileged
Chinese migrants still having less social capital in the West than throughout Asia, for instance),
but also that “even under conditions of transnationality, political rationality and cultural
mechanisms continue to deploy, discipline, regulate, or civilize subjects in place or on the
move.”
24

While Paul himself might not be characterized as a Chinese overseas migrant—though
born in Taiwan, Paul reports that he spent most of life in the U.S.—his experience as a second-
generation immigrant, whose parents returned to Taiwan after securing their finances in the U.S.,
and who travels with ease between the two spaces mimic the same flexibility that Ong describes.
Not only is the novel itself named Taipei—flagging some sort of symbolic significance in either
Paul’s imagination of the space or in his travels to the city—but it also opens and closes with
Paul visiting his parents in Taipei and then returning to the US. In the first instance, while Paul
reflects on returning to the States while in the Taipei airport, Paul fantasizes about eventually
moving to Taipei himself. His fantasy conjures not the typical diasporic longing for an imagined
homeland—a standard trope in Asian American and other diasporic literatures—but instead, I
argue, describes the lived, affective condition of the type of flexible citizenship enabled by late
global capitalism:
In the terminal, sitting with eyes closed, Paul imagined moving alone to Taipei at an age like 51, when
maybe he’d have cycled through enough friendships and relationships to not want more. Because his

115
Mandarin wasn’t fluent enough for conversations with strangers [...] He’d be preemptively estranged,
secretly unfriendable. The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed
throughout the city, onto which he’d project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he’d
appear to be, and be able to pretend he was, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he’d gradually
come to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and
feeling affection without touching or speaking. An earnest assembling of the backup life he’d sketched and
constructed the blueprints and substructures for (during the average of six weeks per year, spread
throughout his life, that he’d been in Taiwan) would begin, at some point, after which, months or years
later, one morning, he would sense the independent organization of a second itinerant consciousness—lured
here by the new, unoccupied structures—toward which he’d begin sending the data of his sensory
perception. The antlered, splashing, water-treading land animal of his first consciousness would sink to
some lower region, in the lake of himself, where he would sometimes descend in sleep and experience its
disintegrating particles—and furred pieces, brushing past—in dreams, as it disappeared into the pattern of
the nearest functioning system.
25

Notably, Paul’s fantasy of Taipei as “a fifth season, or ‘otherworld’”— which he hearkens back
to in moments of emotional stress throughout the novel—hinges on his fantastic capability to
“appear to be... and pretend he was” part of the mass, even if he “never actually” is, leaving him
“preemptively estranged.”
26

It is, as I suggested above, easy to read this passage within the reading practices of Asian
American literature, where a racialized history of exclusion and alienation is inextricably bound
up in present identities, physicalities, and capacities. Despite Paul’s (or Lin’s) insistent refusal to
racially mark Paul and his friends in any way, his fantastic longing for an ability to “appear” like
everyone else in the otherworld of Taipei gestures towards a racialized longing to erase the
physical differences that might otherwise mark Paul as separate and alienated from the general
population. This racialized physicality is embodied by the “antlered, splashing, water-treading
land animal of his first consciousness”—that is, the consciousness Paul has developed while
living in the U.S. Though Paul as narrator and Lin as author avoid any overt description of race,
the description of Paul’s U.S.-based consciousness is, at the same time, pointedly physically out
of place: a land animal, splashing and treading water, trying to survive in an environment it was
not physically built for. Here, the transnational mobility that has structured Paul’s life, and
allowed him to develop “blueprints and substructures” for a second, Taipei-based consciousness,

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allows him to fantasize an escape from the racial regimes in the U.S., in which his body is out of
place and in which, it seems, he can never “appear to be” or even pretend to be part of the mass.
Where a racialized reading of Paul’s Taipei fantasy might expect that to feel racially
aligned would summon feelings of belonging and connection, Paul instead dreams of a “needless
intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without
touching or speaking.” This collective state of “needless intimacy,” which seemingly emanates
from “the unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone,” could again be read as a racialized
structure of feeling. Here, the nonconscious racial feeling of physical out of place-ness is soothed
by an unindividualized mass that Paul feels capable of “appearing” to be part of. While he may
be unable to consciously connect with anyone because of his inability to speak conversational
Mandarin, this fantasy suggests he may yet be sustained by nonconscious racial connection that
can help foster new structures of consciousness not marked, consciously or non-, by racial
difference. His description of the “blueprints and substructures” of consciousness that he has
been constructing his entire life, during his periodic visits to Taiwan, suggest too that though
may not consciously know this himself, Taipei has always offered a respite from the physical
discomfort of his existence in the US, and this is why he returns to it as a fantasy in moments of
heightened stress.
From yet another perspective, Paul’s fantasy could be understood as what Ong calls a
“self-orientalizing project.”
27
Ong argues that upper class overseas Chinese deploy narratives of
Orientalism in order to “reposition Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as new authority
figures while suggesting declining human capital and leadership qualities among Anglos.”
28

While Tao Lin may not seek to position Paul as a “leader” in contradistinction to the surrounding
white characters, this fantasy of Paul’s is imbued with orientalist imaginaries that nonetheless

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position Taiwan as technologically and socially superior to the U.S. Specifically, the fantasy of
Asian racial homogeneity is a direct derivation of American orientalism, often crystallized in the
joke that Asians all look alike. Paul’s invocation of the “screen” is reminiscent of yellow peril
fears of Asian technological prowess, and also points toward U.S. coding of Asians and Asian
Americans as lacking emotionality and animation—as, that is, robotic, unfeeling, and otherwise
less human than white Americans.
29
Yet here those orientalist signifiers are coded as positive,
and indeed, superior to the U.S.; thus, as Ong argues, this is an orientalism that does not encode
Asians as passive objects of Western imaginaries, but rather renarrativizes Asian agency, hailing
U.S. readers by deploying selective familiar tropes that are then inscribed with new meaning.
Pointedly, however, while Paul’s fantasy might be about abandoning one physically-out-
of-place consciousness, his fantasy does not necessarily conjure a new, more connected, less
alienated consciousness in a place he feels at home. While perhaps no longer physically out of
place, Paul’s Taipei consciousness is just as alienated, if not even more so, since he is also
fantasizing about reaching a mental state of “having cycled through enough friendships and
relationships to not want more.” Indeed, the “needless intimacy” he imagines is not actually with
the collective mass, but rather, with himself, as his inability to connect with anyone will allow
him to “project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination.” This is compounded at the end of
the novel, on his last trip to Taiwan, where he again fantasizes about an “otherworld, where he
would find a place […] to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin,
at some point, to think about what to do about himself.”
30
He later adds, “[He] believe[d], on
some level, that if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to
disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some

118
incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur […] it would be
here.”
31

Paul’s fantasy about the otherworld of Taipei, then, proves not to be a fantasy about finally
finding a space of perfect connection, undisturbed even by nonconscious disorientations and
unease generated by racial difference. Instead, Taipei is a fantasy of perfect isolation, where Paul
might “hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself.” This suggests that, in
fact, Paul’s alienation and detachment does not stem from his racial difference in the US, since
it’s actually heightened—even perfected—in Taiwan. While racial difference might inflect his
alienation in the US, nonconsciously shaping his sensations of disconnection to manifest in his
physical sense of self, his disconnection is not generated by racial difference. And yet it is not
merely an individualized dislocation either, guided as it is by “initial momentum,” a “setting
implemented before birth,” and part of “an out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible
worldview.”
What is the out-of-control, incomprehensible worldview that Paul feels inextricably part of,
if it is not a structure of racialized exclusion and disorientation? To return to Aihwa Ong, it
might exactly be Paul’s flexibility that leaves him—and other flexibly mobile and privileged
subjects, particularly second-generation subjects like him—unable to feel at home either in the
U.S. or Taiwan. Where racial difference might leave Paul feeling physically out of place in the
US, for instance, other markers of difference, as I explore in the next section, similarly estrange
him from feeling at home in Taiwan. Within the lived experience of flexible citizenship enabled
by global capitalism, then, particular modes of racialized stigma continue to be in effect. Yet,
they’re in no way totalizing descriptions of a racialized subject’s experience, particularly those,

119
like Paul, who are simultaneously enabled by class mobility and access to the material and
cultural capital of global cosmopolitanism.

RACIAL RECOGNITION
In describing neoliberal multiculturalism, Jodi Melamed argues that, as an ideological
structure, neoliberal multiculturalism “hinders the calling into question of global capitalism ... [In
part, by] deploy[ing] a normative cultural model of race as a discourse to justify inequality for
some as fair and natural. The racial contradictions that such procedures disavow or manage for
global capitalism today manifest both within and beyond color lines.” She argues that
neoliberalism continues to operate along the “racial divisions engendered by white supremacy,
colonialism, and slavery,” while, at the same time “breaks with an older racism’s reliance on
phenotype to innovate new ways of fixing human capacities to naturalize inequality. The new
racism deploys economic, ideological, cultural, and religious distinctions to produce lesser
personhoods, laying these new categories of privilege and stigma across conventional racial
categories.”
32

At the same time, those older racial categories persist and continue to be felt at the level of
the nonconscious for Paul; and even as the “official antiracisms” produced by neoliberal
multiculturalism actively work to disguise the racial workings of global capitalism, such
inequalities have racial resonances that cannot be fully articulated and yet nonetheless retain
discomfiting power. Though, as mentioned above, obvious racial markings are few and far
between in Taipei, Paul does notice and explicitly mark other Asian people at various New York
events on three separate occasions, which are notable precisely because they’re so rare: when he
and his friend Daniel walk past “dozens of elderly, similarly dressed Asian men [...] standing in a

120
loosely organized row, like a string of Christmas lights,” one of whom replies “without an
accent” when Daniel asks him a question; when an “Asian girl” at a party approaches him, and,
after initial conversation, “removed a Chinese magazine from her bag and asked if Paul was
good at translating”; and, finally, at a house party, “in a bar staffed with Asians, with Chinese
and Vietnamese food.”
33

Each of these encounters pivot on various cultural signifiers which stand in for race—
language, dress, food—and at the same time, function to either fracture or separate Paul from
those who he recognizes, on some unconscious racial level. Language, for instance, functions at
multiple levels to signify kinship or estrangement, which relay into markers of global,
cosmopolitan mobility: Paul is seemingly surprised, for instance, that an elderly Asian man
surrounded by a group of men just like him is able to speak without an accent—because,
presumably, old Asian men hanging out together in gentrifying New York neighborhoods are
more likely to be “monocultural” immigrants, unable to either satisfactorily assimilate or to
accumulate enough capital to return to their homeland. At the same time, Paul himself is then
made insufficiently cosmopolitan or multicultural by his encounter with the Asian girl, as he
replies that “he couldn’t read Chinese or speak Mandarin fluently, and had an American accent
sometimes, he’d been told.” Though this time in the opposite direction, lack of fluency or the
lingering of an accent confers some shadow of racialized and classed stigma that serves to both
establish and fracture the racial relation between Paul and the other Asian/American people he
encounters.
The third mention, when Paul notices that the bar is staffed with Asians, more obviously
highlights the fracturing function of class within racial categories, and resonates later in the
novel. When he next returns to Taipei in the novel, Paul is accompanied by his new wife, Erin,

121
who he married during a drug-fueled trip to Las Vegas. Rather than engaging in the typical and
expected tourist trips or immersive family time, the two spend most of their time filming
themselves in a Taipei McDonald’s, located in a large mall, while ingesting large amounts of
MDMA, LSD, and other drugs. On one of these occasions, Paul and Erin try to pin down how
the mall in Taipei is different from one in America:

“I like how quiet it is,” said Paul.
“Me too,” said Erin. [...]
“I don’t like places... where everyone working is a minority... because I feel like there’s too many
different... I don’t know,” said Paul with a feeling that he unequivocally did not want to be talking about
what he was talking about, but had accidentally focused on it, like a telescope a child had turned, away
from a constellation, toward a wall.
“Like, visually?”
“Um, no,” said Paul. “Just that... they know they’re minorities...”
“That they like, band together?”
“Um, no,” Paul said [...] “Just that... here, when you see someone, you don’t know... that... they live like
two hours away and are um... poor, or whatever,” said Paul very slowly, like he was improvising an erasure
poem from a mental image of a page of text.
34

After the discussion about minorities, Paul excuses himself to the bathroom, where, he
confesses to Erin, he “tried masturbating but couldn’t.”
35
He elaborates later: “He tried
masturbating in public bathrooms and couldn’t orgasm or feel pleasure, to any degree, as if
lacking the concept, but felt continuously aroused ‘somewhere,’ including sometimes, it seemed,
outside his body, a few feet in front of him, or far in the distance, in a certain store or area of sky,
or in an overlap, shifting in and out of his chest or head or the front of his face.”
36

Like Paul’s “antlered, splashing, water-treading land animal” consciousness—whose out of
place and disoriented physicality recalls the disoriented physicality of racial difference—here
Paul’s inability to orgasm, occurring directly after the disorienting conversation about
“minorities,” recalls the “racial castration” explored by David Eng and other Asian American
studies scholars, where the social trauma of exclusion manifests in the imagined sexual
capacities of Asian American men.
37
If this scene had taken place in the US, after Paul witnessed

122
Asian servers handing out Orientalized food at a party, the psychoanalytic dimensions of Paul’s
inability to orgasm would be relatively easy to gloss: Paul’s racial recognition of his own kinship
with “minorities” is repressed by his unconscious because it threatens to dissolve his
subjectivity; later, the repressed returns in the form of sexual dysfunction, his body registering
what his conscious mind refuses to.
However, in a mall McDonalds in Taipei—separated by the glossy lens of a Macbook
computer camera—Paul’s ability to identify with the food servers is much more complicated
than that, as his halting conversation with Erin reveals. His discussion of “minority” workers in
the US, that “live two hours away and are um… poor, or whatever,” suggests that Paul has a
nascent consciousness of the connection between racial and class difference in the US, where
“minority” laborers, particularly food servers in this example, are not just more likely to be poor
because of their job but because their racial and economic status compound each other. He
suggests it’s more “quiet” in Taipei for him—connoting physical ease—because there is no
visible difference between the consumers and the workers, making economic differences less
noticeable to him. Just because there is no visible racial difference between consumers and
workers, however, does not mean class differences to not exist and definitively cleave the two
populations apart, however, which Paul’s encounter in the bathroom seem to register. Both in the
mall in Taipei and at the party staffed by Asians in the US, Paul feels racial recognition and
kinship—which is repressed in the colorblind US but undeniable in Taipei. At the same time,
though, he feels class cleavages between himself and them, which interrupt and subvert that
racial recognition. While it may difficult, within the colorblind ideology of the U.S., to admit that
he is “like” the Asian servers at a party, it seems equally difficult, within the supposedly racially
homogenous space of Taiwan, to admit that he is not “like” the McDonald’s workers—which

123
then retroactively shapes his identification, or non-identification, with Asian laborers in the US,
who he again may actually not be like. The high probability that mall workers in Taiwan are
actually unlikely to be racially homogenous—service labor is as racialized in Taiwan as it is in
the U.S.
38
—further complicates Paul’s stumbling articulation of “likeness”; his inability to
recognize the ethnic and racial dynamics of Taiwan here reveals him to be thoroughly American
and thus thoroughly unlike the workers he feels more “like.”
So the fact that Paul is unable to orgasm, “as if lacking the concept,” might be similar to
racial castration, in that it is an effect of repressed social relations that, though denied, continue
to be felt in the body. Those relations are not merely shaped by conscious structures of race—
which dictate that Paul is like Asian laborers anywhere—but also by nascent recognitions of
class and national differences, which cut across and complicate any (un)conscious racial
identification. At the same time, “racial castration” generally marks a psychic damage that is
both caused by and causes meaningful exclusion from realms of social power and material
access. Here, though, Paul’s inability to orgasm does not meaningfully impede his ability to
partake in the pleasures generated by global capitalism. Indeed, the very fleetingness of this
scene—that is, its nonrelation to the larger narrative, and Paul’s seeming unconcern about his
inability to orgasm—might not, in the end, signal something very meaningful being repressed,
but rather exactly what it seems: a temporary affective state, felt viscerally for a moment, that
ultimately holds no psychic significance and has no lasting material effects.
Here, the difference between the psychoanalytic unconscious of racial castration and the
autonomic nonconscious of racial feeling rises to the surface. The unconscious is bound up with
the conscious; it is part of consciousness, albeit repressed from actual psychic acknowledgement.
For scholars of affect, however, consciousness is “subtractive… [a] limitative, derived function

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that reduce a complexity to rich to be expressed.”
39
“Nonconscious” indexes those intensities and
stimuli that register on the body—elevating heart rates, triggering shifts in skin texture and
temperature, altering pheromones as they are exhaled and inhaled—yet never actually enter
consciousness, though they do shape conscious processes and functions, exactly through such
bodily transformations.
Paul’s bodily feeling of arousal “somewhere” but not actually in his own body points to
this complex interchange between nonconscious and conscious reverberations. As explored in
the section above, Paul is a flexible, cosmopolitan citizen subject empowered to enjoy the
heights of consumerist fantasy engendered by global capitalism; tellingly, one of the sites he can
locate pleasure is “in a store.” Even more tellingly, he feels arousal “in an overlap,” shifting from
within his bodily boundaries, to outside of them, and back again. A mall is designed to engender
arousal by inciting capitalist desires exactly through affective transmissions; as consumers move
from one store to another, they nonconsciously absorb intensities not just from sensorily rich
advertisements, store displays, and food court fragrances, but also from each other, as each
consumer who lingers over an unwise but tempting purchase or teeters under the weight of their
bags generates their own affective intensities that in turn stoke and shape the affective states of
others. Thus pleasure and arousal pulse through Paul without settling into something he can
consciously claim as his own, as his body registers arousal but does not necessarily produce it.
As much as Paul’s unconscious might struggle with articulating or understanding his racial
relation to the workers in the mall or the servers at the party within his sedimented, if limited,
racial vocabulary, his nonconscious circulates, partakes in, and enjoys the pleasure of flexible
cosmopolitan living—itself generating new feelings of connection and disconnection, which

125
travel along the lines of the emergent racial structures of feeling that characterize global
capitalism.
Thus, these linked scenes in the mall suggest that, within neoliberal multiculturalism and
global capitalism, multiple structures of racial feeling operate simultaneously, wherein the
psychic damage incurred by a history of racial castration can still be felt—but felt differently,
with different material effects than in the past. In the final section, I explore how it is that racial
feeling can permeate the social even when no racial reference at all—even an extrapolated or
resonant one—is spoken or can be seen. That is, I argue that the ending pages of the novel,
which function at least partially as the narrative climax, can also be read as the climax of the
tensions and anxieties generated by the unspoken racial feeling that vibrates on the edges of the
text. Rather than seeking to stage racial feeling as the “absent center” of the novel—the textual
blind spot that nonetheless drives the narrative—my final reading keeps racial feeling at the
margins, buried within resonances, echoes, and likenesses.

REMEMBER LAS VEGAS?
The alienation and disorientation Paul feels as a result of his increasing drug use
throughout the novel and, relatedly, his intensifying depression, culminates in a long drug trip in
the last few pages of the novel in which Paul becomes convinced he has overdosed and is about
to die. In this heightened state, the disconnection between Paul’s bodily feeling and his conscious
thought becomes profound:
“This isn’t what I expected at all,” he heard himself say, at some point, without knowing what he was
referencing. He’d obviously wanted something good to happen, but what was happening wasn’t expected,
based on what he’d said, therefore it must be bad. He was yawning, so he was factually bored of Erin.
40

126
According to Brian Massumi, wherein consciousness is a limitative translation of nonconscious
bodily feelings, a “normal” conscious subject feels something and then, as those feelings are
processed into consciousness, names what they are feeling. Here, this process is at once
heightened and confused. For instance, Paul yawning and then deciding that it must be because
he’s bored is an exaggeration of this process; his body responds to nonconscious affects and
impulses and his consciousness must work to catch up and decipher the meaning of such bodily
responses. Bodily feeling and verbal expression are also, at the same time, reversed: Paul finds
himself saying “this isn’t what I expected,” and then consciously reorienting his bodily feeling to
agree with what he has said, working backwards to deduce what it is he might mean by that. Of
course, this heightened physical disorientation—wherein the feedback loop between mind and
body is interrupted and denaturalized—gestures most obviously to the kind of universal or at
least generational ennui Paul represents; his alienation from his own body is not meant to be
racialized but rather universalized, as made clear by the text’s repeated and insistent avoidance
of allowing race to “matter” for Paul.
At the same time, in the context of the other passages read above, wherein race was not
acknowledged and yet generated affective currents that shaped both Paul’s conscious thoughts
and his bodily feelings, this reversal of language, consciousness, and bodily feeling cannot help
but conjure racial feeling. That is, in passages above, racial references appeared and then were
either repressed or reinscribed with non-racial meaning, making it more obvious when race as a
structure of feeling might be in play even as it was denied. In the long pages of Paul’s imagined
overdose (he’s never actually at risk of dying), no such racial references appear. Yet somehow
this description of intensified bodily alienation feels like a description of exactly the type of
racialized alienation Paul has been subjecting himself to—consciously or not—throughout the

127
text. He may feel race, but he does not say it; and, in not saying it, retroactively renarrativizes his
own experiences to cover over the material effects of race. At the same time, and over time, this
renarration has its own affective force, so that those material effects are sometimes not merely
covered over but transformed.
Indeed, as he’s convinced he’s dying, Paul reflects exactly on this retroactive reconfiguring
of his own consciousness: “He tried to fondly recall a memory of his life, of life generally [...]
and said, ‘kissing is good’ and ‘remember Las Vegas?’ He said ‘Taiwan was good’ knowing it
hadn’t been, aware he was openly trying to deceive himself, then thought of tracing back his life
to determine what caused the sequence of events leading to his overdose.”
41
Here, Tao Lin
gestures towards the generic expectations of the climax of a social problem novel or
bildungsroman, which must culminate in a crisis that forces the protagonist to make adult or
responsible choices: aware that the narrative itself doesn’t provide a clear chain of events leading
to this supposed climax, the narrator must metatextually reflect on how to provide one. Yet
beyond this toying with “universal” (deracialized) generic conventions, Paul’s reflections
obliquely gesture to what might be called the process of colorblindness for racialized subjects:
rather than affective bodily feeling being translated (if narrowly) into language through a process
of recognition and naming, here bodily feelings are arrested before recognition takes place, then,
later, and only within prescribed and circumscribed language, named and made sense of. In other
words, the passages read above showed how race continues to be felt even when it is not
acknowledged, spoken, or even seen; colorblindness as an unspoken ideology—rather than a felt
affect—works backwards to renarrate racial feeling as individualized, interpersonal, and
deracialized feelings. This complex structure of feeling is layered over and resonates with those
structures of feeling conjured by flexible citizenship and racial castration, all functioning to

128
simultaneously suture Paul tightly to the racialized positions his body inhabits while, at the same
time, transforming the meaning and material effects of those positions. Sutures do both at once,
of course; they close wounds and form scars, resurfacing the skin, yet leaving their mark.
Thus, Taipei closes with the same riddle it began with: what is the relationship between
feeling something, knowing you feel something, and saying you feel something? Paul’s feeling
of social alienation and physical disorientation travel through all of these circuits at once—the
nonconscious, the unconscious, and the conscious—and each resonates along different structures
of racial and class formation that sometimes fall in line and sometimes cut across each other. To
read only within the un/conscious circuits might lead us to conclude that, even though Paul
refuses to engage in the “identity politics” he sees as fundamental to Asian American cultural
production, his racial difference nonetheless “makes sense” of his alienations. But the
nonconscious is just as important in Taipei, and it channels and charts emergent racial formations
that cannot be made sense of within sedimented language of race but have not yet generated their
own named categories, because the need for them has not solidified in Asian American literary
studies. Indeed, Paul ruminates on a similar problem on his last visit to Taipei:
Paul asked if she could think of a newer word for “computer” than “computer,” which seemed outdated
and, in still being used, suspicious in some way, like maybe the word itself was intelligent and had
manipulated culture in its favor, perpetuating its usage.
“I’m still thinking,” she said after a few minutes.
“I don’t think my question made any sense,” said Paul. “There can’t be a newer word… for the same
word.”
42

For Paul, “computer” at once names a known, identifiable thing—a computer—and an
assemblage of productive, connective, and surveillance technologies that extend far beyond that
known, identifiable thing, such that the word computer becomes insufficient to explain the
embeddedness of “computers” in every aspect of everyday life. In the same way, “race” and
“racial formation,” read through a sedimented rubric of conscious and unconscious, at once name

129
known, identifiable structures and yet, in their very singularity and seeming concreteness,
perhaps belie the multiplicities of race and racial formations at work at the level of the everyday.

THE TWO PAULS
The fate of the two Pauls in Aloft and Taipei are fundamentally different, and orient the
text and reader towards different racial futures. One Paul is settled firmly into the national
structures of privilege once called whiteness; the other flexibly moves through a global system
seemingly without race, in that race as aesthetic difference is meaningless and race as material
difference has not yet sedimented into conscious structures. While both texts unsettle critical
expectations about the role of racialized perspectives in Asian American literature, then, they
advance different yet simultaneous visions of Asian American identity and the material function
of race in the 21
st
century. That is, while Taipei envisions a formation of race in which culture,
class, and economic and geographic mobility function to detach the axis of privilege and stigma
that distributes life chances throughout populations from race, Aloft complicates but essentially
extends the so-called “color line” formation of race as it has been lived and documented
throughout American history, though the place of Asian American identity within or upon that
line is shifted.
Neither vision ought to be given primacy, and indeed, as my readings have shown, both
of these visions are uneven and shot through with the shadows of older racial formations and the
constitutive violences that defined them. Yet the simultaneity of these visions itself reveals the
inherently unstable nature of “Asian American” as an identity category, market label, and
racialized position. Like Dictee before them, these texts point to a need for Asian American
literary studies to revise its core assumptions about Asian American cultural production and its

130
relationship to national, and global, socioeconomic structures. Importantly, in order to fully grasp
the function of Asian American culture within global capitalism, Asian American literary studies
needs to orient its own focus towards the nonconscious—that is, the emergent and as-yet-
unrecognized—as much as towards the conscious experience of known and named structures.
Such a reorientation demands a more contingent and complex analysis of the relationship
between the history of race, the racial present, and the racial future, in order to unearth the
embryonic social cleavages and procedures we do not yet, but might soon, call “race” as it
unfolds throughout the 21
st
century.

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Four

The Citizen, the Terrorist, and the Monster: John Yoo’s “Torture Memos”

In 1987, a Korean American student at Harvard wrote an editorial in the Harvard Crimson
that addressed the specter of “subtle racism” that “prevail[ed] even among the more enlightened
students.”
1
“You catch it in a glance, in a whispered comment behind your back, in a loud joke,”
he mused. “Such attitudes […] make it difficult to pursue a mainstream life here.” Recounting
the then high-profile arrest of Jose Luis Razo—known to the press as the “Harvard Homeboy,”
Razo was a Latino Harvard student who had been arrested for committing multiple armed
robberies in the Boston area—the editorialist dwells on the details of the case that suggest that
Razo’s crimes were motivated, in part, by his sense of alienation at Harvard.
2
“Whose fault is
this? The student’s or the school’s?” The editorial, entitled “Minority Search for a Middle
Ground,” bemoaned the state of race relations at Harvard, and portrayed the experience for
minority students at Harvard as one between total assimilation into, or total rejection of,
whiteness. “What identity do we seek here?” he asked. “Do we turn within to examine our
heritage, or do we look outside to fit in to the larger society? Unfortunately no middle ground
exists. Either path leads to the exclusion of the other and the disapproval of one’s peers.”
Strikingly, the student did not posit this as an individual dilemma, but rather, and institutional
and structural one. “A good number of minority students join ethnic student organizations, such
as the Black Students Association and the Asian-American Association. However, most non-
minority students look down on the leaders of these groups and fail to take their activities
seriously, viewing them as anti-social in purpose and practice. As a result, Harvard ethnic
organizations cannot stage any meaningful events that are not directed inward toward their own

132
particular minority community. […] The diverse student body, which is supposed to educated
students here as much as courses do, never materializes as the diverse elements keep to
themselves.” Here, the writer documents the phenomenon of “self-segregation,” which would
that same year be excoriated in Allan Bloom’s conservative best seller The Closing of the
American Mind. Yet rather than blaming this phenomenon on minority students opting to refuse
the friendly overtures of white students—as Bloom did, when he opined, “I do not believe this
somber situation is the fault of the white students, who […] have made the adjustment, without
missing a beat, to a variety of religions and nationalities, the integration of Orientals and the
change in women’s aspirations and roles”
3
—the editorial instead suggests that the white student
body’s indifference, or outright antagonism, to minority student’s perspectives caused this racial
separation. Those who choose to forsake ethnic ties and assimilate into the white mainstream do
not help the problem either; this brings “only nominal diversity,” he says, as “those who follow
this path lose their heritage on the way.”
4

The author of the editorial, a reporter and editorialist for the Crimson, was John Yoo, then an
undergraduate at Harvard. Born in America to parents who moved to the US after the Korean
War because of “a love of democracy,” Yoo attended Harvard and Yale Law School and taught
at UC Berkeley before being offered a position in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel, a small group of lawyers who offer legal counsel to the executive branch.
5
According to
one New York Times’ profile, Yoo was a junior aide at the time of the September 11 attacks, but
he quickly rose to enough prominence and power that his autonomy in the office rankled even
John Ashcroft, then Attorney General.
6
Between September 2001 and March 2003, Yoo, acting
as Deputy Assistant Attorney General, composed and sent a series of memos that have become
known as the “Torture Memos.” Written in the wake of the events of September 11, the memos

133
laid the groundwork for a seemingly unprecedented expansion of Presidential power, and
provided legal justification for almost everything the Bush administration became notorious for:
use of wiretapping for intelligence gathering; the suspension of First, Fourth, and Eighth
amendment rights during “wartime”; the inapplicability of the Geneva Convention to Al Qaeda
and Taliban militants taken hostage by the US army; the evasion of the Posse Comitatus Act,
which had previously banned the use of the US military to enforce laws on domestic soil;
Guantánamo Bay’s lack of habeas corpus rights; and, of course, the legality, both domestic and
international, of harsh, inhumane, and degrading interrogation techniques in the pursuit of
national security. As the central legal architect of many of these policies, Yoo became a figure of
infamy and, in the Obama era, an emblem of the overreaches and excesses of the Bush
administration. After the Obama administration released an unredacted trove of Yoo’s torture
memos in 2008 and 2009, one headline wondered bluntly, “Is John Yoo a Monster?”
7

What do Yoo’s undergraduate observations about the structural contradictions of diversity at
an elite university have to do with the Torture Memos, and vice versa? I argue in this chapter that
Yoo’s observations of the workings of the multicultural university, which was still finessing its
strategies and tactics of governance in the 1980s, are in many ways the origin of his torture
memos. Certainly, even very early on in his writing career, Yoo begins to test and develop a
political theory of executive power that would come to full fruition in the torture memos. Yet
more urgently for this chapter, he also observes and records a set of managerial practices—
deployed both by the University on its students, and the federal government on the University—
that Yoo himself will go on to deploy in the torture memos. In specific, he observes how the
University both wields and contains difference, encouraging and fomenting a broad awareness of
social differences, like class, gender and race, while simultaneously seeking to contain and

134
absorb the implications of those differences. Yoo also witnessed the ways in which the
University and the federal government could appropriate the radical language of those they
sought to manage for their own use, so that social actors from any number of ethical, moral, or
institutional standpoints could use the same language to justify their position as more ethical than
any other. Having learned these tactics while in the lap of the multicultural university, I argue,
Yoo finesses them for his own political purpose in the torture memos.
But what does all this have to do with Asian American studies, the ostensible subject of this
dissertation? As I have outlined in detail throughout this project, Asian American Studies as a
field has a disputed origin story. Yet it is relatively undisputed that the contemporary
permutations of Asian American Studies—in its feminist, queer, transnational, and critical
iterations—stem from a pivotal “anti-essential” turn in the 1990s, embodied most prominently by
Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts. Like Yoo’s torture memos, this anti-essential turn emerged in part
through an encounter with, and observation of, the contradictory workings of the multicultural
university in the 1980s and 1990s; indeed, as I detail below, this setting was in part the origin of
the field’s investment in contradiction, fragmentation, disavowal, and non-resolution.
Thus, I explore how the torture memos and Asian American studies’ methods emerge from
the same origin in parallel, deploying strikingly similar tactics to reach radically different ends.
This is not to suggest that Yoo and Asian American Studies scholars like Lisa Lowe are “the
same.” It is not my intent to reductively read Asian American Studies as portraying itself as a
field and Asian American culture as oppositional while “really” participating in and honing the
managerial practices of multiculturalism, or worse, directly contributing to and shaping the
violence wrought on racialized bodies by the apparatuses of the state, as the Torture Memos do.
Instead, my intent in examining the shared ground between the Torture Memos and Asian

135
American Studies as a field is to clearly identify the process and tactics of multiculturalism as an
absorbing, incorporative technology, one that is specifically designed to absorb and incorporate
the languages, logics, and practices that most radically interrupt it. Rather than stopping short at
pointing out that there is no easy distinction between what is absorbed and institutionalized by
multiculturalism and what remains and functions in opposition to it, I aim, in the rest of the
chapter, to catalogue some of the exact points of absorption. In doing so, I expand racial feeling
to encompass racial thinking, indexing the ways in which shared social and institional milieus
can generate not just shared affects but also shared logics, structures of argument, and lines of
thought.

SHARED ORIGINS
Perhaps predictably, Yoo’s editorials in The Crimson reveal nascent political theories and
personal quirks that hint at the theory of sweeping executive power he would develop in full
while acting as Deputy Assistant Attorney General.
8
Yet at the same time, Yoo’s collection of
editorials and articles reveal his struggle to assess and reconcile the promises and failures of the
neoliberal multicultural university, which was itself struggling to define itself and its mission
throughout the 1980s. Still seemingly reeling from violent student protests in the late 1960s and
early 1970s—the height of which was, as Yoo himself notes, a student takeover of Harvard’s
University Hall that ended in a violent confrontation with police armed with billy clubs and
mace—Harvard sought to find stability between a newly activist student body and a newly
hostile Presidential administration.
9
This entailed administrative contortions that attempted to
simultaneously redefine Harvard’s core curriculum and broad educational mission as liberal,
multicultural, and globally-oriented; integrate growing numbers of racial minorities and women

136
into Harvard’s existing social and academic structures; deflect student activism centering on
divestment from South Africa, staff unionization, and other university business operations; and
lobby an increasingly suspicious White House administration that sought to minimize higher
education’s social authority and fiscal relationship with the federal government. Yoo’s
observations of these contortions reveal a growing awareness of and disenchantment with the
intense contradictions of this emergent administrative and social formation.
In the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and violent student protests against the
Vietnam War, Harvard set out to redesign its curriculum and adjust its academic structures to
respond to growing populations of minority and women students and an overall sea change in
student-administrative relationships. Commissioned in 1974 by University President Derek Bok
and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry Rosovsky and adopted by the Harvard
Faculty in 1978, the newly designed Core Curriculum reflected the administration’s struggle to
appease both the radical and conservative elements on campus. An introduction to the edited and
published version of the Report on the Core Curriculum states,
At mid-century, breadth was provided by requiring courses that surveyed the three main divisions of
knowledge (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences), and offered a grounding in the traditions and
cultures of Western civilization. But in the last decade or more, this curriculum pattern has seemed
inadequate or inappropriate. Colleges now serve an extraordinarily diverse body of students; knowledge
has proliferated immensely and familiar lines of demarcation have broken down; there is a growing interest
in the history and problems of non-Western countries and peoples. These currents have made it
increasingly difficult to agree upon a body of knowledge that could be considered essential to the education
of undergraduates, and they have called into question the structure of the traditional liberal arts
curriculum.
10

This gloss on the contemporary mission of the university here straddles the line between
tentatively acknowledging the radical challenges student activism and postcolonial and
postmodern theory were posing to canonical notions of truth and history and maintaining a
conservative investment in a foundational relationship between “education” and “civilization.”
11

The Core Curriculum drew ire from students and faculty alike, as when Yoo dismissively

137
mentioned it in his last editorial for the Crimson: “Harvard’s poor excuse for a Core curriculum
leaves the undergraduate without any foundation of knowledge or intellectual skill to build upon
[…] the generous graduation requirements of many departments means almost anyone can coast
through Harvard without having to feel sweat on his brow.”
12
Yoo’s comments suggest that the
vagueness inherent to the Curriculum--a product of its attempt to satisfy every interested party--
had not gone unnoticed.
In academics and admissions, Harvard was also attempting to recruit and integrate minority
and women students, to varying degrees of success. A concerted, nation-wide push for the
recruitment of both black students and faculty resulted in the creation of the African and Afro-
American Studies department in 1969.
13
In 1977, Harvard fully absorbed Radcliffe College’s
administration, cementing the place of women in Harvard’s student body; in the Fall of 1986,
Yoo reported, the University established an academic concentration in Women’s Studies.
14
Yet
warning signs that these steps toward diversifying the faculty and student body were not being
well-received by the university or the public proliferated throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
15

During Yoo’s time at Harvard, concern about the effectiveness and long-term viability of
affirmative action policies grew to a public furor. In particular, as conservative critics like Allan
Bloom and mainstream venues like the New York Times noted repeatedly, the enrollment of
black students in elite universities, which had peaked in the 1970s, was steadily decreasing,
despite the emergence of high-profile black academics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
16
Yoo himself
reported on this phenomenon in 1986, noting that “While Blacks comprise 10.1 percent of all
undergraduates nationwide, their representation at Harvard is lower. The percentage of Black
Harvard students in the Class of ’83 was 8.3, but fell to 5.7 percent of the class of ’88 and has
risen to 6.9 percent of this year’s freshman class.”
17
He added, “Meanwhile Asian-Americans at

138
Harvard have increased from 6.3 percent of the Class of ’83 to 12.1 percent of the Class of ’90.
Hispanic enrollment has remained constant at slightly more than 5 percent, the figures revealed.”
In the neutral language of journalism, this discrepancy between steadily decreasing black
enrollment, stable Latino enrollment, and rapidly increasing Asian American enrollment appears
innocuous. Yet conservative pundits seized upon the growing disparity to argue that black
students were uniquely unqualified to excel in elite higher education, reifying Asian Americans’
model minority status. Yet the lived reality of being an Asian American on an elite campus,
though certainly much easier than that of black and Latino students, was far from uncomplicated
assimilation into whiteness. In the piece quoted at length in the introduction, Yoo reflects on the
impossible choice between total assimilation into a non-threatening approximation of whiteness
or ghettoization among the school’s “ethnic” populations, making his own strategic choice
obliquely clear: “I once had a conversation with a Korean girl who verbally assaulted me for
‘repudiating’ my heritage because I had chosen to write for a newspaper, not major in math or
science, and not attend Korean student meetings. In a sense she was right, because those students
who choose to pursue a more mainstream four years here end up leaving much of their ethnic
heritage behind.”
18
Here, Yoo subtly infuses a value judgement to his own “choice,” aligning
“writing for a newspaper” with the “mainstream”—that is, a neutral and “normal” choice—
whereas majoring in math or science is coded as “ethnic” and stereotypical. Yet he also
expresses a sense of melancholy and loss for what he perceives as a mandatory ostracization
from “ethnic contacts or activities.” Importantly, despite his subtle coding of his own choice as
better, Yoo does not cast these choices in terms of individuals either succeeding or failing at
assimilation. Rather, he describes these choices as a result of the racialized social structure at

139
Harvard, which is entrenched, not alleviated, by the institution’s surface commitments to
diversity.
His observations of this gap would grow increasingly caustic, once describing Harvard’s
vision of diversity as “a few jocks here, a few minorities there, a few geeks everywhere.”
19
In
response to President Bok’s proposal to increase social diversity at Harvard by accepting more
international students, Yoo commented, “I fail to see how going to classes or partying with, say,
someone from the Middle East or South America, whose father is a rich international banker or a
powerful government official, is going to help me understand a foreign culture.” He was also
keenly aware that “international” vs “ethnic” diversity was a zero-sum game, adding, “Will the
son of a foreign government minister be given a coveted space in Harvard’s freshman class at the
expense of a poor Black or Hispanic trying to crawl his way up out of the ghetto?”
20
Yoo’s use
of stereotypes and racialized language, as well as the pointed absence of “Asian Americans” as a
population that might also be “trying to crawl” their way into elite institutions, highlights his
own racial and class investments. Yet they also point to a critical understanding of the ways in
which University administrators used claims of diversity to prop up its financial and
administrative aims while lacking a fundamental commitment to the institutional change that
social and racial redistribution might require.
This disenchantment was sharpened as Yoo witnessed, and reported on, repeated clashes
between progressive students and the administration, and between Harvard’s administration and
the regulatory body of the federal government. Harvard’s newly designed core curriculum and its
repeated public commitments to increasing gender and racial diversity on its campus were part of
a broader effort to redefine the role of the elite university in late 20
th
century American life. As
Yoo points out, this prompted questions not only about who such elite universities but also what

140
they were teaching; while conservatives like William Bennett, then Secretary of Education under
Reagan, “want[ed] to see students instructed in a small set of moral values centered around
Judeo-Christian, Western traditions,” Harvard President Bok did not want “to be a moral
imperialist imposing his values on those less in lightened [sic] than he.”
21
Yoo’s invocation of
“moral imperialism” shows how much influence civil rights and ethnic studies discourse
continued to have over the language of student protest. Indeed, Yoo argues that in order to
strengthen ethical education at Harvard, the University should both “add another subdivision to
the Core that examines the values, traditions, and development of Western civilization and
thought. […] To balance any possible Western centrism, the foreign cultures Core should be
strengthened so that its courses emphasize the values of these societies.” Thus, ideas about the
ethical and moral duty of an elite university to train its students to be good, but not morally
imperialist or Western-centric, citizens circulated between the administration and the student
body.
Yet just as Yoo observed that discursive “diversity” did not have its advertised effects, he
also witnessed the discrepancy between the moral posturing of the administration and its actual
response to student protests. Beginning in 1986, Yoo reported often on the Southern Africa
Solidarity Committee, a student organization that advocated for Harvard to divest from South
Africa in protest of its apartheid government. That spring, a divestment rally in Harvard Yard
drew over 5000 student and city protestors to campus. Constructing temporary “shanty towns” in
the Yard became a common tactic for divestment activists to highlight the economic and racial
conditions enforced by apartheid.
22
However, large-scale rallies and smaller-scale student
maneuvers—like trying to get pro-divestment activists elected to the Board of Overseers, as Yoo
reported—went nowhere, and, indeed, were continually frustrated by a seemingly responsive

141
administration. When current students and alumni tried to proffer Board of Overseers candidates
that were pro-divestment, for example, the administration included a “stop, look, and listen”
letter alongside the ballots that “alert[ed] alumni that the three were running on a political
platform” and had “‘politicized’ the election.”
23
As would become a common governance tactic
during the era of multiculturalism, the administration here used the appearance of moral
neutrality (as opposed to “politicized” polarity) to counter and neutralize student activist
demands.
By 1989, Yoo had become frustrated and disenchanted with the divestment movement and
its increasingly ineffective tactics. Having earlier referred dismissively to “a friend” who “has at
times been found protesting at University-sponsored dinners and living in cardboard boxes in the
yard,” Yoo had developed an extreme distaste for protestors by his last year at Harvard.
24
In
“Ties and Takeovers Don’t Mix,” his description of student protestors’ tactics drips with disdain:
“Instead of storming University Hall, Harvard protestors now submit reputable reports on the
University’s governance structure. Rather than fire-bombing offices, they campaign for pro-
divestment candidates on the Board of Overseers. Forums on free speech have replaced
divestment marches once so large they stopped all traffic in the square.”
25
Despite the fact that
his ire is mostly directed towards the students themselves, Yoo here identifies the ways in which
the university has flexibly contained and diverted student activism into publicity-friendly but
institutionally ineffective avenues. By forcing student activists to legitimate their movement by
participating in student governance campaigns and “free speech forums,” the University diverted
vital organizing energy into “play[ing] Harvard’s governance game” while maintaining a moral
sheen. This managing tactic was effective, as Yoo notes with characteristic sharpness: “In case
anyone missed the news, Harvard did not divest.”

142
Yoo was also attentive to a larger “governance game” in which Harvard itself was a player.
In a series of articles, Yoo observed the fraught relations between Harvard’s administration and
President Reagan’s administration. In particular, the University administration intensified its
lobbying efforts and deepened its network of relations to lawmakers in order to defend its own
interests against an administration that was largely hostile to the notion of federal funding for
higher education.
26
These increased lobbying efforts--which occasionally resulted in rather
public repudiations--led to administrative anxiety that higher education was beginning to be
perceived by the federal government as just one of many special interests. As Yoo reported,
Harvard lobbyists often made their case by appealing to the idea of the university’s “special
place” in American society; Yoo quotes Robert M. Rosenzweig, then president of the American
Association of Universities, as arguing that “the mission of the university in American society is
‘essential to national well-being.’ Therefore their [university] lobbying efforts are not on the
same plane as more self-interested industry or labor lobbies because they further policies which
are in the ‘public interest.’”
27
Here again, universities deployed notions of education as a moral
and public good—refined through the language of diversity, access, and globalism—to secure
their own interests. Yet, as did the student activists’ use of this same schema, this allowed the
federal government to counter with its own positioning of itself as the moral good, opposite to
the university’s greed.
William Bennett, the aforementioned Secretary of Education, published an op-ed in the
New York Times deploying this very logic; he charged that “higher education is not underfunded.
It is under-accountable and under-productive. Our students deserve better than this.”
28
Bennett
and his spokespeople repeatedly drew attention to Harvard’s ballooning endowment and research
universities’ “huge infusions of cash from state governments, from corporations, from

143
foundations and from loyal alumni.”
29
Indeed, as Jennifer Washburn argues, the 1980s were the
beginning of “Market Model U,” when universities, facing an expanding and highly competitive
education market, ever-rising enrollments, and declining federal support, allied themselves with
corporations through patenting, licensing, and research funding agreements, in order to deepen
their pockets and increase their prestige. The relationships between corporations and universities
were “inherently difficult to square with the university’s status as a nonprofit institution
ostensibly driven by noncommercial goals.”
30
Yoo made a similar observation when he reported
that “between 1980 and 1985 the total amount spent by industry on universities rose from $277
to $482 million. Simultaneously, the number of patents and royalties have jumped, with Harvard
last year doubling its revenues from patent loyalties…”
31
Yoo concluded, like Bennett and
Washburn, that “If industry’s influence on higher education grows, universities can only become
corrupted.” The Reagan Administration argued that, since universities were already participating
in the market for profit, they ought to then be subjected to market forces in order to regulate
tuition and equalize student access. Bennett thus painted a picture of universities whose
“responsibilities have been evaded” and whose claim to the moral high ground did not hold up
under scrutiny. In short, by forcing universities to “play the governance game” and behave like a
special interest lobby, the administration sharpened its own ability to portray higher education as
a self-interested industry and to contest college administrators’ attempts to appeal to notions of
public good.
Thus, during his time at Harvard, John Yoo observed, documented, and commented upon
the growing contradictions of the multicultural university; in particular, he marked the ways in
which moral and ethical claims about the university’s place in broader American society could
be flexibly deployed by any number of agents for a variety of purposes and from a range of

144
institutional positions. His editorials reveal the university itself honing its management practices
as it responded to current student activism and memorialized older student activism; at the same
time, they also reveal Yoo’s own developing consciousness and attitudes towards those same
management strategies. In particular, these articles document Yoo’s awareness of the productive
tension between student activists’ radical demands during the Civil Rights era and the
university’s deployment of diversity as a controlled response. That is, Yoo seems to have
understood by the end of his tenure at Harvard that the institution’s promise of diversity as a
social good appeared to be a failure if resolution and social harmony was understood to be its
point. Yet if the point was to manage student activism into maintaining the status quo while
preserving the University’s claim to a special, ethical place in U.S. society, then indeed,
Harvard’s deployment of diversity and multiculturalism was a success.
If these observations about the contradictions and failures of the multicultural university
seem familiar, it is because they also characterize the field of Asian American critique. In
Immigrant Acts, for example, Lisa Lowe identifies this exact contradictory function of
multiculturalism as a point of strategic action. In “Canon, Institutionalization, Identity,” a key
chapter from Immigrant Acts, Lowe describes the debate between liberal multiculturalists and
neoconservatives like William Bennett on the function of education, determining that “to the
degree that liberal challenges have remained wedded to a culturalist paradigm, however
‘multiculturalist,’ that still tends to isolate culture from material relations, they have yet to
disrupt adequately the neoconservative management of the function of university education.”
32

Lowe repeatedly invokes the possibility of “exploiting” the contradiction between the demand
for aesthetic and representational diversity and the materiality of difference dragged along with
the bodies and texts made to be the signifiers of that diversity.
33
She goes on to argue that though

145
multiculturalism is “marked by the incorporative process by which a ruling group elicits the
‘consent’ of racial, ethnic, or class minority groups through the promise of equal participation
and representation,” it is also “the index of crisis in a specific dominant formation, [… and]
provides for the activities of racial, class, and sexual minority groups who organize and contest
that domination.”
34
That is, though she acknowledges that liberal multiculturalism is, in part, a
founding condition of Asian American Studies—in that Asian American Studies’ continued
existence as a field is as much due to liberal multiculturalism as it is due to radical activism—
Lowe distinguishes between “multiculturalism” as a mode of absorption and incorporation and
“panethnic or cross-racial coalitions of students and faculty which ally with other groups around
the demand for more radical transformations of the university.”
35
Similar to Yoo, Lowe here
distinguishes between the managerial practices of the institution (“multiculturalism”) and the
impulses and actions of students and faculty who demand “radical” transformation.
36

The project of Asian American critique emerging out of Lowe’s formulation of Asian
American Studies is thus fundamentally shaped by recognition of the very same institutional
conditions that Yoo recognized and tracked. That is to say that Asian American Studies projects
and texts that followed Lowe’s and made reference to her text also similarly begin with a
recognition of the contradictions of the multicultural university and the potential for Asian
American Studies to exploit those contradictions for the sake of furthering political projects.
37

Many, though not all, also gesture to the bifurcation that Lowe gestures to between
multiculturalism as a managerial, absorptive technology and radical pedagogy/activism/study as
a loosely affiliated network of intellectual practices that escape incorporation and retain their
opposition. Mark Chiang, indeed, suggests in his historiography of the field of Asian American
Studies that the field is characterized by an overt struggle between the “political” and the

146
“representational” as oppositional terms.
38
And, as explored more in-depth in chapters 2 and 3,
Asian American Studies scholars argued that “race radical” or “political” exploitations
manifested themselves as much in the form and logic of Asian American culture as much as in its
explicit content.
Yet Chiang argues that the impulse within the field to juxtapose material, political, and
radical pedagogy and academic texts against representational, “culturalist,” and managerial
institutional impulses masks the fact that these seemingly oppositional terms share grounds. That
is, they literally share grounds—the university—but also share investments in the university as a
unique site of potential moral, ethical and political good and in the accrual of capital, both “real”
and cultural, for the practitioners of this pedagogy. For the rest of this chapter, I dwell in the
space of shared ground. If the multicultural university, in all its contradictions, promises, and
failures, is the ground of Asian American Studies—a condition of possibility for the field—I
suggest that it is also the ground of Yoo’s neoconservativism as expressed and honed in the
Torture Memos. That is, just as the contradictions of the multicultural university—and
multiculturalism as a governing tactic more broadly—shape not only the content, but also the
form and logic of Asian American Studies, so do they shape the content, form, and logic of
Yoo’s memos.
Thus, I contend that, in terms of content, the Torture Memos together form a race-making
project, one that deploys the technologies of multiculturalism to simultaneously make race while
hiding it from view. Specifically, the memos instantiate a new racial order, centered on the
cleavage between “terrorists”/“foreigners” and “citizens,” which disaggregates East Asian
American populations and bodies from South Asian American populations and bodies. This
cleaving racial function of the memos builds on the very strategies for selective inclusion and

147
absorption that both Yoo and Lowe pinpoint above; the logic of Asian American Studies is
recognizably opposed to and juxtaposed against this function. Simultaneously, however, Yoo’s
argumentative and citational logic and form is strikingly similar to many Asian American
Studies texts’ argumentative and citational logics and forms. This similarity indexes the ways in
which multiculturalism not only flexibly appropriates bodies, objects, and structures of feeling,
but also forms, logics, and structures of thinking for its own purposes.
I have demonstrated, throughout this dissertation, the ways in which Asian American
Studies’ methodologies emphasize fragmentation, irresolution, and contradiction. Indeed, as
Lowe elaborates above, Asian American Studies does not merely characterize its objects of study
as fragmenting or contradictory; a central mission of the field itself is to “exploit” the
contradictions of the multicultural university in order to disorganize and fragment the white and
Western universalism inherent to American notions of scholarship. Such disorganizing practices
and pedagogies will, Asian American Studies scholars hope, open “the possibility that the
university will ultimately offer to students more than a universalized subject formation, more
than an incorporation into a dehistoricized national or cultural identity, and more sites and
practices than those permitted by one generic subject position.”
39

Yet I have also posited throughout the dissertation that disorganization, fragmentation, and
contradiction are impulses that not only characterize multiculturalism, but are also deployed by
multiculturalism in order to do its racial work. In the next section of this chapter, then, I argue
that John Yoo—who learned this essential characteristic about multiculturalism, as did Lowe and
other Asian American Studies scholars, by observing how the multicultural university sought to
govern and instruct through these contradictions—also seeks to exploit these contradictions for
his own usage. That is, Yoo shares with Asian American Studies scholars a recognition of the

148
fundamental contradictions of multicultural governance. Indeed, as I explore below, Yoo even
recognizes the same legal and cultural contradictions that are central to Asian American Studies.
And like Asian American Studies scholars, Yoo does not seek to reimpose stability, unity, or
coherence, but rather to further fragment and destabilize, to heighten contradictions, and to
unsettle settled interpretive mechanisms.
Yoo does this, of course, to further political aims that virtually no Asian American Studies
scholars would endorse—though they are also radical aims, albeit on the other end of the
political spectrum than “radical” usually signals in the field. Yoo exploits the contradictions he
observes to expand the warmaking capacities of executive power, justify torture of “alien
combatants,” and shield the U.S. military from both domestic and international law. In doing so,
I argue, he also contributes to a multicultural racial formation that disaggregates terrorist bodies
from citizen bodies and simultaneously folds some, but not all, Asian American bodies into the
realm of privileged citizen. His capacity to use the very argumentative structures and citational
logics central to Asian American Studies for his own, essentially opposite political purpose itself
unsettles a logic that has become almost programmatic in the field: that to unsettle and expose
the contradictions of American nation and capital is also and always to oppose American nation
and capital.

STATES OF EXCEPTION
One of the central argumentative logics of Asian American Studies is, as explored in
Chapters 1 and 2, that the U.S. state’s interaction with Asian-region countries, and with
immigrants from Asia, is structured by the same Orientalist logic. At the heart of this Orientalist
logic is the binary between foreign “alien” and national citizen. As Lowe puts it, “the American

149
of Asian descent remains the symbolic ‘alien’ […] the Asian American, even as a citizen,
continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation.”
40
Joshua Takano
Chambers-Letson refers to this condition as “a state of racial exception”; with regards to the U.S.
state and its administration of the law, racial exception is a “juridical construction of Asian
American subjectivity as shuttling in and out of the law, as always already illegal.”
41

As much as the domestic legal and social treatment of Asian Americans is connected by
logic, so too does Asian American Studies argue that the U.S.’s military and economic
interventions in Asia throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are structured by
Orientalist logic, thematized by a binary opposition between “model minority”—i.e., a docile
subject capable of being incorporated into Western structures of civility—and “yellow peril.”
Jodi Kim, for instance, traces the etymology of the word “gook” from U.S. military interventions
in the Philippines through to the Korean War; David Roediger extends this history to the
Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
42
Connecting the racialized logic of America’s wars in Asia and
the Middle East is an important argument in Asian American Studies because it reveals that
Asian Americans, as much as any other racial minority in the U.S., are “living proof” of the
imperial violence central to the construction of the U.S. state.
43
In turn, this unsettles or exposes
the fiction of the benevolent, non-imperial U.S. nation-state upon which American culture and
imagined community rests.
In the set of memorandums broadly designated the “Torture Memos,” sent by Yoo and his
colleagues in the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel to a number of other officials in the
Bush administration, Yoo crafts a series of legal justifications for the indefinite detention and
“cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of prisoners (or “alien unlawful combatants”) held at
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Much has been written about Yoo and the Bush administration’s use

150
of legal rhetoric to craft a seeming “state of exception,” wherein the law was used to decree that
the law had been suspended for an indefinite amount of time due to exceptional emergency.
Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the “state of exception” is not an exception at all
but rather central to the architecture of the modern state, scholars have variously demonstrated
that indeed, very few facets of the War on Terror’s exceptional violence are actually exceptional
to the modern US state.
44
The suspension of rights for certain racialized populations, the
inhumane and humiliating treatment of prisoners, the photographic display of that treatment as in
the Abu Ghraib scandal, the use of concentration camps to indefinitely detain so-called enemies
of the state, and even the geographic location of Guantánamo Bay itself are all intimately bound
to the past and present racialized and gendered violences that have constituted and characterized
US sovereignty rather than exceeded it.
45

My reading of the memos, however, reveals that Yoo uses them to craft not a general state
of exception located in Guantánamo, but more specifically, a state of racial exception that
circumscribes the “enemy alien combatants” housed in the prison there. He does this quite
consciously—by which I mean that reading the memos together, rather than individually, reveals
that Yoo is perfectly aware of the legal contradictions between them, and indeed, exploits those
contradictions to their fullest. He also, as I explore below, buttresses this state of racial exception
by using a citational logic that connects the United States’ previous military operations in the
Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq to the present day combat in Afghanistan, because those
operations were similarly carried out without the express permission of Congress and expanded
the powers of the executive branch to wage war. In short, rather than attempting to cover over or
resolve the contradictions inherent to the U.S.’ history and practice of racialized warmaking, Yoo
exposes, heightens, and leverages them in order to further expand their effectiveness and reach.

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On December 28, 2001, John Yoo sent a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel to
William J. Haynes, then General Counsel to the Department of Defense. The memo, titled
“Possible Habeas Jurisdiction over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” defended the OLC’s
position that habeas corpus, or the right of prisoners to appear in front of a court so that the court
can determine whether or not they are held legally, could not be exercised by prisoners held in
“Gitmo,” the U.S. Naval Base located in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
46
To make this argument, Yoo
draws largely on Johnson v. Eisentrager, a post-World War II Supreme Court case that ruled that
German war criminals, convicted by a U.S. military commission in Shanghai and transported to
U.S.-occupied Germany after the end of the war, were unable to appeal for habeas corpus
because they were not, and had never been, confined within the United States.
47
Using this
Supreme Court precedent, Yoo argues that Guantánamo Bay is definitively outside of U.S.
sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction, both because of and despite the terms of the U.S.’s lease
agreement with Cuba for the land.
Yoo’s argument rests on the distinction, or non-distinction, between “sovereignty” and
“jurisdiction” as defined in the Supreme Court decision. He argues,
In the critical passage that most nearly summarizes the Court’s holding, the Eisentrager Court based its
conclusion on the fact that the prisoners were seized, tried, and held in territory that was outside the
sovereignty of the United States and outside the territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States. We
do not believe that the Court intended to establish a two-part test, distinguishing between “sovereign”
territory and territorial “jurisdiction.” Instead, we believe that the Court used the latter term
interchangeably with the former to explain why an alien has no right to writ of habeas corpus when held
outside the sovereign territory of the United States.
48

One might wonder at Yoo’s repeated insistence here on clarifying that “‘sovereign’ territory”
and “territorial ‘jurisdiction’” are not being used as separate concepts, but rather
“interchangeably” with each other. This argument becomes clear as the memo goes on. Yoo
argues, in fact, that “GBC” (or Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—it’s unclear whether he’s referring to
the Naval Base or to the actual Bay) is definitively not within the bounds of U.S. sovereignty as

152
defined by the terms of the 1903 lease agreement between the U.S. and Cuba.
49
According to
Yoo, “That agreement expressly provides that ‘the United States recognizes the continuance of
the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the’ lands and waters subject to the lease.”
He goes on to add, “Although the agreement goes on to state that the United States ‘shall
exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within’ the leased areas, it specifically
reserves sovereignty to Cuba.”
50

Yoo concludes from the evidence of the lease that “The terms of the Lease Agreement are
thus definitive on the question of sovereignty and should not be subject to question in the
courts.”
51
Curiously, he never directly addresses the point he himself raises, which is that
although the lease definitively states that Cuba retains sovereignty over the land, the U.S. has
been given “complete jurisdiction.” Here, the function of his earlier declaration that the
Eisentrager decision did not intend a “two-part test,” that is, a need for prisoners to have never
been seized, tried or held on territory that was both outside U.S. sovereignty and outside the
“territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States,” becomes clear. Clearly, if the reader
did understand “and” to signal two separate conditions that both must be fulfilled—rather than
signaling terms that are being “used […] interchangeably”—then the terms of the lease with
Cuba would be problematic, to say the least. Instead, Yoo boldly highlights his own cherry-
picking reading of the lease by raising, but never directly addressing, the contradictory terms of
the lease.
Yoo does go on to argue that “GBC is also outside the ‘territorial jurisdiction of any court
of the United States.’”
52
He focuses on the phrase “territorial jurisdiction of any court,” arguing
that “GBC is not included within the territory defined for any district. In contrast, other island
bases that are considered territories or possessions of the United States are expressly defined

153
within the jurisdiction of specific district courts, even if they are retained largely for military
use.” That is, because no specific district court lists either the bay or the naval base as part of its
jurisdiction, both sites remain outside of “territorial jurisdiction,” even though the lease—which
he has just cited as authoritative—does place Guantánamo Bay within U.S. jurisdiction. When he
does acknowledge that “a court could find that Eisentrager’s mention of a jurisdiction dos not
preclude habeas jurisdiction at GBC. […] For a number of reasons, however, we believe that a
federal district court would not accept these arguments.”
53
Thus, Yoo once again raises the
contradiction between “sovereignty” and “jurisdiction” expressed in the terms of the lease, but
quickly dismisses any such reading, citing his own reading as “the best.” In order to cement his
argument that Guantánamo Bay is not within U.S. jurisdiction, he argues that “the executive
branch has repeatedly taken the position under various statues that GBC is neither part of the
United States nor a possession or territory of the United States,” citing various tariff acts that
affirmed that GBC was “a mere governmental outpost beyond our borders,” and therefore,
presumably, not subject to customs or tariffs that a location under U.S. control would be subject
to.
In this memo, then, Yoo argues that Guantánamo Bay is neither within the U.S.’s sovereign
territory, nor within its territorial jurisdiction, both because of and despite the original lease
agreement. This contradiction is not only not covered over; it is boldly pointed out multiple
times, and the justification for ignoring it in favor of Yoo’s reading is cursory. Indeed, Yoo
doubles down on this contradiction in his most infamous memo—often referred to as “the”
torture memo—sent to Alberto R. Gonzalez, Counsel to the President, on August 1, 2002. I will
explore this memo in more depth below, but for now, the memo examines whether the United
Nations Convention Against Torture and Other, Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or

154
Punishment, as ratified and regulated by Sections 2340-2340A of the U.S. Code, applies to the
planned escalation of interrogation tactics on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. As Yoo points
out, the Code limits the application of the Convention to “Whoever outside the United States
commits or attempts to commit torture,” if the offender is a U.S. national.
54
(Presumably, the
Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment for federal crimes, covers
torture committed within the United States by United States citizens.)
55
Yoo does not directly
address the limitation that the torture must occur “outside the United States” in order for the
Convention to be applicable, as he says that Gonzalez has directed them to “address only the
elements of specific intent and the infliction of severe pain or suffering. As such, we have not
addressed the elements of ‘outside the United States,’ ‘color of law,’ or ‘custody or control.’” He
adds in a footnote, however:
We note, however, that 18 U.S.C. § 2340(3) supplies a definition of the United States. It defines it as “all
areas under the jurisdiction of the United States including any of the places described in” 18 U.S.C. § § 5
and 7 […] Section 5 provides that the United States “includes all places and waters, continental or insular,
subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” By including the definition set out in Section 7, the term
“United States” as used in Section 2340(3) includes the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the
United States.” Moreover, the incorporation by reference to Section 46501(2) extends the definition of the
“United States” to “special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.”
56

This elliptical footnote does not make mention of Guantánamo Bay and its exceptional status.
However, by explicitly highlighting that, according to the Code, “United States” refers to not
only “all places […] subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” but also “special maritime
and territorial jurisdiction” and “special aircraft jurisdiction,” Yoo suggests that the code may not
be applicable to Guantánamo Bay because, in this case, it is actually within the United States, not
outside of it. (In yet a different memo, sent in 2003, Yoo casually remarks, “As a general matter,
GTMO and other U.S. Military bases outside the United States fall within the special maritime
and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
57
) Here again, Yoo does not seek to cover over
or resolve the contradictions that structure Guantánamo Bay’s legal status. Instead, he actively

155
exploits these contradictions in order to structure the prison at Guantánamo Bay as either inside
or outside of U.S. sovereignty and jurisdiction as it is convenient to the argument; the prison is
outside the U.S. for the purpose of shielding it from the legal reach of U.S. courts, but
simultaneously inside the U.S. for the purpose of shielding it from the legal reach of international
law.
Amy Kaplan suggests that Guantánamo Bay is “a kind of uncanny return of America’s
repressed imperial history.”
58
Here, she gestures both to its exceptional status—its locations
supposedly both within and outside U.S. law—and its imperial history, which both haunts and
informs its present usage and the space it occupies in the U.S.
59
imaginary. While Kaplan does
not clarify her repeated use of the adjective “uncanny,” the term gestures to a psychoanalytic
literature on haunting and the return of the repressed. Avery Gordon, for example, characterizes
Freud’s description of the uncanny as when “something familiar […] has transmuted into an
unsettling specter. […] We are haunted by somethings [sic] we have been involved in, even if
they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other.”
60
Thus, Kaplan suggests that in the public
imagination, or at least for “most Americans” who “do not even know that it [the Naval Base] is
in Cuba,”
61
the base in Guantánamo Bay is an uncanny, haunting reminder of “somethings we
have been involved in”—imperial, violent somethings that, while coded as far away and distant
by their obscurity and the alien-sounding name of their location, are nonetheless unsettlingly
related, or even central, to Americans’ daily lives in the home space of the nation.
For Yoo, however, this connection is not haunting or uncanny in any way; it is deliberate
and calculated. That is, it is literally Guantánamo Bay’s past construction as a juridically
ambiguous site, where U.S. military law is in force and enforced, but U.S. domestic jurisdiction
is suspended, that makes it an apt site for the holding of prisoners that the U.S. neither wants to

156
release or officially charge. Yoo’s citational practice throughout the memos confirms this
calculating deployment of the U.S.’ history as a military power that has consistently carved legal
exemptions for itself in the name of “the safety of the state.”
62

Yoo, of course, had to establish legal precedent in order to buttress his arguments, and, as I
will discuss below, to potentially lay the legal groundwork for their defense, should they ever be
tested by U.S. Courts. Throughout the memos, then, Yoo builds a body of legal precedents,
drawing primarily from U.S. military legal history. In doing so, he both retroactively legitimates
past legal decisions that sought to exempt the executive power or the military from both
domestic and international law, and uses those moments of exception to legitimate his own
arguments—and this new state of exception—in the present. In particular, like Asian American
Studies scholars, Yoo constructs a body of warfare, conducted in the Asia-Pacific region, that
was structured by a shared logic. For Yoo, this logic is not imperialism or orientalism, but the
prerogative of the President and the executive branch to wage war, detain prisoners, and suspend
at will the U.S. Constitution and the U.S.’ compliance with international treaties.
For example, in a memo dated January 9, 2002, in regards to “Application of Treaties and
Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees,” Yoo argues that al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners do not
have access to the rights guaranteed by the Geneva convention, because al Qaeda is not a “state,”
and the Taliban’s military rule over Afghanistan prove that Afghanistan is a “failed state.”
63

While the U.S. has never suspended the Geneva Conventions, he notes that it has “deviated” in
practice twice since its ratification: during both the Korean War and the Persian Gulf War, in
which the U.S. did not return Chinese, North Korean, and Iraqi prisoners of war to their countries
of origin by their own request.
64
The refusal of prisoners of war to return to their own countries
after U.S. military incursions—“for fear of suffering punishment from their government for

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having surrendered”—appeals to the image of the U.S. as a benevolent, liberating force that
rescues citizens from their respective “failed” states. Yet this benevolent gesture here legitimates,
in the legal sense, the broad suspension of the Geneva Conventions as applied to the U.S.’ use of
military force in Afghanistan.
In order to argue for the essentially unfettered power of the executive branch to wage war,
Yoo cites an archive of “secret” wars, military operations conducted without approval from
Congress, and other seemingly unconstitutional extensions of executive power; that is, an archive
of racialized, often imperial violence, sometimes legitimated by the Supreme Court but often
merely defended in archives of OLC memos like his own. In “Re: Application of 18 U.S.C. §
4001(a) to Military Detention of United States Citizens,” sent June 27, 2002, Yoo begins by
arguing, “It has long been the view of this Office that the Commander in Chief Clause is a
substantive grant of authority to the president.”
65
To buttress this argument, he cites a 1970
memo from Willam H. Rehnquist, “Re: The President and the War Power: South Vietnam and
the Cambodian Sanctuaries.”
66
Rehnquist’s memo argues that “the President’s determination to
authorize incursion into the the Cambodian border area by United States forces in order to
destroy sanctuaries utilized by the enemy is the sort of tactical decision traditionally confided to
the Commander in Chief in the conduct of armed conflict […] By crossing the Cambodian
border to attack sanctuaries used by the enemy, the United States has in no sense gone to ‘war’
with Cambodia.”
67
That is to say, Yoo cites a previous OLC opinion that argued for the legality
of bombing Cambodian territory in the name of shutting down North Vietnamese military
routes.
68
The 1970 memo, and the bombing that it legitimated, constructs Cambodia as an empty,
“neutral” space, one which must be sacrificed for the safety of the state.

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Yoo builds on this logic in another memo, “Re: Authority for Use of Military Force to
Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States,” arguing that “the federal courts have
upheld the authority of the Government, acting under the imperative military necessity, to
destroy property even when it belongs to United States citizens and even when the action occurs
on American soil.”
69
He cites United States vs Caltex (Philippines), in which “plaintiffs had
owned oil facilities in the Philippine Islands (then a United States territory) […] In the face of a
rapidly deteriorating military situation in the western Pacific, United States military authorities
ordered the destruction of those facilities. […] The Court denied compensation under the Fifth
Amendment: the destruction or injury of private property in battle, or in the bombardment of
cities and towns, and in many other ways in the war, had to be borne by the sufferers alone, as
one of its consequences. […] The safety of the state in such cases overrides all considerations of
private loss.”
70
Here again, the Philippines, though “territory” of the United States, is constructed
as an empty space upon which U.S. military action unfolds. As is implied in Rehnquist’s memo
about Cambodia, the devastation of this military action is “to be borne by the sufferers alone, as
one of its consequences.” The pronoun it is ambiguous here; from who or what do these
consequences spring, and why is it legally necessary for “the sufferers” to bear “its”
consequences? Such questions are elided by the final pronouncement that “the safety of the state
in such cases overrides all considerations of private loss.” This idea—that “the safety of the
state,” as defined by the executive branch, potentially overrides any and all legal impediments—
becomes Yoo’s central argument throughout the memos. That is, unlike in the example above,
Yoo here does not make any gesture towards a benevolent, or liberatory, U.S. military; instead,
he intentionally unearths an archive of legal contradictions, subsumed—but not resolved—under
the aegis of the executive branch’s apparently unfettered right to make war for the “safety of the

159
state,” a condition which—despite Yoo’s devotion to consulting dictionaries to define every term
deployed in a decision—is never actually defined.
Thus, in order to justify this continued expansion of executive power, Yoo cites military
operations, OLC memos, and Supreme Court decisions that run the gamut of U.S. military
operations in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to citing conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and
the Philippines, he also cites martial law in Hawaii, as in the case of Duncan v Kahanamoku,
when the Supreme Court “recognized the President’s authority as Commander in Chief to order
the capture and detention of enemy belligerents,” and Japanese internment, which could be
condemned by the House without preventing “the President’s Commander in Chief power” to
detain “enemy combatants” on U.S. soil.
71
Of course, Yoo is not limited to citing military
operations in the Asia-Pacific region; he also cites the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion by
the Attorney General—which opined that the killing of an Indian could not be called “murder”
because the Indian in question “had engaged in a war with the United States” by himself killing a
U.S. army negotiator—and, across multiple memos, the numerous times the military has been
deployed by the executive branch to quell race riots within the United States.
72

Certainly, the memos are a repository of the broad swath of U.S. imperial violence, which
is not limited to the Asia-Pacific region or to the experience of Asian Americans. Yet in form,
structure, and logic, they run parallel to the developing field of Asian American Studies,
deploying the tactics observed and learned by Yoo—and Lowe, Chuh, Kim, and others—in the
developing and flourishing multicultural university. That is, the memos, like many key works of
Asian American Studies, are rife with and prioritize contradiction, fragmentation, and an
antagonism towards resolution—indeed, they exploit those contradictions to their fullest; and
they are also structured by a logic that connects all of the U.S.’s military incursions in the Asia-

160
Pacific, although it is a different logic than the one Asian American studies articulates. The
parallelism between these two bodies of work ends, however, at the means. That is, while the
torture memos and the field of Asian American Studies might deploy the same strategies and
logics, they do so to radically different ends.
It is this last point I turn to in the conclusion of this chapter. As Joshua Chambers-Letson
argues, the logic of racial exception does not carve out an architecture of deracialized exception
central to modern statecraft. Instead, it is specifically a juridical architecture that functions to
constantly “shuttle” Asian American subjectivity “in and out of the law.”
73
As a close to this
chapter, and to the dissertation, I argue that Yoo does not merely identify or cite this structure of
racial exception for the purpose of offering legal cover to the Bush administration’s desire to
wage war and interrogate prisoners. Instead, the torture memos also have racial effects, which
function to firmly circumscribe Yoo’s Asian American body within the realm of the protected
citizen—that is, within the law—while constructing a new racial category to bear the brunt of
racial exception: the terrorist.

THE TERRORIST AND THE CITIZEN
The racial effect of Yoo’s deployment of racial exception becomes more clear when we look
at “the” torture memo discussed above, wherein Yoo redefines torture. 18 U.S.C. § 2340A,
mentioned above, prohibits torture “outside of the United States,” and as Yoo highlights here,
defines torture as “acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or
suffering.” In this bizarre and surreal memo, Yoo consults the Oxford English Dictionary to
define the words “severe,” “other,” “disrupt,” and “profound,” to “conclude that certain acts may
be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain or suffering of the requisite intensity

161
to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture.”
74
A follow up memo, sent by Yoo’s
superior Jay Bybee on the same day, clarified that the use of ten specific “interrogation
techniques” fell within this category of “cruel, inhuman or degrading,” but “not torture”:
“attention grasp, walling (pushing an ‘individual’ against a flexible wall so that they rebound
against it), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep
deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard.”
75

Yoo argues, in short, that the word “severe” in the section’s language means that the acts of
torture must be literally life-threatening in order to violate the statue. In the case of physical pain,
he argues, “the adjective ‘severe’ conveys that pain or suffering must be of such a high level of
intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure”
76
; the act must cause pain and damage
at “the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body
function.”
77
As for mental pain, the mental pain resulting from “the acts” must “disrupt
profoundly the senses or the personality” and cause “prolonged mental harm”
78
: “the harm must
be one that is endured over some period of time. Put another way, the acts giving giving rise to
the harm must cause some lasting, though not necessarily permanent, damage.”
79
And, Yoo adds,
because Section 2340A highlights the need for “specific intent” to cause such severe and
permanent harm, “A defendant could negate a showing of specific intent to cause severe mental
pain or suffering by showing that he had acted in good faith that his conduct would not amount
to the acts prohibited by the statute […] A defendant could show that he acted in good faith by
taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing
evidence gained from past experience.”
80

These bloodless, sterile definitions are given rather more weight in Bybee’s follow-up memo
to John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the CIA. The memo, while not authored by Yoo, was

162
clearly written in consultation with him and in concert with his initial memo. Where Yoo defines
torture and the acts that might and might not fall within Section 2340 purview, Bybee’s memo—
long withheld from public review and, when finally released by the Justice department, initially
so heavily redacted it was complete illegible—catalogues the CIA’s “proposed conduct” “in the
course of conducting the interrogation” of al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah.
81
Bybee goes
through the ten proposed techniques that constitute an “increased pressure phase” in Zubaydah’s
interrogation, arguing in each case, with the exception of waterboarding, that they fail to meet
the thresholds named in Yoo’s memo, either for “intent to cause” “severe” “mental” or “physical”
pain. In describing “the facial slap,” for instance, Bybee clarifies, “The goal of the facial slap is
not to inflict physical pain that is severe or lasting. Instead, the purpose of the facial slap is to
induce shock, surprise, and/or humiliation.”
82
As for sleep deprivation, Bybee notes, “You have
informed us that is not [sic] uncommon for someone to be deprived of sleep for 72 hours and still
perform excellently on visual-spatial motor tasks and short-term memory tests. […] You have
indicated studies of lengthy sleep deprivation showed no psychosis, loosening of thoughts,
flattening of emotions, delusions, or paranoid ideas.”
83
Though these comments make no
reference to Yoo’s memo, they are clearly meant pair with Yoo’s definition of torture, as Bybee is
here documenting the failure of these techniques to cause severe or mental pain or suffering, or,
in the case that they might, Bybee documents the CIA’s “good faith” belief that they wouldn’t,
having “tak[en] such steps as surveying professional literature” and “consulting with experts.”
Bybee does not use the memos purely to exculpate the CIA based on their good faith intent
not to cause severe mental or physical pain. He also suggests, repeatedly, that whatever the CIA’s
intent, their treatment could not possibly rise to the level of “severity” outlined by Yoo, because
Zubaydah has an apparently inhuman tolerance for pain and suffering. In discussing the “variety

163
of stress positions used”—“not designed to produce the pain associated with contortions or
twisting of the body” but rather “to produce the physical discomfort associated with muscle
fatigue”—Bybee adds, “You have also orally informed us that through observing Zubaydah in
captivity, you have noted that he appears to be quite flexible despite his wound.”
84
While others
might be caused severe pain by “kneeling on the floor while leaning back at a 45 degree angle,”
this comment suggests, Zubaydah himself will only feel “physical discomfort,” due to his innate
flexibility. As for sleep deprivation—which must not, as Yoo proscribed, “profoundly disrupt the
senses or personality”: “You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of
sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72
hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.”
85

In general, Bybee later reveals, these proscribed interrogation techniques are deemed
necessary because Zubaydah has proved extraordinarily resilient to the CIA’s standard
interrogation tactics, “remaining at most points ‘circumspect, calm, controlled, and
deliberate.’”
86
Only one time, according to the CIA, did Zubaydah react to their techniques in the
desired manner: “You describe that in an initial confrontational incident, Zubaydah showed signs
of sympathetic nervous system arousal, which you think was possibly fear. Although this
incident led him to disclose intelligence information, he was able to quickly regain his
composure, his air of confidence, and his ‘strong resolve’ not to reveal any information.”
87

Zubaydah’s responses to his interrogators, according to the CIA, are so removed from how
“normal” people might respond—and he is so inhumanly consumed by his ideology—that he
does not even show “fear,” merely “sympathetic nervous system arousal.”
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault suggests that sexuality is one point where “body and
population meet,” meaning that both disciplinary power and biopolitical (or regulatory) power

164
converge in sexuality as a mechanism for social control of both the individual and the
population.
88
In the torture memos, torture may be another of those meeting points between
discipline and bio- (or necro-) politics. Former CIA and FBI interrogators have both confirmed,
for instance, that torture doesn’t often produce the truth so much as it forces the interrogated
inmate to say whatever they think will get the torture to stop.
89
At Guantánamo, that is, the
inmate body is subject to literal disciplinary controls within the institution of the camp and made
into a terrorist body by being subject to interrogation—that is, torture produces the terrorist,
rather than revealing him, just as Foucault suggests 18
th
and 19
th
century sexual discourse
produced the pervert, the masturbator, and the homosexual rather than simply naming or
uncovering them.
Foucault also suggests that racism is functionally inscribed within biopolitical mechanisms,
because racism functions to designate lively populations (those the state will “make live”) from
those that the state can, or will, “let die.” Biopolitically, torture functions to separate out
“terrorists” from “citizens” in part through designating terrorists as those who can withstand
“inhuman” amounts of pain and “cruel and degrading” treatment without it being “life
threatening” or without “severe psychological impairment.” Zubaydah, who “believes that the
global victory of Islam is inevitable” and “continues to express his unabated desire to kill
Americans and Jews,”
90
thus emerges from the confluence of Bybee and Yoo’s memos as the
archetypal terrorist: sociopathically unresponsive to “normal” human provocations, sustained by
ideological fervor, and inhumanly capable of withstanding pain, suffering, and humiliation, to the
extent that even treatment that could hypothetically fulfill Yoo’s proscriptions fail to severely
impair or harm Zubaydah’s mental or physical state. Implicitly, of course, the opposite of the

165
“enemy alien combatant” is the citizen: neither an enemy of the state, nor an alien, nor in danger
of being made an alien by virtue of being identified as an enemy of the state.
If racism is the justifying mechanism that allows biopower to operate differentially
throughout populations, then we might call “race” the schism or cleavage that separates
populations from each other, in this case, that separates terrorists from citizens, not because of
individual behavior, but because of large scale bodily and mental capacities that together
aggregate into citizen/humans and terrorist/in or nonhumans.
91
The torture memos, then, are
race-making documents, which create a schism (race) and simultaneously deploy racism, in the
form of racialized legal exception, to cover over the schism’s production. To return to my earlier
point about the material function of Yoo’s use of racial exception’s legal paradox, he uses it here
not to reveal or highlight racial exception’s continued embeddedness in Asian American
experience, as Asian American culture is usually understood to do. Instead, he redeploys the
legal paradox’s racializing mechanisms in order to inscribe his own body, and bodies like his,
firmly within the citizen/human population. That is, he removes some, but not all, Asian
American bodies from the cleaving function of the legal paradox—while leaving other bodies
still or newly subject to its sweeping path.
In particular, the designation “terrorist” is collapsed with the racial/ethnic categories of
“Muslim” and “Arab,” signifiers which can also attach, sometimes erroneously, to South and
Southeast Asian American bodies. Since September 11, for example, Indian and other South
Asian Sikhs have been particularly vulnerable to hate crimes targeting “terrorists,” because Sikh
turbans have become collapsed as signifiers with Muslim headcoverings and Arab/“Middle
Eastern” turbans.
92
With or without turbans, South and Southeast Asian bodies often overlap
phenotypically with stereotypical images of “Arabs”; indeed, they are sometimes made more

166
visible as targets of racialized hatred because actual Arab populations (not the projected,
stereotypical Arab conjured in American imaginations) also phenotypically overlap with white
populations.
93
East Asian Americans, whose phenotypical features are most often marked as
“alien” in white representations of them, are here folded into the category of “citizen” by virtue
of being identifiably not “terrorists.” That is, while East Asians may yet remain marked as
foreign and alien within this racial schema, Yoo’s own embeddedness within the patriotic
mechanisms of defensive statecraft protects his Asian American body—and those like his—from
being (mis)recognized as “enemy combatants.”
Like Flower Drum Song, Aloft, and Taipei, that is, Yoo’s Torture Memos deploy the strategies
of multiculturalism—fragmentation, proliferation of difference, contradiction, nonresolution—to
cleave the category of “Asian American” into new racial formations, and to inscribe his own
body and subject position as within multiculturalist paradigms of power and privilege. Where
that privileged realm in Flower Drum Song and Taipei was occupied by those capable of flexibly
packaging their ethnicity as a commodity that could move between geographic and national
boundaries, and in Aloft was occupied by those who could inherit and inhabit the structures and
spaces once preserved for white men, here the dichotomy is fairly simple: those who can assume
the category of citizen and are relatively invulnerable to being recognized (and thus produced) as
as a terrorist occupy a racial position of relative privilege and power, and those who cannot, and
are not, do not.
Yet the Torture Memos and Asian American Studies’ shared origins, and strikingly parallel
logics and structure of thinking, reveal a new facet of racial feeling. As I have articulated it
throughout the dissertation, racial feeling as method enables scholars to track the mutations and
permutations of racial formations apparent in cultural texts before they have crystallized into

167
recognizable, and articulated, structures. Yet racial feeling may also usefully trace the contours of
the structure of race itself as it vacillates between emergent, residual, and dominant formations.
Raymond Williams’ uses structures of feeling, after all, to describe generational changes in
language and aesthetics broadly, which he calls “style.”
94
Styles are broad, fluid categories,
which share aesthetic, linguistic, and structural characteristics; they are political, in that they are
born out of structural confluences of power, but they are also apolitical, in that they can be
flexibly deployed from a range of political positions. Thus Asian American Studies may share a
racial style with John Yoo’s particular brand of neoconservativism, as they both emerge in
negotiation with neoliberal multiculturalism.
A shared racial style is not a shared political orientation, nor even a shared understanding of
race as a category, but an aesthetics, a collection of tactics, and an idiom. Yet if aesthetics,
tactics, and idioms can move fluidly between institutions, structures of oppression, and
movements and fields desiring to oppose them, the capacity for those tactics to successfully
resist such institutions need to be carefully considered, especially as once emergent styles rise to
the surface of the mainstream. The method of racial feeling allows for scholars to remain
attentive to these shifts in cultural idioms, for even as the styles, forms, and feelings of neoliberal
multiculturalism crystallize and cohere, new racial formations, feelings, and styles are gathering
on the cultural horizon.

168
Conclusion

In 2014, Officer Peter Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old black man, in the
stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. Liang, who was a rookie at the time, claimed the
shooting was an accident; he had been patrolling a dark stairway with gun drawn (a common
police tactic in so-called “vertical patrols”), was startled by a noise, and accidentally discharged
his gun, which ricocheted and hit Gurley. According to eyewitness reports during Liang’s trial,
he and his partner then debated calling an ambulance or performing CPR, in essence withholding
medical care from Gurley and letting him die. After the shooting, Liang was fired and convicted
of second-degree manslaughter and official misconduct. Liang was the first NYPD officer to be
convicted for a line-of-duty shooting in over a decade.
1

In the aftermath of Liang’s conviction, thousands of Asian Americans, largely Chinese
Americans, protested in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., among other
cities. In response, Black Lives Matter protestors, who also counted many Asian American
activists and coalitions among their ranks, staged counter protests, clashing with pro-Liang
supporter both during the actual protests and in the press, through a wealth of think pieces and
long form essays released by both sides over the course of the trial. Both Black Lives Matter
supporters and Liang supporters used similar terms to defend their positions; that is, both sides
articulated a history of racism that contextualized the case and both sides called for cross-racial
solidarity.
The tensions that surfaced in the public debates over Gurley’s death and Liang’s
conviction point to the troubled state of multicultural racial logics in the last few years. On the
one hand, pro-Liang supporters wielded signs that read, “No Selective Justice” and “One
Tragedy, Two Victims.”
2
These protestors argued that Liang was being used as a scapegoat for

169
the NYPD, which was facing increasing public pressure to begin to hold its officers accountable
for the high numbers of police shootings of black and Latino men. They pointed to other recent,
high profile line-of-duty killings, like the murder of Eric Garner by NY police offers earlier in
2014, which had not resulted in indictments, let alone convictions.
3
And they linked Liang’s
vulnerability to being scapegoated as part of a long history of Asian Americans being seen as
being foreign to the nation and thus less worthy of protection. One organizer was quoted as
commenting, “Today it’s Peter Liang. Tomorrow it’s Peter Lee. After that it’s Peter Chan. We’ve
borne it long enough.”
4
Former New York City comptroller John Liu, during one of the rallies,
expressed lack of surprise at Liang’s conviction: “Because for 150 years, there had been a
common phrase in America. This phrase is called, ‘Not a Chinaman’s chance.’”
5
Organizers and
protestors also pointed out that Asian American’s model minority status, which both contributed
to and was compounded by Asian American’s relative lack of political organization, left them
vulnerable to exploitation. Liu said, in another publication, “The sentiment in the Asian
community is: It’s easier to hang an Asian, because Asians, they don’t speak up.”
6
Another
activist, Joseph Lin, was quoted as saying, “If he’s a black officer, I guarantee you Al Sharpton
will come out […] if he’s Hispanic, all the congressmen will come out. But no, he’s a Chinese,
so no one is coming out.”
7

In contrast, Black Lives Matter and other allied supporters placed Gurley’s shooting
within a different racial context—the disproportionate killing of black and brown men by police
officers, and the disproportionate lack of punishment meted out in those cases, were for them
part of a broader, state-sanctioned project of white supremacy that not only did not care about,
but often actively encouraged, the murder of black and brown people. They also pointed to the
model minority complex, but here used it to highlight the ways in which it positioned Asian

170
American and black communities against each other; several articles referenced the 1992 L.A.
riots, which were partially in response to the shooting of Latasha Harlins, a young black girl, by
Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, while others pointed to the lack of Asian American
participation in the Black Lives Matter protests that had been taking place all over the country
since Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012.
8
Many activists argued that while they agreed that Liang’s
race probably played a factor in his conviction, his status as a police officer—a voluntary choice,
many emphasized—meant that race could not play a part in deciding whether or not to hold him
accountable. Cathy Dang, the executive director of New York based CAAAV Organizing Asian
Communities, argued, “Well, our organization started 30 years ago out of supporting Asian
immigrants and refugees who were impacted by police and hate violence […] And we got
involved because we didn’t want race to be the reason why Peter Liang wasn’t held accountable.
At the end of the day, he has a uniform, and he is an officer, and he needs to be held
accountable.”
9
Another writer argued, “Liang chose to become an NYPD officer. He knows the
risks of carrying a lethal weapon.”
10

Asian American activists who supported Black Lives Matter also raised the specter of
foreign influence on American politics. A joint statement issued by CAAAV Organizing Asian
Communities, Asian Americans United, and the Chinese Progressive Associations of San
Francisco and Boston claimd that “While the Chinese media and some Chinese leaders stood
behind former Officer Peter Liang, as grassroots organizations working with Asian/Chinese
Americans, we continue to stand with the family of Akai Gurley.”
11
Activist and comedian Jenny
Yang commented, “There are more and more wealthy Chinese from China attending colleges
and living in the states. They are also the ones who get more attention by the media. But what
still gets left out are those who have less money and political power, often times more working-

171
class immigrants and undocumented folks.”
12
Here, Asian American activists juxtaposed a
working-class, grassroots, community oriented Asian America against wealthy, class motivated
“Chinese from China.” This positioning elides the possibility of class-interested Asian
Americans, coding new immigrants as foreign and regressive while inscribing Asian Americans
as inherently progressive.
Jay Caspian Kang interprets this complex clash between Asian American communities as
“the stunted language of a people who do not yet know how to talk about injustice.”
13
I read
these debates, however, as revealing instead the stresses and fractures that had begun to
characterize neoliberal multiculturalism’s racial style by 2014. The selective incorporation of
people of color into the institutions of white supremacy, accelerated by neoliberal
multiculturalism, set the stage for Liang’s murder of Akai Gurley. The political debate after
Liang’s conviction reveals, in fact, an Asian American activist class well versed in the tropes of
Asian American racial formation, particularly model minority. Asian exclusion, and the need for
political and cultural representation. Both “sides” are also clearly aware that, within the context
of neoliberal multiculturalism, social power is disbursed, though unevenly, among those subjects
of color who can wield either social or economic capital to their advantage. Thus, these Asian
American activists, no matter what position they advocate for, carve out ethical positions for
themselves by characterizing themselves and their position as less socially powerful than their
opposition. Pro-Liang supporters consequently argued that Asian Americans lacked the political
power of African Americans and Latinos, while their opposition argued that the Asian
Americans advocating for Liang were wealthy and had more access to and representation in the
media. This, too, is part of neoliberal multiculturalism’s racial style, which uses, as discussed

172
throughout this dissertation, rubrics of ethics and cultural authenticity in order to disavow the
logics of social capital accumulation that undergird such positioning.
I say that this debate reveals the fractures within this racial style because it exposes the
ways in which an idiom of racial oppression and political representation had become so flexible
as to be wielded unironically against itself. If the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was the apex
of neoliberal multiculturalism’s power, his presidency quickly revealed the limits of neoliberal
multiculturalism. The emergence of Black Lives Matter demonstrated one facet of this tension,
as a public movement that demanded that the lives of black people—and specifically black
men—were seen as valuable, precious, and, in death, grievable, even as pundits claimed that a
black President signaled the end of racism in the U.S. The election of Donald Trump in 2016
demonstrated another facet: a racial backlash and new style of white supremacy, emergent even
in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidential run, had crystallized and is, even now, in
contest with neoliberal multiculturalism for dominance.
Indeed, Donald Trump’s election—alongside other global turns towards nativist and
white supremacist sentiment, like Britain’s resolve to “exit” the European Union—signals that
neoliberal multiculturalism is not only stressed or waning, but has perhaps come to an end as a
hegemonic, dominant cultural formation. Multiculturalism, that is, is no longer “common sense”;
global mobility and cosmopolitanism is now considered suspect; and those oppressed
populations that had carved out spaces of normalcy and mobility for themselves are newly under
threat. Though East Asian Americans had seemingly been folded into the category of citizen and
were presumed relatively protected from racially motivated violence, for example, hate crimes
against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were found to have tripled between 2014 and
2015, causing the launch of a new website dedicated to tracking anti-Asian hate crime

173
statistics.
14
Yet even as multiculturalism seems to be waning, its technologies of absorption and
difference are residual and still recognizable, as when, for instance, the Trump administration
deploys the Jewish ethnicity of some of its key administrators as protection from charges of anti-
semitism.
15

The field of Asian American literary studies has been relatively insulated from these
stresses, fractures, and fluctuations. In part, this is because Asian American literature has not yet
materialized these conflicts in print. Yet it is also because, as discussed throughout this
dissertation, Asian American literature is most often produced by a relatively small coterie of
intellectual and cultural elite, who are themselves steeped in the logics of Asian American
Studies, and are thus unlikely to produce texts that capture the range of ideological diversity now
marshaled under the signifier “Asian American.” Indeed, because of this, Asian American
literature may not be a useful index on its own of the current function and meaning of Asian
America as a racial category; thus, Asian American literary studies will need to broaden its
perspective if the field hopes to remain engaged with present racial formations and feelings. This
may mean, in part, reorienting the focus of the field away from the poles of exclusion and
alienation and towards, instead, tropes of selective inclusion and mobile racial positioning. While
tropes of heterogeneity and difference are still dominant within the current racial style, Asian
American literary studies must more rigorously interrogate the material and cultural realities of
those differences and heterogeneities rather than deploying them as free-floating theoretical
idioms.
Here, I do not simply mean to urge that Asian American literary studies remains
cognizant of its own complicity with institutional and disciplinary power, or on a broad level
interrogate Asian America’s complicity with the project of white supremacy, although those are

174
both imperative. “Complicity” is a partial framework, easily mired in individualist logics of
blame and personal intent. Instead, Asian American literary studies, and Asian American
Studies broadly, must remain attentive to the racial effects of its own production, and to the
imbrication of the field within broader cultural contests over the meanings and feelings that
define Asian America—both in the waning shadow of neoliberal multiculturalism, and the
growing shadow of whatever comes next.

175

NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1
Tao Lin, Taipei (New York: Vintage, 2013), 133.
2
Chang-Rae Lee, Aloft (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), 73.
3
John Yoo, “Minority Search for a Middle Ground,” The Harvard Crimson, July 21, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/7/21/minority-search-for-a-middle-ground/.
4
Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), 4.
5
Mark Chiang uses the term “primordial” to refer to ethnic identities that appear to be and are experienced as less
mediated than Asian American identity. Rachel C. Lee, in describing how the field has formed around the inherent
instability of the term, compiles a brief list of quotations spanning two decades of Asian American Studies to
highlight how “the unanchored quality of to Asian America’s constituent parts has become a prima facie tenet of the
field.” Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the
University (New York: New York UP, 2009), 13; Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America:
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU Press, 2014), 8.
6
See, for example Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Frank Chin et al. (New York:
Meridian, 1991); King-Kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American
Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?,” in A Companion to Asian American Studies, ed. Kent A. Ono
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 157–74.
7
In the last decade, two prominent strains of Asian American cultural studies have emerged. One emphasizes
transnational (and often, transpacific) experience, subjectivities, or cultural flows, often focusing on specific shared
ethnic, national or political identity (e.g., Filipino Americans; refugees) rather than panethnically-identified Asian
Americans; see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015); Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Nothing Ever Dies (Harvard University Press, 2016); Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and
Militarized Refugees (University of California Press, 2014); Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay
Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at
the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015); David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2010). The other emphasizes the form, performance, and representation of Asian American culture and
subjectivity as opposed to (or at least in conjunction with) the term’s legislative, political, or institutional
production; see Ju Yon Kim, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (New
York: NYU Press, 2015); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian
America (New York: NYU Press, 2013); Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage
(Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2002); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian
American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The
Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007); Hoang Tan Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation
(Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014). Some sparkly texts do both; see Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and
Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU Press, 2013).
8
Lee uses these terms to encapsulate how the field is usually narrated, but in fact argues that these terms belie the
anti-essentialist impulses of early Asian American Studies and obscure the essentialist characteristics of later Asian
American Studies. Christopher Lee, The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2012).
9
Chiang, Cultural Capital, 173.
10
Chuh, Imagine Otherwise.
11
This “dematerializing” of Asian American Studies has caused consternation among some critics. Notably, Colleen
Lye argues that the end result of the refusal of Asian American Studies to delineate its subject is that staging the
field as an “analytic” elides the biological logic still at the heart of determining who is or is not Asian American.
Rachel Lee also takes up this argument, though she interrogates the notion of “the biological” as something to

176

always be critically avoided or obscured. Colleen Lye, “Introduction: In Dialogue with Asian American Studies,”
Representations 99.1 (2007): 1–12; Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America.
12
Chiang distills these terms from his reading of Viet Nguyen and Kandice Chuh. Chiang, Cultural Capital; Viet
Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian American Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2002); Chuh, Imagine Otherwise.
13
Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham: Duke University
Press Books, 2002); Chiang, Cultural Capital; Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature,
1893-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2009).
14
Kang, Compositional Subjects, 19.
15
Ibid.
16
Nguyen, Race and Resistance, 7, 13, vi.
17
Anecdotally, the first time I was ever made aware of my own “Asian Americanness” (as something separate from
my identity as a Filipina) was in an institutional setting, when my high school summoned all four of its Asian
American students to the office to invite us to participate in an Asian American Leadership Conference.
Academically, Yen Le Espiritu highlights the centrality of Asian American Studies, Asian American student
organizations, and other diversity, professional, or political organizations to the building of a panethnic Asian
American identity. In 2011, based on the 2008 National Asian American Survey, Janelle Wong, S. Karthick
Ramakrishan, Taeku Lee, and Jane Juan observed that Asian Americans with the highest degrees of educational
attainment (college degree and above) were most likely to self-identify as Asian Americans, rather than as a single
ethnicity (e.g. Korean) or a “hyphenated ethnicity” (e.g. Korean American). Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American
Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Temple University Press, 2011); Janelle Wong et al., Asian
American Political Participation : Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities (New York, US: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2011), 174–175, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=11169246.
18
Stephen Sohn argues that the racializing processes of the literary market have profound effects on the form and
content of the works of Asian American authors. Given that multiculturalism demands Asian American authors to
play the role of the native informant, and given Asian Americans’ positions as “model minorities” vis a vis other
ethnic minorities, Sohn argues that “contemporary Asian American writers must attend to their creative work in an
era in which their status as a minority can be levied as a kind of cultural capital.” Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial
Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 11.
19
Melamed actually makes a historical distinction between “liberal multiculturalism,” which for her characterizes
the phase of multiculturalism that was hegemonic from the 1970s to the 1990s, and “neoliberal multiculturalism,”
which became hegemonic in the 1990s through the 2000s, culminating in the election of Barack Obama. Following
Hong, Ferguson, and David Harvey, I do not necessarily delineate between these two phases, but use “neoliberal” to
signal, broadly, the period from 1978-present. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2007); Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of
Minority Difference (Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012); Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures Of
American Capital: Women Of Color Feminism And The Culture Of Immigrant Labor, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ
Of Minnesota Press, 2006); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial
Capitalism (U of Minnesota Press, 2011).
20
Melamed draws her formulation of the “racial break” from Omi and Winant’s formulation of post-Civil Rights
racial formation. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edition (New York:
Routledge, 2014).
21
Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 139.
22
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2004).
23
Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 152.
24
Hong, The Ruptures Of American Capital, xx.
25
See Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007);
Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press Books,
2011).
26
As Kandice Chuh points out, these are aesthetic characteristics that more broadly characterize postmodernism,
hence Chuh’s linking of Asian American Studies to postmodernist studies rather than to student activist movements.
I am more interested, however, in neoliberal multiculturalism’s deployment of these concepts as tactics of capital
accumulation rather than as generalized aesthetics. Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 20–29.

177

27
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making Of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire
(Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013), 107.
28
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 1.
29
Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “Late (Global) Capital,” in The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific
Islander Literature, ed. Rachel C. Lee (New York: Routledge, 2014), 305.
30
As Laura Kang argues, this financial collapse has now been attributed not to the fundamentally predatory global
financial system developed by the U.S. and Europe, but instead to the inherent inferiority of Asian capitalism, which
was characterized by strategic state planning and intervention, to the “Washington Consensus” version of American
capitalism, which hinged on a reduced state that facilitated capital flow. Indeed, Gindin and Panitch make that exact
argument, quoting Mitchell Bernard’s claim that “While various factions of global capital were indeed central agents
in bursting the Thai bubble, the origins of the crisis lay in the way these forces of globalization were intertwined
with the Thai power structure.” As Laura Kang puts it, this figures the crisis as “the inevitable outcome and
confirmation of a misguided ‘Asian model’ […] The attribution of the downfall to the anachronistic and persistent
influence of ‘Oriental despotism’ and ‘Asiatic absolutism’ enabled a triumphant affirmation of the Washington
consensus and attested to the persistence of East vs. West, Asian vs. American binaries.” Mitchell qtd in Panitch and
Gindin, The Making Of Global Capitalism, 255; Kang, “Late (Global) Capital,” 305.
31
Kevin Granville, “What Is TPP? Behind the Trade Deal That Died,” The New York Times, August 20, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/business/tpp-explained-what-is-trans-pacific-partnership.html; Peter
Baker, “Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s Signature Trade Deal,” The New York Times, January
23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/tpp-trump-trade-nafta.html.
32
Madeline Hsu points out that though the term emerged in 1966, the practice of selectively elevating specific
“desirable” Asian immigrants began much earlier, during the period of Chinese exclusion, when Asian American
students, professors, and other upper class figures were selectively allowed to travel and even immigrate to the U.S.
Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2015).
33
For a longer discussion of this phenomenon, see Chapter 1.
34
See, foundationally, Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society Vol. 27,
no. No. 1 (March 1999): 105–38; also Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the
Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Hsu, The Good Immigrants; Victor Bascara,
Model-Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
35
Nguyen, Race and Resistance.
36
José Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive
Position,” Signs Vol. 31, no. No. 3 (Spring 2006): 682.
37
Nikhil Singh, “Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century,
ed. Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 285.
38
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford Paperbacks, 1978), 128–136.
39
Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 4.
40
Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS, 1 edition (Chicago: University
Of Chicago Press, 2009); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011);
Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006).
41
Muñoz, “Feeling Brown”; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Mel
Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012);
Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2012); Sara
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2014).
42
Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of
Comparative Racialization (Durham NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 9.
43
David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001).
44
Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy:
Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Dana D. Nelson and Russ Castronovo (Durham N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2002), 190.
45
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 22.

178

CHAPTER 1
1
In 2015, Flower Drum Song was finally supplanted by Allegiance, a Broadway musical about Japanese internment
during World War II, hailed as a “more authentic” representation of the “Asian and Asian American experience.”
The starring role, Kei, was written specifically for Lea Salonga, whose fame as the most successful Asian/American
Broadway actress in history is explored in depth later in this chapter. Diep Tran, “From Orientalism to Authenticity:
Broadway’s Yellow Fever,” AMERICAN THEATRE, October 27, 2015,
http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/10/27/from-orientalism-to-authenticity-broadways-yellow-fever/.
2
Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982); David Henry Hwang, Flower Drum
Song (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), x.
3
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: NYU Press,
2005).
4
Hwang, Flower Drum Song, ix–x.
5
Ibid., xii, xiv.
6
David H. Lewis, Flower Drum Songs: The Story of Two Musicals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006),
88–89.
7
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 84.
8
Ibid., 70.
9
For example, in his oft-cited essay, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation,” Glenn Omatsu
declares, “1968 for Asian Americans was a year of birth.” Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements
of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Asian American Politics: Law,
Participation, and Policy, ed. Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003),
135–62; see also Nguyen, Race and Resistance; Chiang, Cultural Capital; Chuh, Imagine Otherwise.
10
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 212.
11
Hsu, The Good Immigrants, 12.
12
The Hart-Celler Act finally ended the national origin quota system, which had operated alongside explicitly anti-
Asian legislation to exclude Asian immigrants from the US since the 1880s, and instead instituted a hemispheric
quota system hierarchized by “preferences” for family members and skilled workers. The effect of the Hart-Celler
Act on the Asian-origin ethnic population in the US cannot be overstated: people who identified as Asian, who
represented less than 1% of the US population in 1965, accounted for 5.6% of the population in 2010, with a ten
year growth rate more than four times faster than that of the total population. Beyond sheer increase of numbers, the
preferences for skilled workers have had profound effects on the Asian-origin population: “The arrival of new
immigrants after 1965 has transformed the group from a predominantly American-born constituency to a group
which is 65% foreign-born. The new immigrants carry strong homeland identifications, speak many different
languages, practice various religions, and have a multiplicity of political affiliations. Some of the recent immigrants,
especially Chinese and Indians, are part of ‘second phase migrations’ arriving in the U.S. not from their countries of
origin, but from […] diasporas […] Even when joining older groups, the newer immigrants add layers of class
difference: whereas many of the the earlier Chinese, Filipino and Indian immigrants were nonliterate laborers, the
new arrivals from these groups include large numbers of middle-class professionals.” Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of
Asian American Literature,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6, no. 2 (1996): 322; Elizabeth M. Hoeffel et al., “The
Asian Population: 2010,” 2010 Census Briefs (U.S. Census Bureau, March 2012),
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-11.pdf.
13
See for example Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York:
Little, Brown, 1998); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making
of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy:
Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley, CA: Univ of California P, 2011);
Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015) is the only
counterexample I have found.
14
Omatsu, “Four Prisons”; Gordon Lee, “The Forgotten Revolution,” Hyphen, Summer 2003,
http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/magazine/issue-1-premiere/forgotten-revolution-0.
15
Koshy, “Fiction,” 323.
16
Lye, “Introduction: In Dialogue with Asian American Studies,” 5.
17
Koshy, “Fiction,” 323–324.

179

18
Following the so-called “transnational turn” of Asian American Studies in the early 1990s (discussed in more
depth in Chapter 3), a debate arose about the ways in which a focus on the transnational aspects of “Asian America”
might obscure a rigorous engagement with how domestic forces—particularly gender and sexuality—continue to
shape Asian America. While I agree with much of Rachel Lee’s argument, I here build on Jodi Kim and David
Palumbo-Liu’s assertions that Asian America is always already a transnational formation. I also make use of
Palumbo-Liu’s “solidus,” that is, his demarcation “Asian/America,” which marks “both the distinction installed
between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.” For the purposes of this
chapter, I use “Asian America(n)” to reference the intellectual and political formation or people and characters who
specifically identify as such. I use “Asian/American” to reference collectives of people made up of various unsettled
or unnamed identifications. Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1999); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: Univ of
Minnesota P, 2010); David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999).
19
Jodi Kim traces this connection between the wars of 1898 and the Korean and Vietnam wars in depth, suggesting
that even the word “gook,” most strongly associated with the Vietnam war, actually derives from American military
intervention in the Philippines. Kim, Ends of Empire, 3.
20
Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2012),
250–255.
21
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 101.
22
Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004), 99.
23
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 99.
24
Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 101.
25
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 99.
26
Ibid., 109.
27
Kang, Compositional Subjects; Chiang, Cultural Capital; Lye, America’s Asia.
28
Freeman, Time Binds, 65.
29
Lee, “The Forgotten Revolution.”
30
C. Y. Lee and David Henry Hwang, The Flower Drum Song (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 1, 243–244.
31
Nayan Shah succinctly describes the late 19th- and early 20th-century representations of Chinatown to which
Lee’s and other midcentury Chinatown portrayals responded: ”The creation of “knowledge” of Chinatown relied
upon three key spatial elements: dens, density, and the labyrinth. The enclosed and inhuman spaces of dens were
where the Chinese live. High density was the condition in which they lived. And the labyrinth was the unnavigable
maze that characterized both the subterranean passageways within the buildings and the streets and alleys
aboveground. These spatial elements established the basic contours of the representation of Chinatown and provided
the canvas for detailed renderings of Chinese living styles, conditions, and behaviors.” Such descriptions obscured
the network of family, fraternal, and regional organizations that structured Chinatown life and eased new
immigrants’ arrival to the U.S. They also portrayed Chinatown’s density and spatial arrangement as a result of
Chinese iniquity rather than both legal (Exclusion legislation) and extralegal (Anti-Chinese violence) attempts by
Americans to make large swaths of the U.S. inhospitable to Chinese settlement. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides:
Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 18–19.
32
Lee and Hwang, The Flower Drum Song, 118.
33
Kim, Ends of Empire; Melamed, Represent and Destroy.
34
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 203; Shah, Contagious Divides, 223.
35
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 203.
36
Wu, The Color of Success, 111–144; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 202–225.
37
Lee and Hwang, The Flower Drum Song, 7, 14.
38
Ibid., 194.
39
Ibid., 65, 94–98.
40
The term was coined by David Eng in his eponymous book, published in 2001, but the issue has been omnipresent
throughout the field’s history. See Chapter 2 for longer discussion. Eng, Racial Castration.
41
Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 98.
42
Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 54.
43
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 110.
44
Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 99.

180

45
Wu recounts the history of the “yogore,” or Nisei zoot-suiters, who become a target of management and
disciplinary figure for the JACL and other Japanese American citizenship organizations in the post-internment years.
Nisei zoot-suiters boldly embodied stylistic and affective connections to both Mexican and Filipino zoot suiters and
African American hipsters; both as “real bodies” and “politically charged symbols,” yogore “conjured up alternative
imaginings of Americanism that obstinately resisted the WRA’s command to disappear into the white middle class.
Wu, The Color of Success, 41.
46
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (University of California
Press, 2003), 231.
47
Bruce A. McConachie, “The ‘Oriental’ Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast
Asia,” Theatre Journal 46, no. 3 (October 1, 1994): 385–98; Chang-Hee Kim, “Asian Performance on the Stage of
American Empire in Flower Drum Song,” Cultural Critique 85, no. 1 (2013): 1–37; Anne Anlin Cheng, The
Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
48
Kim, Ends of Empire, 2–3.
49
“…In the 1940s and 1950s it was precisely the dual identity—the foreignness—of Chinese Americans that gave
them value as Americans. Flower Drum Song hardly advocates the ‘melting’ of Asian difference into a homogenous
sameness of postwar American whiteness. The idea of dual identity—as opposed to wholesale assimilation— […]
had everything to do with the global imperatives driving the reformulation of American national identity as a
pluralistic nation of immigrants.” Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 241.
50
The 1945 War Brides Act allowed US soldiers to circumvent Asian exclusion in order to bring home the women
they married while stationed in Asia. According to Susan Koshy, war brides accounted for “approximately 80
percent of the forty-five thousand Japanese immigrants who entered in the 1950s”; “almost 40 percent of Korean
immigrants” between 1950 and 1964; and “nearly all the sixteen thousand Filipinas who entered the United States in
the postwar years.” Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 11–12.
51
Cindy I.-Fen Cheng, “Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Cultural
Citizenship in Early Cold War America,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2006): 1076, doi:10.1353/aq.2007.0003.
52
This supposed perversion, however, also led to the conflation of Asian women with the extraterritorial locales
they inhabited—“island paradises in the Pacific, treaty ports, and colonial possessions”—where American men
could enjoy sexual intimacies and pleasures beyond the strict parameters of their domestic duties, as memorably
enacted in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s earlier musical, South Pacific. Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 11.
53
Kim, “Asian Performance,” 11.
54
It’s notable that even though, in this version, “Asians” can ceremonially become “Asian Americans” through
ceremonial civic participation, they’re still confined to the geographic space of Chinatown. Cindy I-Fen Cheng
argues that, in fact, the 1940s and 1950s saw a massive exodus of Chinese Americans from Chinatowns across
America, a result of both the shift in national attitudes chronicled above and the new ability of Chinese Americans to
form nuclear, heterosexual households. Like Mei Li’s overt Chineseness, the space of Chinatown functions to
contain the threat of Asian America—that is, if “Asians” can become “Asian Americans,” what’s to stop them from
just becoming “Americans”? Cheng, “Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs,” 1075.
55
Lee and Hwang, The Flower Drum Song, 65.
56
Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, and Joseph Fields, Flower Drum Song: A Musical Play (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 89–90.
57
Henry Koster, Flower Drum Song - Special Edition (Universal Studios, 2006).
58
Original 1958 New Yorker review of the Broadway show, qtd in McConachie, “The ‘Oriental’ Musicals of
Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia,” 389.
59
Lewis, Flower Drum Songs, 102.
60
Hwang, Flower Drum Song, x.
61
Lewis, Flower Drum Songs, 188.
62
Ibid., 191, 195.
63
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.
64
Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?; Melamed, Represent and Destroy.
65
For more on how the incorporation of ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary served the aims of the neoliberal
university, see Ferguson, The Reorder of Things; Kang, Compositional Subjects.
66
Chiang, Cultural Capital, 13.
67
Lee, The Making of Asian America, 286, 359–360.
68
Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown, 2nd edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Lee, The Making of Asian
America; for more on Monterey Park and suburban Chinatowns, see Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown:

181

The Remaking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); also Leland T. Saito,
Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb, First Edition edition (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998).
69
Lewis, Flower Drum Songs, 163.
70
Jasbir Puar argues that the rise of “gay rights” discourse and activism was predicated on the the figure of the queer
terrorist as the unincorporable double that makes the gay citizen incorporable and palatable. I take up this argument
in more depth, arguing that the terrorist is also the unincorporable other to the multicultural Asian American citizen,
in Chapter 5. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
71
Melamed, Represent and Destroy.
72
Ibid., 138; see also Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Duke
University Press, 2006); for more on governance through managed dissensus, see Singh, “Racial Formation.”
73
Hwang, Flower Drum Song, xi.
74
Ibid., 22.
75
Ibid., 65 format original.
76
Ibid., 68.
77
Ibid., 70.
78
Lewis, Flower Drum Songs, 145.
79
Tzu-I. Chung, “The Transnational Vision of Miss Saigon: Performing the Orient in a Globalized World,” MELUS:
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36, no. 4 (2011): 64–65.
80
Hwang, Flower Drum Song, 90.
81
Lewis, Flower Drum Songs, 195.
82
Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 235.
83
Hwang, Flower Drum Song, 97.
84
Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism; Kim, Ends of Empire.

CHAPTER 2
1
Lee, Aloft, 22.
2
Native Speaker appears in chapter-length studies in Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire and the edited collection
Transnational Asian American Literature, and in several print articles, including those by James Kyung-jin Lee,
Yung-Hsing Wu, and Sämi Ludwig. A Gesture Life is equally popular among Asian American literary studies
scholars; indeed, it is the focus of Lisa Lowe’s overview of Asian American Studies in the Concise Companion to
American Studies. A Gesture Life is also the subject of chapter-length studies in Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise
and Christopher Lee’s Semblance of Identity, as well as articles by Anne Anlin Cheng, Daniel Y. Kim, Mark C.
Jerng, and Young-Oak Lee, among others. By contrast, as discussed later in the article, Aloft has been the subject of
only two published critical analyses as of the writing of this article. See Kim, Ends of Empire; Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
et al., eds., Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2006); James Kyung-Jin Lee, “Where the Talented Tenth Meets the Model Minority: The Price of Privilege in
Wideman’s ‘Philadelphia Fire’ and Lee’s ‘Native Speaker,’” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35, no. 2/3 (Spring-
Summer 2002): 231–57; Yung-Hsing Wu, “Native Sons and Native Speakers: On the Eth(n)ics of Camparison,”
PMLA 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1460–74; Sämi Ludwig, “Ethnicity and Cognitive Identity: Private and Public
Negotiations in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” Journal of Asian American Studies 10, no. 3 (October 2007):
221–42; Lisa Lowe, “Reckoning Nation and Empire: Asian American Critique,” in A Concise Companion to
American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 229–44; Chuh, Imagine Otherwise; Lee, The
Semblance of Identity; Anne Anlin Cheng, “Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival from
Chang-Rae Lee to Jacques Lacan,” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (September 21, 2005): 553–74,
doi:10.1093/alh/aji032; Daniel Y. Kim, “Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-Rae
Lee’s Native Speaker,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 3 (October 2003): 231–60; Mark C. Jerng,
“Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-Rae Lee’s ‘A Gesture Life,’” MELUS 31,
no. 2 (2006): 41–67; Young-Oak Lee, “Transcending Ethnicity: Diasporicity in A Gesture Life,” Journal of Asian
American Studies 12, no. 1 (February 2009): 65–81.
3
Throughout the chapter, I borrow the use of the word “emergent” from Raymond Williams. For Williams,
“emergent” does not only index a temporal formation; that is, an emergent formation or structure of feeling is not
necessarily “new” in the sense that it has only just arrived. Instead, emergent cultural and social forms are those
exhibited in the “practical consciousness” of the present moment that a “specifically dominant social order neglects,

182

excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize.” Emergent and dominant formations are always both present in any
given cultural text. Thus while multiculturalism as an ideology is not necessarily “new” at this point—having been
around since the mid-20th century and even ascended to the status of hegemonic in the late 20th century—its forms,
characters, and types remain emergent within Asian American literature, at least in relation to the dominant
interpretive mechanisms brought to bear on such literature by Asian American Studies. Williams, Marxism and
Literature, 125.
4
I borrow the term “racial asymmetry” from Stephen Sohn. Sohn, Racial Asymmetries.
5
Kim, Asian American Literature, xi.
6
Ibid., xiii.
7
Ibid., xii.
8
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996), 10.
9
Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke UP,
2000), 9.
10
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 3.
11
Ibid., 9.
12
Chu, Assimilating Asians, 4.
13
Famously, Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History, ed. Marilyn Alquizola and Lane
Hirabayashi, Reprint edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); John Okada, No-No Boy, ed. Lawson
Fusao Inada and Frank Chin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Reissue edition (New York: Vintage, 1989); Frank Chin, Donald
Duk, First Edition edition (Minneapolis : St. Paul, Minn: Coffee House Press, 1991); Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine,
1st edition (New York: Grove Press, 1999); Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake: A Novel, Reprint edition (New
Hampshire: Mariner Books, 2004).
14
Chu, Assimilating Asians, 12.
15
Sohn, Racial Asymmetries, 4.
16
Kim, Asian American Literature, xv.
17
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 6.
18
Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 8.
19
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 6.
20
Kim, Ends of Empire; Kandice Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge: Or, Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian
Americanist Critical Practice,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 5–23,
doi:10.1353/jaas.2003.0025.
21
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 44.
22
Ibid., 10.
23
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 41, 43.
24
And, of course, Aloft is not the first novel or short story written by an Asian American author to feature a white
protagonist. In fact, Stephen Sohn’s reading of Aloft is part of his book-length study on Asian American writers
whose work does not focus on Asian American protagonists, a phenomenon which, as he explains, has rapidly
multiplied in the “post-race” era. Sohn’s central argument is that Asian American literary studies needs to expand its
understanding of what counts as Asian American literature in order to more fully account for the creative vastness of
Asian American fictional worlds. In general, both within Sohn’s text and in other critical essays—such as critical
readings of Bharati Mukherjee’s short story Orbiting or Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs. Sen—representations of
white protagonists tend to be read as writers deploying ethnic immigrant histories and experiences in order to put
pressure on American dream and bootstraps ideologies, a project well within the bounds of Asian American culture
as delineated by Asian American Studies even when it doesn’t necessarily entail the representation of Asian
American experience. Victoria Carchidi, “‘Orbiting’: Bharati Mukherjee’s Kaleidoscope Vision,” MELUS 20, no. 4
(1995): 91–101; Sohn, Racial Asymmetries, 25–62.
25
Sohn, Racial Asymmetries, 46.
26
Mark C. Jerng, “Nowhere in Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-Rae Lee’s Aloft, and the Question of Asian
American Fiction,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 183–204.
27
Lee, Aloft, 364.
28
Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 13.
29
For a discussion of Asian American literary studies’ preoccupation with “bad subjects,” see Nguyen, Race and
Resistance.
30
Hong, The Ruptures Of American Capital, xx.

183

31
Ibid., 108; see also Melamed, Represent and Destroy; Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Singh, “Racial
Formation.”
32
Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 108.
33
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133.
34
Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 24 (2006): 20.
35
Singh, “Racial Formation,” 291.
36
Jerng, “Nowhere in Particular,” 194; Susan Koshy, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical
Transformations of Whiteness,” Boundary 2 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 185.
37
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
38
Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 150.
39
Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 152.
40
The distinction made in an earlier footnote between “emergent” as a temporal marker and “emergent” as a cultural
formation that is not always legible in the terms of the dominant cultural formation comes to the fore here. While
neoliberal multiculturalism may revise the avenues and strategies through which the boundaries and privileges of
whiteness are extended, attempts from ethnic or racial minority groups to align themselves with whiteness are in no
way new, as the work of Jacobson and David Roediger reveal. While whiteness studies has largely focused on how
various European ethnic groups competed for and accomplished entree into whiteness during the late 19
th
and early
20
th
centuries, Asian Americans themselves have had several public and legal contestations with the category of
whiteness, as notably detailed by Susan Koshy. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making
of the American Working Class, ed. Mike Davis, Michael Sprinker, and Kathleen Cleaver, New Edition (Brooklyn,
NY: Verso, 2007); Koshy, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity.”
41
Lee, Aloft, 78.
42
Qtd in Sohn, Racial Asymmetries, 26.
43
Lee, Aloft, 78.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid., 97.
46
Ibid., 128, 30, 218.
47
Ibid., 360.
48
Ahmed, “Whiteness,” 156.
49
Lee, Aloft, 212, 129 (emphasis original), 243.
50
Ahmed, “Whiteness,” 155.
51
Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 153.
52
Ibid., 152.
53
Lee, Aloft, 218.
54
Yes, named for that Barthes. A joke about academics, perhaps—Theresa and Paul are subject to a number of
these—or yet another self-conscious hint about the overdetermined nature of most of the symbols and locations in
the novel. Ibid., 354.

CHAPTER 3
1
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 2 edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1.
2
Lin, Taipei, 3–4.
3
Lee, The Semblance of Identity.
4
Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 105.
5
Elaine Kim and Norma Alarcón, eds., Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha (Berkeley: Third Women Press, 1994), ix.
6
Ibid., 4.
7
Ibid., 104.
8
Ibid., 4, 76.
9
Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, 102.
10
Kim and Alarcón, Writing Self, Writing Nation, 8.
11
Ibid., 104.

184

12
In fact, Lee provides these terms and then argues, compellingly, against them. He argues that the supposedly
“essentialist” phase of Asian American studies contained post-identity discourse, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the
point stands that, in most narratives of the field’s development, this period marks a distinct change in underlying
assumptions, methods, and critical frameworks. Lee, The Semblance of Identity.
13
Ibid., 10.
14
Lydia Kiesling, “Modern Life Is Rubbish: Tao Lin’s Taipei,” June 5, 2013,
http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/modern-life-is-rubbish-tao-lins-taipei.html.
15
Sohn, Racial Asymmetries.
16
Lin, Taipei, 24, 28.
17
Ibid., 48.
18
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, First Edition edition (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press Books, 2002), 29.
19
Ibid., 25.
20
Kim and Alarcón, Writing Self, Writing Nation, 7, 98.
21
I thank Viet Nguyen for bringing my attention to this passage, which I somehow missed the first time around.
Lin, Taipei, 33.
22
See also David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991); Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Halberstam, In a Queer Time
and Place.
23
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, 2nd printing, edition (Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 1999), 134.
24
Ibid., 20.
25
Lin, Taipei, 15–16.
26
Ibid., 16.
27
Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 111.
28
Ibid., 133.
29
See Chen, Animacies; Ngai, Ugly Feelings.
30
Lin, Taipei, 161.
31
Ibid., 164.
32
Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text
24 (2006): 14.
33
Lin, Taipei, 68, 87, 110.
34
Ibid., 187.
35
Ibid., 188.
36
Ibid., 203.
37
See Eng, Racial Castration; David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, “Introduction,” in Q & A: Notes on a Queer Asian
America, ed. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998), 1–24; Daniel Y. Kim, Writing
Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2005); Nguyen, A View from the Bottom.
38
See, for example, Rhacel Parreñas, Servants of Globalization : Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition (2)
(Redwood City, US: Stanford University Press, 2015),
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=11079019.
39
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 29.
40
Lin, Taipei, 244.
41
Ibid., 246.
42
Ibid., 167.

CHAPTER 4
1
Yoo, “Minority Search for a Middle Ground.”
2
Ruben Navarette, Jr., “Harvard Homeboy: A Chicano on the Fast Track Now Heads for Prison,” Los Angeles
Times, August 5, 1989, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-05/local/me-337_1_educational-fast-track; Robert
Lindsey, “Worlds in Collision: From Barrio to Harvard to Jail,” The New York Times, July 26, 1987, sec. U.S.,
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/26/us/worlds-in-collision-from-barrio-to-harvard-to-jail.html.

185

3
Allan Bloom, Andrew Ferguson, and Saul Bellow, Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has
Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Reissue edition (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2012), 92.
4
Yoo, “Minority Search for a Middle Ground.”
5
John H. Richardson, “Is John Yoo a Monster?,” Esquire, accessed October 1, 2015,
http://www.esquire.com/features/john-yoo-0608.
6
Tim Golden, “A Junior Aide Had a Big Role in Terror Policy,” The New York Times, December 23, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/politics/a-junior-aide-had-a-big-rolein-terror-policy.html.
7
Richardson, “Is John Yoo a Monster?”
8
As he witnessed the scandal of the Iran-Contra affair unfold and its after-effects ripple through military actions
throughout the 1980s, for example, Yoo often bemoaned Congress’s ineptitude in matters of military and foreign
policy. “Democrats in Congress […] who lay all blame on the White House shouldn’t throw War-Powers-Act
stones in glass rotundas,” he wrote in an op-ed, “They are equally—if not more—to blame as the Reagan
administration for our failure to pursue a coherent foreign policy in an area which was once so stable as to be called
‘America’s backyard.’” He added, “This relationship [between Congress and the White House] prevents the United
States from taking a strong military stand against communism and limits our ability to use force when and where we
ought to.” John Yoo, “Freeing Our Arms in Honduras,” The Harvard Crimson, March 23, 1988,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/3/23/freeing-our-arms-in-honduras-pbabs/.
9
John Yoo, “The Return of the Military: Harvard and ROTC,” The Harvard Crimson, May 12, 1986,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/5/12/the-return-of-the-military-pthis/.
10
Qtd in William Spanos, The End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of Minnesota
Press, 1992), 136.
11
As William Spanos points out, the Core Curriculum was not particularly progressive or even innovative; not only
did it simply repackage general education curricula experimented with by “Columbia in the 1920s, at Hutchins’
Chicago in the 1930s, and at Harvard itself in the late 1940s,” but its answers to the questions posed about what
higher education meant in the late 20
th
century resulted in “nothing newer than a reaffirmation of the already
questionable logocentric and elitist ideal of humanistic education […] that has oriented discussion of undergraduate
education at Harvard at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.” Barry O’Connell, qtd in ibid., 133.
12
John Yoo, “What Education?,” The Harvard Crimson, June 8, 1989,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1989/6/8/what-education-pbabt-the-back-of/.
13
The creation of an entire department, rather than just a concentration, apparently caused a kerfluffle among the
faculty. Keller and Keller describe the scene in histrionic but strangely elliptical terms: “Faculty hawks warned of
the fall of Harvard, and even civilization, as they knew it. Radical whites and blacks threw themselves into this
opportunity for agitprop: one black militant paraded outside the meeting sporting a meat cleaver. […] Rosovsky
called the faculty vote ‘an academic Munich,’ a triumph of confrontation over rational debate.”Morton Keller and
Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University (Oxford University Press, 2001), 287.
14
Ibid., 350; John Yoo, “Charting a New Course for Harvard Women’s Faculty,” The Harvard Crimson, December
13, 1986, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/12/13/charting-a-new-course-for-harvards/.
15
In 1972, for example, a Harvard professor of psychology, Richard Hernstein, wrote in an article for the Atlantic
Monthly that differences in I.Q. and mental ability were largely inherited traits; though he supposedly “did not focus
on race, he ran into a storm of obloquy, including death threats, badgering in and out of his classroom, and demands
for his dismissal.” Protesting students were censured by the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities for violating
the university’s rules about student conduct, but disciplinary action could not be agreed upon. In 1981, Bok wrote an
eight page open letter on “Issues of Race at Harvard,” reaffirming the administration’s commitment to affirmative
action admissions policies and to attempting to increase the diversity of the faculty. In 1982, however, the Crimson
leaked a Kennedy School report commissioned by President Bok that suggested that women and black students did
“less well academically than their SAT scores predicted,” and that “affirmative action at elite schools might have
undesirable consequences for minorities.” The report was never officially published, but it triggered another wave of
protests and confrontations between students and administration. Keller and Keller, Making Harvard Modern, 254;
Derek Bok, “The Text of Bok’s Open Letter,” The Harvard Crimson, February 27, 1981,
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1981/2/27/the-text-of-boks-open-letter/.
16
Bloom, Ferguson, and Bellow, Closing of the American Mind, 92; Adam Begley, “Black Studies’ New Star:
Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/01/magazine/black-studies-new-star-henry-louis-gates-jr.html.

186

17
John Yoo, “Black Students Enrolled in Colleges Decreasing,” The Harvard Crimson, October 9, 1986,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/10/9/black-students-enrolled-in-colleges-decreasing/.
18
Yoo, “Minority Search for a Middle Ground.”
19
John Yoo, “Freedom of Choice,” The Harvard Crimson, November 21, 1988,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/11/21/freedom-of-choice-pbibn-essence-the/.
20
John Yoo, “A Foreign Education,” The Harvard Crimson, July 31, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/11/21/freedom-of-choice-pbibn-essence-the/.
21
John Yoo, “Striking a Balance in Ethics Education,” The Harvard Crimson, July 17, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/7/17/striking-a-balance-in-ethics-education/.
22
Keller and Keller, Making Harvard Modern, 484.
23
John Yoo, “Overseers Plan to Review Election Rules Next Year,” The Harvard Crimson, May 9, 1986,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/5/9/overseers-plan-to-review-election-rules/.
24
John Yoo, “Secrecy and Freedom,” The Harvard Crimson, December 14, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/12/14/secrecy-and-freedom-pbtbrust-but-verify/.
25
John Yoo, “Ties and Takeovers Don’t Mix,” The Harvard Crimson, April 12, 1988,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/4/12/ties-and-takeovers-dont-mix-pbdbivestment/.
26
Harvard and other elite university administrations joined together to fight the Reagan administration’s proposed
budget cuts to federal research grants, which would narrow the federal government’s interest in research to
“practical research” funded largely through the Department of Defense. Harvard President Bok also lobbied
Congress members throughout the early 1980s to exempt colleges and universities from a new law that would make
mandatory retirement ages illegal. University administrators like Bok argued that mandatory retirement helped to
keep tenured systems invigorated by mandating turnover and employment for younger scholars. After concerted
lobbying, however, universities were only given a seven-year exemption to the 1986 law, rather than a permanent
one. John Yoo, “Reagan Plan May Harm Universities,” The Harvard Crimson, March 6, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/3/6/reagan-plan-may-harm-universities-pafter/; Shari Roan, “How Old Is
Too Old to Work?,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-05-07/news/vw-
1555_1_mandatory-retirement.
27
John Yoo, “University Lobbying Efforts Criticized,” The Harvard Crimson, April 30, 1987,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/4/30/university-lobbying-efforts-criticized-pone-of/.
28
William J. Bennett, “Our Greedy Colleges,” The New York Times, February 18, 1987, sec. Opinion,
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/18/opinion/our-greedy-colleges.html.
29
Yoo also quotes a Bennet spokesperson as saying, “What higher education really is now is a big business… All
you have to do is look at Harvard’s $3 billion endowment to see that.” Yoo, “University Lobbying Efforts
Criticized.”
30
Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 2008), 53.
31
John Yoo, “Going by the Redbook,” The Harvard Crimson, February 22, 1988,
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/2/22/going-by-the-redbook-pbtbhe-patent/.
32
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 39.
33
Ibid., 38, 42.
34
Ibid., 42.
35
Lowe, “Reckoning Nation and Empire: Asian American Critique,” 41.
36
Jodi Melamed similarly differentiates between “race-radical” and “race-liberal” culture. Melamed, Represent and
Destroy.
37
See, for example, Chuh, Imagine Otherwise; Nguyen, Race and Resistance; Chiang, Cultural Capital.
38
Chiang, Cultural Capital.
39
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 59.
40
Ibid., 6; see also Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Shimakawa, National Abjection.
41
Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different, 9.
42
Kim, Ends of Empire, 3; David R. Roediger, “Gook: The Short History of an Americanism,” Monthly Review 43,
no. 10 (March 1992): 50.
43
Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism, 8; see also Kim, Ends of Empire.
44
See, for example, Fleur Johns, “Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception,” European Journal of
International Law 16, no. 4 (September 1, 2005): 613–35; Andrew W. Neal, “Foucault in Guantánamo: Towards an

187

Archaeology of the Exception,” Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (March 1, 2006): 31–46; Simon Reid-Henry,
“Exceptional Sovereignty? Guantánamo Bay and the Re-Colonial Present,” Antipode 39, no. 4 (September 1, 2007):
627–48.
45
For a longer discussion of these resonances, see Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantanamo?,” American Quarterly 57,
no. 3 (October 10, 2005): 831–58.
46
Patrick F Philbin and John Yoo, “Memorandum for William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of
Defense, RE: Possible Habeas Jurisdiction over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” (National Security
Archive/Washington Media Associates, December 28, 2001), Torturing Democracy,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20011228.pdf.
47
It’s worth noting that this precise argument was rejected in the 2008 Supreme Court case Rasul v Bush. Detlev F.
Vagts, “Military Commissions: A Concise History,” The American Journal of International Law 101, no. 1 (2007):
44; Linda Greenhouse, “Justices, 5-4, Back Detainee Appeals for Guantánamo,” The New York Times, June 13,
2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html.
48
Philbin and Yoo, “Re: Possible Habeas Jurisdiction,” 3.
49
Amy Kaplan highlights this slippage in both public imagination and legal documents, noting that it gives the
impression that “no distinction exist[s] between geography and the political imposition of a military institution.”
Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85, no. 1
(January 7, 2003): 90.
50
Philbin and Yoo, “Re: Possible Habeas Jurisdiction,” 3.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 5.
53
Ibid., 6.
54
“Torture, U.S. Code 18, §§ 2340-2340A,” n.d.
55
Yoo will go on, in later memos, to argue that in fact, the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments do not apply,
either for “alien enemy combatants” held at GBC or arrested and searched in the U.S. itself.
56
Jay Bybee and John Yoo, “Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzalez, Counsel to the President, RE: Standards of
Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A” (National Security Archive/Washington Media
Associates, August 1, 2002), 3, Torturing Democracy,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20020801-1.pdf NB: This memo was drafted by Yoo, but
signed by his superior Jay Bybee. See Philippe Sands, “The Green Light,” Vanity Fair, May 2008,
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/05/guantanamo200805.
57
John Yoo, “Memorandum for William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, RE: Military
Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States” (National Security
Archive/Washington Media Associates, March 14, 2003), 20, Torturing Democracy,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20030314.pdf.
58
Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 91.
59
For a longer history of U.S.-Cuba relations and how the lease was coerced by the U.S. government, see Kaplan,
“Where Is Guantanamo?”
60
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 2008), 51.
61
Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 91.
62
John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty, “Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzalez, Counsel to the President, William J.
Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, RE: Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist
Activities Within the United States” (National Security Archive/Washington Media Associates, October 23, 2001),
31, Torturing Democracy, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20011023.pdf.
63
John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty, “Memorandum for William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Department of
Defense, Re: Application of Treaties and Laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees” (National Security
Archive/Washington Media Associates, January 9, 2002), 2–3, Torturing Democracy,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20020109.pdf.
64
Article 118 of Geneva Convention III “prescribes the mandatory repatriation of POWs after the cessation of a
covered conflict.” Ibid., 30.
65
John Yoo, “Memorandum for Daniel J. Bryant, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legislative Affairs, Re:
Application of 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a) to Military Detention of United States Citizens” (ACLU, June 27, 2002), 2, The
Torture Database, https://www.thetorturedatabase.org/document/olc-memo-applicability-18-usc-%C2%A7-4001a-
military-detention-united-states-

188

citizens?search_url=search/apachesolr_search/yoo&search_args=page=2%26solrsort=tds_cck_field_doc_date%20as
c.
66
Rehnquist was then acting as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. He would go on to serve
as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1986 until his death in 2005.
67
Nathan A. Forrester, ed., Supplemental Opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department
of Justice: Consisting of Selected Memorandum Opinions Advising the President of the United States, the Attorney
General, and Other Executive Officers of the Federal Government in Relation to Their Official Duties, vol. 1
(Washington, DC: The United States Department of Justice, 2013), 337,
https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/477221/download.
68
This is not the only time the specter of “the American war in Vietnam” appears. Yoo also cites at length, in a
different memo, United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, known as the only espionage case to arise from the Vietnam
War. Truong, a U.S. citizen accused of passing information to the Vietnamese government after the end of the war,
argued that the U.S. government had violated his Fourth Amendment rights by wiretapping him without a warrant;
the Fourth Circuit ruled that “the needs of the executive are so compelling in the area of foreign intelligence, unlike
the area of domestic security, that a uniform warrant requirement would […] unduly frustrate the President in
carrying out his foreign affairs responsibilities.” John Yoo, “Memorandum for David S. Kris, Associate Deputy
Attorney General, Re: Constitutionality of Amending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to Change the ‘Purpose’
Standards for Searches” (National Security Archive/Washington Media Associates, September 25, 2001), 4,
Torturing Democracy, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20010925.pdf; Paul Vitello, “David
Truong, Figure in U.S. Wiretap Case, Dies at 68,” The New York Times, July 6, 2014,
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/us/david-truong-figure-in-us-wiretap-case-dies-at-68.html.
69
Yoo and Delahunty, “Re: Authority for Use,” 30.
70
Ibid., 31.
71
Yoo, “Re: Application of 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a),” 3, 12.
72
Yoo, “Re: Military Interrogation,” 7; Yoo and Delahunty, “Re: Authority for Use,” 18; See also Matthew L. M.
Fletcher and Peter S. Vicaire, “Indian Wars: Old and New,” Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 15, no. 201 (May
4, 2011): 225, doi:10.2139/ssrn.1832523; Jodi A. Byrd, Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
(Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011), 226–228,
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10502056.
73
Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different, 9.
74
Bybee and Yoo, “Re: Standards of Conduct,” 1.
75
Jay Bybee, “Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency, Re:
Interrogation of Al Qaeda Operative,” August 1, 2002, 1–2, The Rendition Project,
https://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/pdf/PDF%2015%20[Bybee%20Memo%20to%20CIA%201%20Aug%20200
2].pdf.
76
Bybee and Yoo, “Re: Standards of Conduct,” 5.
77
Ibid., 6.
78
Ibid., 10.
79
Ibid., 8.
80
Ibid.
81
Bybee, “Re: Interrogation of Al Qaeda Operative,” 1.
82
Ibid., 2.
83
Ibid., 6.
84
Ibid., 3.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid., 8.
87
Ibid.
88
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David
Macey, Reprint edition (New York: Picador, 2003), 252.
89
Martin Robbins, “Does Torture Work?,” The Guardian, November 4, 2010, sec. Science,
http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/nov/04/2.
90
Bybee, “Re: Interrogation of Al Qaeda Operative,” 8.
91
In the last decade, a rich literature has emerged on the racial mechanisms of biopolitics, and in particular, on the
ways in which racial cleavages are often figured as a cleavage between body/flesh/animal/inhuman and
mind/human. The Black Lives Matter movement captures this dynamic, as it points to a racialized distinction

189

between whose lives “matter” and whose bodies are matter. This deserves a longer discussion, but for the sake of
the length of this chapter, I merely gesture to it here. See Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014);
Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism; Chen, Animacies; Ngai, Ugly Feelings.
92
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 166–167.
93
See Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora
(Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press, 2009).
94
Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131.

CONCLUSION
1
Jay Caspian Kang, “How Should Asian-Americans Feel About the Peter Liang Protests?,” The New York Times,
February 23, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/magazine/how-should-asian-americans-feel-about-the-
peter-liang-protests.html.
2
Ibid.
3
“As Officer Who Killed Akai Gurley Gets No Jail Time, Asian Americans Debate Role of White Supremacy,”
Democracy Now!, accessed April 30, 2017,
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/21/as_officer_who_killed_akai_gurley.
4
Frank Shyong, “Why This Cop’s Conviction Brought Thousands of Asian Americans into New York’s Streets,”
LA Times, April 13, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-liang-brooklyn-shooting-20160413-story.html.
5
Phoenix Tso, “The Splintered Messages of the #Justice4Liang Movement,” GQ, February 24, 2016,
http://www.gq.com/story/peter-liang-akai-gurley-aftermath.
6
Jaeah Lee, “Why Was Peter Liang One of so Few Cops Convicted for Killing an Unarmed Man?,” Mother Jones,
April 8, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/peter-liang-police-conviction-nypd.
7
Sarah Maslin Nir and David W. Chen, “Many Asians Express Dismay and Frustration After Liang Verdict,” The
New York Times, February 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/many-asians-express-dismay-
and-frustration-after-liang-verdict.html.
8
Kang, “How Should Asian-Americans Feel About the Peter Liang Protests?”; Kat Yang-Stevens, “Akai Gurley the
Thug,’’ Peter Liang the Rookie Cop’’ and the Model Minority Myth,” Truthout, accessed April 30, 2017,
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34988-akai-gurley-the-thug-peter-liang-the-rookie-cop-and-the-model-
minority-myth; “As Officer Who Killed Akai Gurley Gets No Jail Time, Asian Americans Debate Role of White
Supremacy.”
9
“As Officer Who Killed Akai Gurley Gets No Jail Time, Asian Americans Debate Role of White Supremacy.”
10
Yang-Stevens, “Akai Gurley the ‘Thug’...”
11
Kenrya Rankin, “Asian-American Coalition Issues Powerful Statement About Peter Liang’s Sentence of
Community Service,” Text, Colorlines, (April 20, 2016), http://www.colorlines.com/articles/asian-american-
coalition-issues-powerful-statement-about-peter-liangs-sentence-community.
12
Ijeoma Oluo, “Jenny Yang and Ijeoma Oluo Talk about Peter Liang and Racial Justice,” The Seattle Globalist,
February 25, 2016, http://www.seattleglobalist.com/2016/02/25/ijeoma-oluo-jenny-yang-peter-liang-akai-
gurley/47865.
13
Kang, “How Should Asian-Americans Feel About the Peter Liang Protests?”
14
Jenny J. Chen, “First-Ever Tracker Of Hate Crimes Against Asian-Americans Launched,” NPR.org, February 17,
2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/17/515824196/first-ever-tracker-of-hate-crimes-against-
asian-americans-launched.
15
Emily Peck, “Trump’s White House No Longer Gets Benefit of the Doubt on Anti-Semitism,” Huffington Post,
April 12, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-house-anti-
semitism_us_58ee6103e4b0cb574bb4e66a.

190

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Asset Metadata

Creator Raymundo, Emily K.A. (author)

Core Title Reorienting Asian America: racial feeling in a multicultural era

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/06/2017

Defense Date 05/15/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect theory,American studies,Asian American studies,Drama,Literature,Multiculturalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial formation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), Halberstam, J. Jack (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Shah, Nayan (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email emily.ka.raymundo@gmail.com,eraymund@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-394169

Unique identifier UC11265567

Identifier etd-RaymundoEm-5475.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-394169 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RaymundoEm-5475.pdf

Dmrecord 394169

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Raymundo, Emily K.A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA