Biopower, Space, and Race in Asian American Studies
2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00029831-3711150
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoThree recent books explore the interdisciplinary connections between, respectively, spatial politics, biopolitics, and Afro-Asian dynamics in Asian American literature and culture. Xiaojing Zhou explores the poetics and politics of space in Asian American urban literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Rachel Lee interrogates how a biopolitical framework can reorient the ways the field of Asian American studies approaches race, and in turn what Asian American cultural productions can tell us about biopolitics. Crystal Anderson analyzes the outcomes of Afro-Asian cultural interactions within the contemporary moment in fiction and popular culture. All three books are in dialogue with a recent ensemble of Asian American discourses, practices, and cultural productions that tacitly underline how Asian American culture and criticism are about more than recognition, inclusiveness, and representation. This review begins with an assessment of all three books and then segues into a conjoined attempt to apply these interpretive approaches in my reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014).Zhou contends that readings of the spatial dimensions of a text are often overlooked in literary criticism of Asian American literature, resulting in missed opportunities to see the city as a crucial contested space of democratic possibilities for the emergence of new subjectivities and communities. Loosely organized, with all but the concluding chapter centering on the work of a specific author, Cities of Others underlines the ways “identities of ethnic bodies, enclaves, or segregated ghettos, and the city are mutually constitutive in the process of becoming” (5).In her readings, Zhou attends not just to spatial representations in the text but also to how racialized and gendered characters inhabit or engage in spatial practices such as walking, wandering, and getting lost in the city. Unlike the ingenue, who discovers the city anew and reinvents herself, or the cosmopolitan flâneur, who is at home in a rapidly changing urban landscape, the characters Zhou discusses are engaged in a racially inflected and gendered counterflânerie.The first half of the book focuses on representations of Chinatown as a contested space of “competing ideologies, discourses, and representations” (117). Zhou tracks how authors such as Sui Sin Far, Lin Yutang, Fae Myenne Ng, and Frank Chin render alienated Asian immigrant characters as immersed in a series of urban interactions that on one level resists social marginalization and isolation and on another level imagines a sense of belonging, enacting a spatial citizenship and transforming the contours of being American and living in America—echoing Elaine Kim’s positing of Asian American literature as a project to claim America. Zhou’s more ambitious aim is to show how Asian American literature reimagines and re-represents the American city, while simultaneously denaturalizing narratives and policies that undergird the displacement of Asian American bodies in segregated and colonized spaces. The first half of Zhou’s book revises portrayals of Chinatown through her reading of Sui Sin Far’s “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), which challenges Chinatown as a site of exoticism and intrigue, pestilence and poverty, and renders it as a vibrant and dynamic community—but Zhou also complicates it as a site for reconstituting Chinese American and American identities in her reading of Chin’s The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (1998) and Donald Duk (1991).The second half of the book meanders, becoming a survey of select works of Asian American literature that represent different kinds of exilic, psychic, institutional, and transnational spaces. On the one hand, the close readings of novels are comprehensive and insightful (and useful for those who teach Asian American literature, as each chapter includes a cogent review of previous discussions of a particular work). On the other hand, Zhou’s attempts are uneven in analyzing a character’s spatial practice or intervention in the infrastructure of the city and tracing an author’s narrative spatial strategies. Zhou shines in her analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and I-Hotel (2010) creating a space where worlds collide, time warps, and a character performs and inscribes onto his body the colonial legacies between the global South and the West and the devastating impact of NAFTA. And yet missing is a more integrated engagement and application of Rob Shield’s conceptualization of social spatialization and Elizabeth Grosz’s approach to the city and body as organic matter, in which bodies not only inhabit a city, but mutually constitute each other.At the outset of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, Lee points to how much Asian American critical thought focuses on humanizing and transforming the fragmented and displaced Asian American alien from a racialized infrahuman Other into a liberal subject, or a “subject of (original) wholeness,” what she terms a “qualified personification.” Conversely, she proposes seeing the Asian American violated body, as in Lois Ann Yamanaka’s poem “Part to Whole” (1993) and the plastinated cadavers in the Body Worlds exhibits, as distributed agencies of phylogenetic and ontogenetic body parts: “patterns-circulations of energy, affects, atoms, and liquidity in its accounting of the soma” (7). Reconceptualizing the Asian American body as an organism within “informational, molecular, and posthuman terms” (20), rather than “endowed with rationality, self-possession, and a set of liberal choices,” Lee’s objective in her new book is to reconsider the Asian American body as cellular, enzymatic, and genetic.Like Zhou’s and Anderson’s monographs, which group Asian American texts and cultural productions around a particular theme, Lee’s book can be approached as an analysis of Asian American literature and performance art within the framework of biopolitics and the idea of the fragmented Asian American body. But Lee’s book is much more ambitious, an epistemological reassessment of Asian American studies that attempts to graft recent scholarship in gender theory, queer theory, and science and technology studies (STS) onto Asian American critical thought to break the static thinking of the field’s pursuit of social justice and understanding of agency. In a framework where race is understood as a historically variable construct with material effects, the term Asian American has been foregrounded as a necessary “fictional (discursive) construct,” one that constantly threatens to be interpreted as essentialist and biological (8). Pointing to the field’s renewed anxiety about essentialism, Lee reviews the different ways scholars such as Kandice Chuh and Colleen Lye have called for “more rigorously historicist, formalist, [and] aesthetic” interrogations (10). While not taking issue with these endeavors, Lee questions the implications of avoiding a discussion of the ways scientific discourse on race has moved to the genetic and cellular level, and has cleaved from the biological. This disconnect, she argues, forecloses a number of opportunities to advance social justice agendas: the ability to see the persistence of particular forms of biological racism, the emergence of new racial forms, and the apparent equivalence of living matter “in an abstract system of underlying exchangeability” (233). In a manner analogous to Asian American studies’ deployment of qualified personification, STS deploys discursive strategies that conjure narratives about fictional persons in order to return the part (of the body) to the whole—for example, conflating cell lines with persons and turning them into proxies for personhood. Lee highlights how recent scholarship in STS traces the historicity of biology and exposes the ways biotechnology has reconfigured biology as a factory in correspondence with an intensified commodification of organs and tissues from surplus populations, separating human biological persons from partial persons. She pushes Asian American scholarship to consider these new forms of racial profiling and rearticulated divisions between nature and culture, human and posthuman. In other words, the meaning of race has changed within the discourse of biology, but Lee contends that these shifts have neither displaced nor supplanted a chromatic schema of race. Instead, biotechnology’s separation of human biological persons from partial persons and its anthropomorphizing of cells performatively intensify the aggregation and disaggregation of Asian Americans into revised racial classification systems. This emerges, for instance, in the case of Greg Bear’s biothriller Blood Music (1985), whose plot includes racializing and reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes of Asian Americans as superhuman, indifferent to feeling and suffering, and biologically impossible.In the introduction and opening chapter, Lee convincingly establishes several examples of how the discourse of biopolitics holds relevance for Asian American studies, even if it hasn’t been named or framed as such. For example, much writing about the experiences and histories of the coolie, sweatshop worker, and biomaterial laborer (in other words, the supplier of spare human parts) can be approached through a biopolitical lens as the transforming of subjects from zoe to bios. Keenly aware of the ubiquity of a biopolitical disciplinary apparatus that regulates and manages the vitality of the body through governmentality, prescriptions for self-care, and promotions for wellness of being, writers such as Yamashita, Chang-rae Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki have integrated in myriad ways plots of assisted reproductive technology, immunology, tissue culturing, trafficking of organs, and transplantation surgery. Establishing firmly the stakes of her project, Lee’s introduction traverses a wide spectrum of theories drawn from a feminist-inflected strand of STS, performance studies, queer studies, femiqueer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, affect theory, performance art, new materialism, ecology, and the interdisciplines of bioscience.With her focus on the body and bodily functions, Lee’s interest in performance art makes absolute sense. On one level, her readings are rich. She shows how artists use kinesthetic tactility, movement, and humor to revel in bodily excesses, to reveal how gag reflexes challenge the false divide between the psychic and somatic, and to index on their bodies the oppression and resistance of being biopolitically contained and regulated. At the same time, a number of the ideas and concepts laid out in the introduction drop away in the reading of the performances or do not seem to match up with Lee’s claims. It takes, for example, an imaginative stretch to grasp the affective embodied response of Margaret Cho’s exploding vagina as a critique of a militarized market imperialism, or to link Cheng-Chieh Yu’s suspended nascent transformation with the induced activity of the pluripotent stem cell. Lee’s reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) reveals the salience of Asiatic biologies and how Asians and Asian Americans are deeply implicated and marginalized in the construction of scientific knowledge. At the same time, it leaves me grappling with the question of how Asian American studies serves as more than just a provocative archive that supplements, rather than pushes forward or intervenes in, the ways STS and queer discourses have broadened the field of nonhuman life.Perhaps anticipating this question, Lee underlines, in her “Allotropic Conclusions,” the “peculiarities of the Asian Americanist critical field’s articulation of its weakness as an immanent discursive formation,” its presumptions of fixed essentialist ideas of the biological, and how this anxiety links with other fears of dehumanization in the form of the Asian American figure as alien and stranger, model and minority (211). Organizationally and conceptually, the book is an intriguing thought experiment on the form and function of the monograph. Conceived as an exquisite corpse and informed by queer theories of accretion, it resists offering a vertical analysis, and instead presents a lateral or “sideways” presentation of theories, readings, and propositions (akin to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analog structure) that thrives on both the aleatory and collaboration.In contrast to the mythical figure of the ouroboros, a serpent who bites its own tail to form a complete circle, Lee’s “frayed” or open-ended conclusion leaves the door open: a call for future scholars to take parts of her thesis and create their own hybrid cross-cultural disciplinary analytic to radically redraw the contours of Asian American studies as a multispecies assemblage—one that lacks clear boundaries, and is constantly transforming in shape and constitution.Interethnic cultural interactions and forged alliances undergird Anderson’s Beyond the Chinese Connection. In direct dialogue with Rachel Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), Anderson attempts to make links between the transnational and cross-racial dimensions of Bruce Lee’s films and Afro-Asian cultural productions in relation to experiences of slavery, colonization, and globalization. Her book revolves around Bruce Lee’s legacy as a “cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon” and his signification to African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hong Kong youth, using Bruce Lee’s films Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971) to structure her exploration of Afro-Asian cross-cultural dynamics within a transnational context (3). Connecting the rise of the global economy in the 1970s with globalization in the post-1990s era, Anderson suggests a continuum of Afro-Asian cultural engagement of which the proliferation of black-Asian buddy films in the 1990s was a part.Anderson draws a set of themes from Bruce Lee’s films—interethnic male friendship, ethnic imperialism, and interethnic conflict. Each chapter focuses on one of these themes in relation to a pair of cultural productions, including Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996); the films Rush Hour 2 (2001), Unleashed (2005), the Matrix trilogy (1999–2003); and the Japanese anime series Samurai Champloo (2004). In dialogue with scholars including Vijay Prashad, Heike-Raphael Hernandez, and Bill Mullen, Anderson distinguishes her discussion of Afro-Asian relations as a contemporary focus on the “complexity of such cultural interactions” rather than an analysis of its political origins, beginning with the 1955 Bandung Conference (37). Locating each work within an Afro-Asian cultural spectrum, ranging from “cultural emulsion” (when cultures come together and don’t mix, reinforcing ethnic and national boundaries) to “cultural translation” (when one ethnic culture is used to interpret another), she tracks how authors and filmmakers “both challenge and reinforce homogenizing stereotypes within a global context” (33).Anderson’s readings of the novels, films, and actors’ filmographies are lucid and engaging. Beginning with a focus on interethnic buddy films, she highlights the limitations of Hollywood’s imagination, as in the case of Rush Hour 2 and its need to rely on familiar notions of national identity and black and Asian stereotypes. In contrast, the relationship between the characters played by Morgan Freeman and Jet Li in Unleashed is based on a shared experience of subjugation (transatlantic slavery and modern forms of coolie labor). More interesting are juxtapositions that exceed Anderson’s analytical setup, revealing the contradictions of a possible Pan-African and Asian alliance, as in the 1940s, when black Americans related to the Japanese because both were seen as enemies and targets of US imperialism, and both shared concern over the fate of Ethiopia.Loosely linking the emergence of transnational culture and the rise of transnational corporations with Bruce Lee’s rising appeal in the 1970s, Anderson points out how his films foreshadow the anticipation of hyper-capitalism, uneven processes of wealth accumulation, and neoliberal globalization. But Anderson’s explication of his films does not pay sufficient attention to the intensifications of globalization, the international division of labor migration, class disparities, urban renewal, or a growing heterogeneous Chinese diaspora between the 1970s and the 1990s, all of which ideally need to be more historicized and theorized. Absent too is any mention of neoliberal multiculturalism and its impact on black-Asian relations, which would help deepen Anderson’s analyses. In the last chapter, Anderson juxtaposes Beatty’s Afro-multi-Asian approach in White Boy Shuffle with the Afro-pan-Asian approach of the Matrix trilogy. Foregrounding Beatty’s use of Japanese puppet plays and appropriation of a Japanese sense of nihilism (as conceived by Yukio Mishima after World War II) to interpret the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Anderson highlights not only Gunnar’s deft reading of Nicholas Scoby’s death but also his resignification of the concept of “suicide,” which negates Gunnar’s powerlessness and subordination as a black male youth and also ups the stakes in an Afro-Asian cultural exchange beyond flexible multicultural alliances. In her reading of Samurai Champloo, Anderson points out how Japanese youth appropriate black hip-hop culture to challenge Japanese conformity, but she fails to connect this to the structural racism in Okinawa and its relations to the United States. In contrast, Anderson’s reading of Beatty’s novel reveals not only the conflicted fusion of power that undergirds the Los Angeles uprising but also the ability to refuse its subjectifying powers.Foregrounding race in her reading of the Matrix trilogy, Anderson distinguishes the franchise from other works of mainstream science fiction that exclude people of color, erase difference, or fall back on assumptions about race back on Earth. The race and gender makeup of the Oracle are key in her interactions with Neo despite his suspicions and gendered presumptions. While Anderson’s womanist analysis of the Oracle as fostering solidarity and helping Neo understand the larger threat is diametrically counter to Rachel Lee’s challenge to pursue wholeness, I nonetheless see in Anderson’s reading of The Matrix an opening to apply a biopolitical framework (for example, in the scene where a parasitic device is removed from Neo’s navel, and in another where Morpheus gives him the red pill, whereby Neo learns about his destiny to free humanity from the Matrix, a set of machines fueled by bioelectric energy).These three books commit in different ways to destabilizing binary systems of difference, opening up cross-border flows of knowledge and culture, and unsettling Asian American studies from its investment in identity politics and institutional identity in order to focus on other spaces, materialisms, and bodies. In addition, all three books can be approached as responses to the erosion of relations, coalitions, and place-based communities brought forth by neoliberalism, globalization, and other historical factors. Their scholarship attempts to rebuild alliances in relation to US imperialism and transnationalism, cross-racial friendships, a symbiotic parasite-host relationship, and “discoordinated antagonisms” (R. Lee, 24).The texts also promote the vital need for Asian American literary and cultural studies scholarship to expand and shift its aims, while at the same time continuing to investigate the specificity of Asian Americanness. In contrast to Chuh’s call for a subjectless critique and recent forays within African American studies that promote black liquidity and detach blackness from the body, the books call attention to the need to continue discerning the distinctiveness of Asian American subjectivities and bodies, and the contradictory and multiple roles that race plays in scientific research, the production of space, and cross-racial alliances.Chang-rae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (2014) is the culmination of a consistent conceit to revamp and remap literary realism in order to represent “the way the histories of individual ethnic groups may impact their interaction with one another” (Anderson, 37). I want to suggest how Chang-rae Lee’s narrative and his experimentation with familiar tropes in speculative and dystopic fiction not only illustrate the themes outlined in Anderson, Rachel Lee, and Zhou, and match their aims, but also how, in its aesthetic and literary excess, the book revels in its limited potential.On Such a Full Sea presents a dystopian world through the eyes of an anonymous narrator who speaks (in the first person plural) for the residents of a close-knit technoagrarian community called B-Mor. B-Mor’s facilities provide security and stability in a world wracked by climate change and the ubiquitous presence of a terminal disease known as C. B-Mor’s residents are descendants of refugees from New China, who now cultivate food for the Charters, exclusive upper-class communities where bourgeois lifestyles are contingent on “ever-optimizing metrics,” preoccupations of finding therapies to overcome the C virus and extending one’s life at whatever price. Outside the gates of the Charters and B-Mor are the counties: unincorporated territories of waste and lawlessness where people are left to fend for themselves. Assigned and trained from young ages to do specific tasks, B-Mor residents live and work “mostly among brethren” (C. Lee, 200) within an extended family network. Characterized and categorized not by their race or ethnicity, they take pride in being productive and self-reliant.The story follows the travels of Fan, a 16-year-old B-Mor laborer, who leaves the security of her job as a diver and caretaker of the production settlement’s fish tanks and home to search for Reg—her first love and the father of her unborn child—who has mysteriously disappeared. Fan’s departure in search of Reg is seen initially as reckless and foolhardy. Her passing the sentry gates, caught on a surveillance camera, doesn’t cause much of a stir. Over time, however, as the worker-residents of B-Mor become flummoxed at her departure from a place where “any rational person would leap at the chance of living” (C. Lee, 2), her actions become fodder for gossip and eventually the stuff of legends.While not engaged in the spatial practice of flânerie, Fan moves through the counties and Charters, propelled by a combination of external forces that lead to a series of encounters and compromised positions from which she must escape, again and again. She lives up to her name as the “lucky one” (C. Lee, 257). At the same time, Fan’s calculated withholding of information of her age and pregnancy, her seamless ability to fit in and be a “common character on display” without the need to be “always tilting to leave one’s mark on it” (295), help her survive. Reinforcing Laura Kang’s analysis of the Asian American model minority figure as the embodiment of neoliberalism, Fan and her brethren who make up B-Mor are an amalgamation of techno-Orientalism, biopolitics, disaster capitalism, and neoliberal principles. Like their New Chinese ancestors who first settled in B-Mor, the B-Mor residents make a life for themselves as self-patrolling ability machines comprising an efficient and cost-effective postindustrial workforce “where routine is the method, and the reason, and the reward” (190).In exchange for “longtime security and progress” (C. Lee, 2), the B-Mor residents subject themselves not to sweatshop conditions but to a stable and surveilled existence that, in hindsight, recounting Fan’s adventures, they learn “for too long had been our lone, secret pride” (266). Fan, in leaving B-Mor, is not understood as “marching for some cause or platform” (181). Her departure is instead seen as a sign of quiet revolt and a “telltale sign[ ]” (222) of worse things to come. Her egress coincides with an economic downturn: a drop in Charter demand for B-Mor’s goods in combination with increased austerity measures, shift reductions, mandatory furloughs, fluctuating food prices, ever-increasing class sizes, the end of bonuses given out to families who have at least four children, and a tax on the third child to offset the costs of healthcare, schooling, and training (220, 222, 279, 199). Outside B-Mor, the impact of the “world wide recession” is felt by the Charters as well (199): “rising costs of rent, and food, and schooling” (235) keep the service class constantly at work—away from their families—while a host of new taxes stifle the entrepreneurial class (207).Partly reflecting an outcome of techno-Orientalism, race paradoxically becomes a “distant notion” at B-Mor until Fan is disparagingly and fetishistically reminded of her Chineseness during her time in the counties. This in turn leads to a rare insight into her consciousness about her baby, in which she contemplates the idea of race beyond phenotype as a marker, legacy, and talisman (C. Lee, 188). In the retelling of her exploits, the narrator reveals a corresponding collective realization of the precarious connection between B-Mor and the Charters. The disruption of “certain routines of the mind” (256) in combination with spreading rumors of the “imminent cutbacks in the production facilities” and “the eventual shutdown and closure of B-Mor” (216) highlight the infrastructural fissures, the delimitations of their subjectification, and the need to resist being treated as programmed drones who exist merely to provide for the well-being and life extension of Charter citizens. Emboldened by increasing outbreaks of vandalism and impromptu protests, they begin investigating Fan’s alleged misconduct and asking questions about their past, the origins of B-Mor. While the community initially dismisses its shared past (“Why bother—Everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone” [1]), Fan and Reg’s coupling and disquieting presence-absence force the community to reread the remains of a covered-over history. Most of the residents at B-Mor, including Fan, are descendants of refugees from New China, but the recounting of Reg’s biracial background highlights the remains of a former time and place, Baltimore, before it was renamed B-Mor. Reg’s ancestors, one B-Mor man reveals, were Baltimore residents, driven out of their homes and forced to occupy a public park outside the newly established B-Mor. Reduced to an image of muted protest in history classes, the Baltimore dissidents are revived as the residents of B-Mor piece together the remains of a fraught history of race relations.B-Mor’s understanding of race advances during Fan’s residence in the Charter village where they learn the different ways race is codified, revealing an older racial dispensation that counterpoises the Association’s unofficial color-blind policy. For example, by way of Fan’s encounters with a service worker, the community recalls how other Asians—from Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines—were brought into B-Mor once, and, unable to integrate with the community, were quickly removed. The retelling of these backstories of racial strife and return to order leads to an evolving and continuous awareness of the ways race performs crucial work in enabling facilities like B-Mor to emerge, but at the same time tears asunder the symbiosis of B-Mor, “souring the spirit of our community” (C. Lee, 218).A crisis of action and identity ensues in light of their awareness of B-Mor as part of a biopolitical regime whose directive of “make live and let die” marks them as already dead. Known for their “demonstrations of filial attention” (C. Lee, 222), the residents begin to break tradition and, in isolated incidents, kill themselves or those who remind them of their “pointless way of life” (219). While a chance at living the life of a Charter was once a possibility, the narrowing of criteria for admission, in combination with Reg’s disappearance, makes clear that the Charter establishment is only interested in acquiring a particular kind of blood or tissue type from the outside (208). Reg is free of the C pathogen, a condition that makes him unique in a world where no one dies of old age. His disappearance, his secret detention, and revelations of his dislike for fish expose the establishment’s desperation for an antidote by any means necessary, leading to a period of falling demand for B-Mor fish. Tied to a narrow commodity market with no room to exit or expand, and socially engineered to be risk averse, the residents of B-Mor are confronted with their own sense of powerlessness to change the infrastructure to allow for an alternative sustainable future. The genuine upsurge of revolt is brought to a halting arrest.Blood, a trope in all of Lee’s books, is figured here as both bond and bondage; toward the end it betrays, as Fan becomes part of a plot of biopolitical exchange. Fan’s brother Oliver, one of the few B-Mor residents to be raised in a Charter town due to his intellectual promise, capitalizes on Fan’s pregnancy in order to sell investors on a new C-therapy. Refusing to serve as a biomedical research subject, Fan becomes a fugitive to protect her reproductive capacities and her unborn child. Human variation in genetic models means that individual markers are rarely distributed along racial or ethnic lines, which would preclude Fan’s baby having the same makeup as Reg, but the novel highlights how blood is still thought of as the carrier of heritable racial characteristics. As in many works of speculative fiction, Fan’s pregnancy signifies a reproductive futurism; Fan’s and Reg’s unborn child is seen as a savior, contiguous with B-Mor’s vitality. As The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America attest
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