Biopower, Space, and Race in Asian American Studies

Three 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 The the of and how and Asian Americans are and in the of scientific At the same time, it with the of how Asian American studies as more than just a that rather than pushes or the ways STS and queer have the field of Lee in her the of the Asian critical field’s of its as an discursive its of essentialist ideas of the and how anxiety with other of in the of the Asian American as alien and and and the book is an thought on the and of the as an and queer theories of it resists a and a or of readings, and to that on the and to the of the a who its to a Lee’s or the a for scholars to of her and their disciplinary to the contours of Asian American studies as a that and is constantly transforming in and cultural interactions and undergird Anderson’s the Chinese In dialogue with Rachel Lee’s The of Asian American of and Anderson attempts to between the transnational and dimensions of Lee’s and Afro-Asian cultural productions in to experiences of and book around Lee’s as a and global cultural and his to Asian and Lee’s the The Chinese and The to her of Afro-Asian dynamics within a transnational the of the global in the with in the Anderson a of Afro-Asian cultural engagement of which the of in the a a set of from Lee’s ethnic imperialism, and chapter focuses on one of these in to a of cultural The the the and the series In dialogue with scholars and Anderson her discussion of Afro-Asian as a contemporary focus on the of such cultural rather than an analysis of its with the each work within an Afro-Asian cultural from and reinforcing ethnic and to one ethnic culture is to she tracks how authors and challenge and stereotypes within a global readings of the and are and with a focus on she highlights the of as in the case of and its to on of and and Asian In the between the characters and in is on a of and forms of are that Anderson’s the of a and Asian as in the Americans to the as and of imperialism, and the of the emergence of transnational culture and the of 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in another where the about his to from the a set of three books in different ways to of opening up of and culture, and Asian American studies from its in politics and in order to focus on other and In all three books can be approached as to the of and and other scholarship attempts to in to and a and Lee, texts also the for Asian American literary and cultural studies scholarship to and its while at the same time to the of Asian In to for a critique and recent within American studies that liquidity and from the body, the books to the to the of Asian American subjectivities and bodies, and the and that race in scientific the of and Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is the of a to and literary in order to represent the histories of ethnic impact their with one to how Chang-rae Lee’s narrative and his with in and fiction not only the in Rachel Lee, and and match their but also in its and literary the book in its Such a Full Sea a through the of an who (in the first for the of a called and in a and 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the constantly at from their a of new the an of race a at is and of her her time in the This in turn to a into her about her in which she the idea of race as a and Lee, In the of her the a of the between and the The of of the in with of the in the and and of the the of their and the to being as who to for the and of of and and questions about their the of While the its is from but that it is and and the to the of a of the at are of from but the of highlights the of a time and it one out of their and to a the to an of in the are as the of the of a of race understanding of race in the where the different ways race is an racial that the For example, of with a worker, the how other and the into to with the The of these of racial and return to order to an and of the ways race performs crucial work in to but at the same time the of the of Lee, of and in of their of as part of a biopolitical whose of and them as for their of Lee, the to break in or those who them of their of While a at living the of a a the of for in with makes that the is only in a particular of or tissue from the is of the a that makes in a where one of his and of his for the for an to a of for to a market with to or and to be the of are with their sense of to the infrastructure to for an The of is to a a in all of Lee’s is as and the it as part of a plot of biopolitical one of the to be in a to his on in order to on a new to as a subject, a to her reproductive and her in genetic that are distributed racial or ethnic which the same as but the highlights how is thought of as the of racial in works of a reproductive and is as a with The Exquisite Corpse of Asian while race is a social racial a in biology and genetic In to and recent forms of scientific racism, is as a rather than as a away for that race. the disaggregation of race is to and or to racial fiction race is in to or in order to us The aggregation of racial and ethnic in not just within the of but to be that in turn scientific the of their the of the of their bodies and the of their not from those who in and have been to of and the of of and of what them is to up to his of and his of the and his of being Lee, in to to nature of her and how she “in the the biopolitics the and for the to be and at and as neither in the case of the of nor who that being can be not through or but only is she she as she only in it her out even in the of the to the of her the to and which her imagines as of “The of is to be in the of be is not to have the to do or that nor it is it the to to do or that be is to be of to be in to that her into is the of she can the of not for Lee Lee’s of as of the in living and Lee, with the of a character for and and in and out of to in a process to the she in different for and and but also and In to who is as is as a and one with and part of their art the artists also all the with in an a a that with a The of her the artists as her which also the of her of is in with a of a fictional character the of is as a and a to In to the of intensify a sense of but rather the process of and a site of In other words, Lee and the to project, to a the can Lee to at but an has within the of its of the of and the to from the the in of but at the same time, within each are to [and] a moment that a even In other words, through about in a that a the how to the even are an whose than the and even it it to the artists to the of the for to the of her self-possession, an only through and in how biopolitics and race not only racialized but that bodies that matter and to a to with a work of art that seem of the and of Asian American studies, but at the same time to Anderson’s for more Afro-Asian In on the city of in the of from to the present. The of of the city with of and In the colonial set up a in that to each in order to their of these but also the of of the of a which out of use for and in and intensified more with an of and of The in is not an but a of about that and is also the a The of the is that it and and the of But it also a space where are to or a that is to the of Chang-rae Lee’s in part the between and race, how see the emergence of these books Rachel Lee, and Anderson as not only of but also a to Asian American studies not the same in different but different questions in order to new for Asian American and Anderson’s interpretive approaches are not or but issue a to with one another and the The of these yet texts is an attempt to Asian American to not just and but a of the disciplinary that and and the of forms of

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• Racial Disintegration

  Michelle N Huang•American Literature•2021

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