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This book demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. It illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. The book argues that in the age of emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. It situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts alongside Black Atlantic texts. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's “slavery clauses,” the book recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. It demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, the book challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.

This book addresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or social construction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engaging novels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the United States and internationally—such as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me Go or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of Body Worlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons—this book teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthuman ecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. It unpacks how the designation of “Asian American” itself is a mental construct that is paradoxically linked to the biological body. Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard for reading Asian American texts, the book inaugurates a new avenue of research on biosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on the literary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergent scales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects. It establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy between Asian American studies and Science and Technology Studies, biocultures, medical humanities, and femiqueer approaches to family formation, carework, affect, and ethics. In pursuing an Asian Americanist critique concerned with speculative and real changes to human biologies, the book both produces innovation within the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to other disciplines.

Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia centralizes fashion and beauty in the shaping of Asian modernities and the formation of the so-called Asian Century. The authors assembled here train our eyes on sites as far-flung and varied and yet as intimate and intimately connected as Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto, in order to map the transnational and transregional connections that have made new worlds and life paths possible. By connecting individual stories to large-scale circuits, this interdisciplinary anthology moves beyond common characterizations of Asians and Asian diasporic subjects as simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers of fashion and beauty. Instead, this collection analyzes what modern subjects look like, what they wear, how they work, move, eat, and shop, helping us to see the forms of modernity taking shape in Asia—the aspirations it expresses and the sensibilities it endorses—and the ways they inform our understanding of race, nation, and the global.

Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; as well as photographs, interviews, films, and performances to suture a fragmented past. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Framed by War reveals how what unfolded in Korea set the stage for US power in the postwar era. US destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean women and children, enabling US intervention and fortifying transnational connections with symbolic and material outcomes. In the 1950s Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and the Cold War scripts needed to support these internationalist efforts required the erasure of those who could not fit the family frame. These were the geographies to which Korean women and children were bound, but found ways to navigate in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between, reconfiguring notions of race and kinship along the way.

In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the after math of the regime’s collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country’s population—around two million people—perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand refugees coming to America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, the book places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, it makes legible the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.

Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second-generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. This book explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. It argues that the filial debt of these women both demands and defies repayment—all the better to produce the docile subjects of a model minority. Through readings of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Catherine Liu's Oriental Girls Desire Romance, and other texts, the book offers not an empirical study of intergenerational conflict so much as an explication of the subjection and psyche of the Asian American daughter. It connects common literary tropes to their theoretical underpinnings in power, profit, and subjection. In so doing, literary criticism crosses over into a kind of collective memoir of the Asian immigrants' daughter as an analysis not of the daughter, but for and by her.

Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? This book attempts to answer this question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity. The book argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, the book foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation's pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth-century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.

This book explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means “pure art.” In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.–Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors in Miss Saigon. Using this varied archive, the book turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.

It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, this book resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of erotic fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the long and complex historical entanglement of concepts of faith, race, and secular love is urgent to contemporary debates about normativity, agency, and subjectivity. Queer Faith puts Christian theology and Renaissance lyric poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer theory and scholarship.

This book explores how the history of U.S. citizenship has positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid-nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on “inter-racial prejudice,” the book demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity. It examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the “Negro Problem” and the “Yellow Question” in the mid- to late nineteenth century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-civil rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the nineteenth-century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—the book does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. The book provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, this book argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, the book explores the legal paradox whereby US law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in US law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, the book articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, this book argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. The book specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the individual author's ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry, and Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, the book reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, the book employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. This book argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body's uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. The book focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, the book invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.

Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory reassesses the legacy of the Vietnam War through the figure of South Vietnam. More specifically, it offers a reinterpretation of the military policy of Vietnamization. In 1969, Richard Nixon pledged to “Vietnamize” the regional armed conflict in Indochina, placing all responsibility for winning the war onto the South Vietnamese—a “transfer” of power that ended in the swift collapse of the south to northern communist forces in 1975. It recognizes that Vietnamization and the end of South Vietnam signals not just an example of flawed American military strategy but an allegory of power, providing subterfuge for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the Vietnamese and others to become free, modern liberal subjects on their own. The main thesis of this book is that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing more for a better critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency and self-determination beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” The denial of a viable independent future for South Vietnam produces a compensatory demand for increased South Vietnamese representation, knowledge production, and memory-making. Through a multi-method examination of different case studies, from refugees returning to the homeland to refugee anti-communist politics to refugee participation in the U.S. War on Terror, the book pushes scholars to consider not simply the ways refugees are Vietnamese but how they are Vietnamizing their social landscapes and political environments.

This book collects the work of a generation of scholars who are enacting a shift in the orientation of the field of South Asian American studies. By focusing upon the lives, work, and activism of specific, often unacknowledged, migrant populations, the chapters present a more comprehensive vision of the South Asian presence in the United States. Tracking the changes in global power that have influenced the paths and experiences of migrants, from expatriate Indian maritime workers at the turn of the century, to Indian nurses during the Cold War, to post-9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the crossfire of the “War on Terror,” the chapters reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialism. Driven by a shared sense of responsibility among the contributing scholars to alter the profile of South Asian migrants in the American public imagination, the book addresses the key issues that impact these migrants in the U.S., on the subcontinent, and in circuits of the transnational economy. The book provides tools with which to understand the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the place of South Asian migrants within it.