From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Love and Intimacy: Race, Exoticism, and ‘Asian Fetish’
Chapter 2: Family and Mothering: Multicultural Redemption and Gendered Racial Logics in Crazy Rich Asians
Chapter 3: Discrimination and Justice: Asian Americans and Anti-Blackness in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
Chapter 4: Person/Nationhood: Anti-Asian Racism Amidst COVID-19
Chapter 5: Carcerality: Entangling Categories of Asian American Racialization
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
