Making the Human

“Critical and necessary. . . . Making the Human is a clear-eyed assessment of 21st century Asian American racialization that should prove useful for cultural studies, media studies, rhetoric, and critical race and ethnic studies scholars invested in anti-colonial and abolitionist scholarship. . . . An excellent resource for understanding and challenging the way Asian Americans are racialized and gendered in contemporary American public discourse.”

---Cultural Studies

"For scholars in critical media studies, rhetorical studies, Asian American studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and gender studies, Making the Human provides valuable insights into the slippery categorical boundaries of Asian American racialization. . . . Making the Human makes a significant contribution to the field of communication by demonstrating how racial allegories shape the visibility, meaning, and legibility of Asian Americans in public discourse."

---Critical Studies in Media Communication

"Rhetorical scholars have a lot to learn from Sugino's theorization of racial allegory. Making the Human challenges rhetorical scholars to consider the material textures of discursive difference, to question knowledge formation across multiple contexts, and to foreground interconnected ways of thinking. The rhetorical praxis embodied in this book will thus be useful in this discipline and others."

---Quarterly Journal of Speech

"What are the consequences of understanding 'Asian American' as a term wrapped up in carceral warfare, antiblackness, coloniality, and extraction? Positioning the figure of the 'Asian American' within a Civilizational project that imagines, institutionalizes, and enforces Western 'Man,' Making the Human demystifies the de facto liberalism embedded in dominant racial categories—and of 'anti-racism' itself."

"Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s book is an expansive, ambitious examination of how Asian/Americans are constructed through racial allegory. In this tour de force, Sugino artfully analyzes the rhetoric of 'Asian/American' as fetish, disease vector, carceral subject, and victimized college applicant across popular discourse, film, and the law to construct 'Western Man'. It’s a must-read for scholars interested in the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetoric, and race."