Review of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino (Rutgers University Press)

Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. By Corinne Mitsuye Sugino. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2025. 212 pp. Paperback. ISBN 9781978839694. US List: $32.95.

How do we make sense of the “sheer number of (often conflicting) narratives that swirl around Asian Americans?” (2). This question forms the starting point that animates Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. From vectors of disease to meritorious college applicants to symbols of diversity to victims of hate crimes, Asian Americans have been framed in a dizzying array of different ways in our contemporary era. In Making the Human, communication studies scholar Sugino takes up not how to more accurately or authentically portray Asian America, but rather, the question of what these narratives do. Sugino addresses these many diverse narratives around Asian Americans not as misrepresentations, but as persuasive discourses that form or “congeal” the figure of the Asian American itself. For Sugino, the shaping of the “Asian American” through various narratives is a contingent and political process, enmeshed in complex vectors of power. Making the Human ultimately argues that “Asian American” emerges as a recognizable category as a result of its being deployed to stabilize the boundaries of heteronormative, European colonial whiteness, or what Sugino, following Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, calls Western Man—a normalized and transcendent category against which the Other is, and must be, negatively defined.

To illustrate how this process works, Sugino proposes the rich concept of “racial allegory.” The term describes the discourses—cultural, political, institutional—that narrativize racial difference and make them legible, often by drawing distinctions between the human/inhuman or what Sugino calls “in/animacies” (8). These racial legibilities in turn work to reproduce power by resecuring Western Man. In other words, Asian Americans “take shape as racialized figures” (2) through a rhetorical and communicative process that not only produces “Asian American” as a category, but also (re)produces violent racial, colonial, and gendered dominant hierarchies. Each chapter demonstrates how “Asian American” serves as an “allegorical resource” (3) to stabilize different values that secure those hierarchies: love/intimacy, family/mothering, discrimination/justice, and body/nation. The final chapter utilizes carcerality as a framework to consider “new modes of thinking about Asian/American racialization” beyond racial allegory, highlighting the complexities of both interracial and intraracial entanglements without reducing them to unified “Asian American” experience (114). Making the Human analyzes a wide range of objects, from dating websites to film to legal documents to the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, and each chapter utilizes a new theoretical framework that enriches our understanding of Sugino’s overall argument. For scholars across multiple fields, including communication studies, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and American studies, it offers an incredibly generative framework for thinking about Asian American racialization, anti-Asian racism, and the imbrication of Asian America with anti-Black violence (a foundational and structural element of Western Man’s power). 

In Chapter 1, Sugino takes up the relationship between gendered fetishization of Asian American women and normative ideas of love and intimacy. Analyzing both dating websites that match white Western men with Asian women, and the documentary film Seeking Asian Female, Sugino observes how Asian/American women are rendered through fetish as simultaneously interchangeable, exotic, and “compulsorily heterosexual and family-oriented” (42). The Asian/American woman emerges as a racialized and gendered category of difference through a racial allegory that transforms Asian fetish into benign love and intimacy, “[naturalizing] the racial and cisheteropatriarchal normativities of Western Man” (38). 

Chapter 2 offers an original perspective on the much-discussed film Crazy Rich Asians, building on Sugino’s 2019 article about the film in Lateral by putting it in conversation with the Moynihan Report.¹ This juxtaposition illuminates how normative ideas of family and mothering operate in both to manage and define Black and Asian American difference. Sugino coins the term “multicultural redemption narratives” to describe the many ways that Crazy Rich Asians constrains the possibilities for racial liberation by reifying the “hierarchies and logics of Western Man” (45), including managing anxieties about China gaining global power for audiences and featuring “ostensibly proto-feminist” (45) Asian/American women characters whose status relies on wielding colonial power over South and Southeast Asians. These narratives ultimately serve to make Asia, and Asian/Americans, more “palatable and comfortable” (60) to white Western audiences. 

Chapter 3 takes up Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the legal case whose decision ended affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. Through a detailed analysis of multiple affirmative action cases culminating in SFFA and of SFFA’s website for recruiting plaintiffs, Sugino deftly demonstrates that SFFA actually reifies racial difference instead of dismantling it, and further, that its depiction of Asian American victimhood “[rearticulates] anti-Blackness in the name of justice” (68). For Sugino, SFFA illuminates how racial allegories “deploy Asian Americans as elastic narrative figures to reconcile the ideas of discrimination and justice in the anti-Black terms of Western Man” (85). In the final chapter, Sugino reads anti-Asian racism through the lens of carcerality, considering the (in)stability of the category of “Asian American” and its relationship to the US carceral regime. Sugino illuminates connections between anti-Asian racism and anti-Black violence as a way of understanding Asian/American racialization as “interconnected yet irreducible to a singular identity or experience” (114). Analyzing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, Tou Thou’s role in the murder of George Floyd, and Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” the chapter illustrates the importance of grasping the relationship of Asian/Americans to anti-Blackness even as we apprehend the nuances of anti-Asian racism beyond incidents of individual “hate.” 

The intent in the final chapter to surface the intimate entanglements of Asian/American histories “without imposing a . . . unifying essence of ‘Asian American’” (114) reflects a key theme of the book: By focusing not on how to more accurately depict Asian Americans, but rather on how narrating Asian Americans reproduces power, Sugino encourages us to understand racialization not as a series of false representations, but as a communicative process. Further, by emphasizing that Asian American racialization (and anti-Asian racism) work to strengthen the boundaries of Western Man and the moral, political, and conceptual limits placed on the boundary of “the human,” Sugino makes an important theoretical intervention that apprehends the complexity of Asian American racialization and anti-Blackness as deeply imbricated. Additionally, the citations throughout the book demonstrate that Sugino’s thinking is deeply rooted in, and in conversation with, the thought and writing of scholars of color, particularly Black and Asian writers; and as citations are, as Sara Ahmed has written, “the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings,”² this author sees this as a principled practice that works to create what Annabel L. Kim calls a “relational economy of knowledge”³ built through citational practice.

With Making the Human, Sugino grapples deftly with the thorny connections between discourse/narrative, anti-Asian racism, anti-Blackness, gendered violence, colonialism, and notions of the (in)human. Bringing together communication studies, which emphasizes the close relationship between the discursive and the material, and Asian American studies/ethnic studies, which points to connections between race/racialization and systems of power and violence, Sugino provides a novel theory of the “making and unmaking of the human in the image of Western Man” (135). This thoroughly researched, carefully argued book is an important read for all scholars interested in narratives about race in our contemporary lives.

Making the Human is a recipient of the Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize.