Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans theorizes how Asian Americans are constructed and made legible through cultural narratives to shore up normative European colonial whiteness, or what Sugino calls “Western Man.” This process happens through “racial allegory,” or discourses that narrativize racial difference, often by making distinctions between the human/inhuman or “in/animacies”; these allegories in turn work to reproduce power. Further, because Western Man is founded on anti-Blackness, Sugino demonstrates how Asian American racialization is intimately tied to anti-Black violence. By focusing on the process of Asian American legibilization itself, Sugino sidesteps portraying an accurate or “authentic” Asian America; instead, Making the Human takes up the relationship between discourse and materiality, centering the question of what narratives around Asian Americans do, create, and enact. Making the Human offers to scholars across multiple fields a significant and novel theory to understand Asian American racialization and its imbrication in complex vectors of power.
Keyword: critical ethnic studies
Review of Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence edited by René Dietrich and Kerstin Knopf (Duke University Press)
Questions of violence, governance, life, and land have long animated critique within settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies. Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life interrogates these lines of inquiry by centering Indigenous politics and onto-epistemologies from a variety of disciplines and across a range of settler colonial contexts to address the enmeshments of bio- and geopolitical logics and practices.