Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the focus of the field of Asian American Studies has gone through dramatic shifts, from its early archival efforts to preserve the immigrant experience, repudiate orientalist stereotypes and demand for civil liberties, to a more recent turn towards globalization and transnationalism. Since the 1965 immigration reform, which abolished the long-standing discriminatory national quota system limiting Asian immigration into the US, Asian Americans have surpassed Hispanics to become the fastest growing minority group in the US. This influx of Asian Americans in the last half of the 20th century coincides with the ascension of Asia in the global economy, and both developments anticipate the adoption of neoliberal multiculturalist policies within the US nation-state. These developments challenge Asian American Studies to shift away from cultural nationalist debates over representational authenticity vs. cultural hybridity towards a more self-reflective engagement with the demands of the neoliberal literary and cultural market. Addressing this change of direction in the field, my dissertation, “Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia,” analyzes the ways in which race gets capitalized in the works by contemporary diasporic Asian writers, who deploy economic tropes and neoliberal logics to narrate the Asian diasporic identity and experience. In dialogue with other recent critical interventions that have sought to reframe the Asian American and Asian diasporic identity in relation to the proliferation of global capitalism such as Flexible Citizenship (1999), Economic Citizens (2007) and Liquidated (2009), “Capitalizing Race” argues that Asian diasporic agency is shaped by and in turn regulates the proliferation of flexible, transnational capital. Examining how contemporary fiction situates the Asian diaspora in the context of the global circulation of capital and mass media imaginaries, “Capitalizing Race” concludes that the rhetorical production of “ethnicity” is an economic process, governed by the neoliberal logic of the literary, cultural market. Delving into the ways in which human mobility is dictated by and signified through financial liquidity, “Capitalizing Race” illuminates the neoliberal multiculturalist aesthetics operating in some of the texts analyzed here. I’m weary of the uncritical celebration of their flexible accumulation of cultural capital, which, I argue, detracts from the Asian diasporic community’s effort to achieve greater political representation and equality.