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149 pages

English

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Contemporary ideas about race are often assumed to be products of specific locales and histories, yet we find versions of the same ideas about race across countries and cultures. How can we account for this paradox? In The State of Race, Sze Wei Ang argues that globalization has led to new ways of using racial stereotypes as shorthand for complex social relations in disparate national contexts. Literature then provides a key to understanding these labels and the role that race has played in shoring up state power since World War II. Ang contends that in an era marked by global economic dependence, the nation-state has only become more rather than less central to organizing social life via tropes of race that cast human and cultural differences in morally charged terms. Focusing on a series of Asian American and Malaysian texts, Ang tracks the significance of two figures in particular—the model minority and the communist spy. Appearing in novels, politics, and popular culture, these stereotypes anchor powerful narratives about race, global capital, and state sovereignty. In exploring the United States and Malaysia, two countries that seem to not have much in common, Ang reveals how they share very similar ways of conceptualizing race and sheds light on an emerging global story of value.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Tropes of Exemplarity: Morality as Racial Pedagogy

2. Tropes of Degeneration: Morality and Political Efficacy

3. Tropes of Insecurity: State Competition and Racial Anxiety

4. Tropes of Security: The Global American Dream

Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Asia

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	14 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438475028
Langue	English

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The State of Race
SUNY series in Multiethnic Literatures

Mary Jo Bona, editor
The State of Race
Asian/American Fiction after World War II
Sze Wei Ang
Chua Mia Tee
Epic Poem of Malaya
1955
Oil on canvas, 112 × 153 cm
Collection of National Gallery Singapore
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ang, Sze Wei, 1978– author.
Title: The state of race : Asian/American fiction after World War II / Sze Wei Ang.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in multiethnic literatures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035979 | ISBN 9781438475011 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475028 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Race in literature. | Racism in literature. | Asians in literature. | American fiction—Asian American authors—History and criticism. | Malaysian fiction—History and criticism. | United States—Race relations. | Malaysia—Race relations.
Classification: LCC PN56.R16 A54 2019 | DDC 809/.933552—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035979
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER O NE
Tropes of Exemplarity: Morality as Racial Pedagogy
C HAPTER T WO
Tropes of Degeneration: Morality and Political Efficacy
C HAPTER T HREE
Tropes of Insecurity: State Competition and Racial Anxiety
C HAPTER F OUR
Tropes of Security: The Global American Dream
E PILOGUE
N OTES
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
Acknowledgments
Early thoughts for this book surfaced at Cornell University under the guidance of Natalie Melas, Shelley Wong, Eric Tagliacozzo, and Laura Brown, and in conversation with others there, especially Nadine Attewell, Jo Chen, Jade Ferguson, Susan Hall, Yew-foong Hui, Janice Lim, Petrus Liu, and Sheetal Majithia. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih modeled hospitality, conviviality, and intellectual rigor during the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA. They drew into their orbit other amazing scholars; among them were Maya Boutaghou, Greg Cohen, Elizabeth Deloughrey, Alessandra Di Maio, Fatima El-Tayeb, Marcela Fuentes, Nouri Gana, Kirstie McClure, Sonali Pahwa, Sarah Valentine, and Travis Workman. Continued institutional and material support throughout the process has been crucial. The Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project Code HKU 740311H) and the Department of Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong made it possible to write the book. The Dean of the Arts Faculty, Derek Collins, and the department chair, Nicole Huang have been particularly supportive. Sections of chapter 1 appeared earlier in CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 119‒39. At the press, Rebecca Colesworthy offered timely, astute, and deft editorial guidance, and responses from anonymous readers drew out sometimes unexpected insights.
Along the way, I benefited from the generosity of others, both professional and personal. Kandice Chuh saw more fully the potential of the questions asked in this book long before I did. Jean Ma turned a chance encounter into a friendship. Timothy O’Leary deserves special thanks for always trying to do the right thing, and without his early enthusiasm the project might have turned out differently. David Pomfret provided thoughtful advice and unfailing good cheer at every turn when others might have flagged. Charles Schenking showed exceptional goodwill when he read the first draft in its entirety and then gave me the fortitude to keep going. William Corlett, Steven C. Dillon, Sanford Freedman, Carole Anne Taylor, and Anne B. Thompson were the best of teachers who became so much more than that. Friends who may not have always fully understood the nature of the work gave me the gifts of shelter, food, laughter, time, and patience. This incomplete list includes Mark and Jan Chandler, Katy Chan, Mabel Dunn, Fang Li Ping, Catherine Fobi, May Lam, Karen Leung, Paul Long, Rebecca Lovett and her family, Mika Kanda and her family, Carmen Man, Maggie Maurer-Fazio and her family, Lloyd and the Maxsons, Irene Ngiam, Emelia Ong, Ong Kian Ming, Sarah Potter, James and Soni Reese, Elaine Wong, Rebecca Yip, Isaac Wang, and Fifi Young. Yan Wong roped in her entire clan to show me relentless kindness, far beyond what I deserve, and for much longer than humanly possible. This book would not have been completed without my family who always wanted the best for me. Labor and love turned out to be not so very different after all.
Introduction
Race is not only local, it is global. While shaped by specific histories and parochialisms, racial tensions and the inequalities that fuel those tensions can give us a picture of how different parts of the world are connected. Racial tropes such as the “yellow peril,” “model minority,” “terrorist,” “spy,” “threat,” or “contamination” have become commonplace in countries that otherwise do not share languages, cultures, religions, or histories. Stereotypes or variations of racist slogans such as “Go back where you came from!” and “This is our country!” turn up from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and also across the Asia Pacific. How we talk about race, ironically, has become more similar in places and cultures still divided by significant political and cultural differences. The populist rage behind Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016 can even seem belated when compared to the rise of the far-right elsewhere: Boris Johnson and Theresa May in the UK, Marie Le Pen in France, Pauline Hansen in Australia, Xi Jinping in China, Narendra Modi in India, Hun Sen in Cambodia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Najib Razak in Malaysia. 1 Racism, unfortunately, is neither isolated nor original, but why?
The State of Race argues that some modes of racial thought are a transnational phenomenon because they emerge out of global as well as local histories. 2 Historical events that take place and have effects across national borders have shaped conceptions of race and its social meanings even when they first appear to be formed within particular cultures and contexts. The racial tropes I examine in this book may indeed have a presence everywhere in unexpectedly analogous and informal ways, but I want to suggest that the examples drawn from this study are global because they are first a part of global history. In other words, this book is primarily about how racial vocabularies have become more similar because national histories and cultures are formed in relation to transnational events, circumstances, and interests. The novels, short fiction, and cultural histories in the case studies of this book draw our attention to how racial tropes are similar across languages, borders, and time periods because they reflect the converging interests of each state as it is affected by the broader cultural phenomena that affect all states. 3 This book does not insist that racial formations everywhere are always alike. Rather, my interest here is in how hierarchies of value embodied in racial difference often reflect each state’s interests as it cooperates and competes with other states, and the overlaps in various states’ interests as they operate in a global system is what accounts for the overlaps in racial language. The social meanings of racial difference are determined in response to global and local formations.
Modes of racial thought in different countries can take on remarkably similar forms because the state is still central to our cultures and politics. As Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have argued, we can neither do away with the state nor hold tightly to single nation frameworks in our analytical schemas: “Nation-states are alive as mechanisms of control and domination even when transnational corporations are supposed to have dissolved their boundaries. Minority cultural workers are transnational not because they transcend the national, but because their cultural orientations are by definition creolized in Glissant’s sense” (9). In this book, the comparison of minor literatures helps us see that racism is resilient because it can be used to strengthen the political centrality of the state. This is not to say that racial formations are always identical. Differences in local expressions can in fact be valuable to the state precisely because race is flexible and adaptable to particular geopolitical conditions or historical periods. But while racial figurations need to be read within the national contexts where they circulate, they are not isolated from global flows. The model minority or invocations of the American Dream in the novels compared in this book demonstrate that the state mobilizes ideas about race to its own ends in response to events that take place across its borders.
But to understand how race is shaped by shared historical developments, we need to first understand the nation-state’