Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (review)

Despite the high rate of Asian American out-marriage, we have been slow to recognize the significance of cross-racial encounters. Susan Koshy's slim first book adds to the small but growing list of recent publications such as Rebecca King's Pure Beauty (2006) and Bill Mullen's Afro-Orientalism (2004) dealing with Asian interracial relationships. She makes an important contribution to the field by examining representations of Asian American-Euro-American romance over a roughly one hundred year period with a particular emphasis on the transnational context for their liaisons. Although she focuses on canonical Asian American studies texts, Koshy distinguishes her work from earlier writing on the same topic, most notably the ground-breaking Romance and the Yellow Peril (1994) by Gina Marchetti, by including both mainstream, Euro-American produced texts and books written by Asian Americans. She also alternates between the dominant image of a white man/Asian woman and less familiar representations of an Asian man/white woman dyad. Her lucid, detailed, and precise prose carefully adds layer upon layer of complexity until we can see the ways in which narratives of inter-racial heterosexual romance lay at the intersection of discourses of race, gender, class, and nationalism.

It is worth buying the book for the introduction alone, which places Asian/white miscegenation within the older and broader context of America's differential treatment of all cross-racial, sexual relationships. This first chapter is a tour de force of political and cultural history, tracing the legal prohibitions against and the social reception of inter-racial marriage. Koshy also reconstructs the historical forces that promoted some types of inter-racial romances and decreased the likelihood of others. Comparisons of the histories of Native American, African American, Mexican and Asian miscegenation in the U.S. might be daunting enough, but Koshy takes care to point out how gender and global politics affect the prevalence and the reception of these relationships. Koshy persuasively argues that Asian/white miscegenation must be recognized for its own peculiar history, but that its meaning can only be fully comprehended in contrast to the evolution of other kinds of inter-racial relationships in the United States.

The book then splits into two sections. The first reads two central texts, the iconic story of Madame Butterfly (1919, John Luther Long) and the film Broken Blossoms (1919, dir. D.W. Griftith). While this section provides an important context for the reuse and revaluing of the trope of white/Asian miscegenation, which Koshy charts in later chapters, it struggles to move beyond the already existing scholarship on these two popular texts. Koshy analyzes both Butterfly and Blossoms in terms of the ways they align racial, gendered, and class-based stereotypes to naturalize the unequal relationship between the West and Asia. She also contrasts the extraterritorial space of Butterfly to the setting of Blossoms which takes place within the physical boundary of England to discuss how the two texts, despite their pretext of integration through romance, participate in the expulsion of the Asian from the national body.

In Part 2, Koshy compellingly advocates for a greater recognition of interracial romance as a "narrative framework for exploring the terms of Asian American subjection and hybridizing the American imagination" (92). The interracial romances of both America is in the Heart (1943) and Jasmine (1989) have been mostly neglected or dismissed as pro-assimilation lapses in judgment and appallingly sexist. While Koshy does not argue for a revaluation of these novels as pro- or proto-feminist, she does demonstrate the ways in which the authors use interracial romances to claim a long denied subjectivity and agency, even as they are constrained by those same narratives.

In her reading of America, Koshy argues that the colonial history of the Philippines resulted in what she calls the "hypercorporeality" of Filipinos natives, meaning "the reduction of Filipino subjectivity to primordial sensations, appetites and propensities and the corresponding equation of Filipino culture with a primitive level of social and cultural development" (100). In the book, the...