Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature by Juliana Chang (review)

As anyone who has ever watched or read anything about zombies can attest, there are two central characteristics that unify most depictions of the “walking dead.” First, they are difficult to kill, and thus must be killed as constantly and definitively as possible lest they kill you first. Second, they tend not to stay killed, and have the irritating habit of returning when least expected. Of course, it’s precisely the expectation of this return that underwrites the furious necessity of killing them in the first place, completing the circuits of narrative and psychic desire—a desire that, in its fulfillment, must a priori be disavowed. In truth, we do not want our zombies to die. We take far too much pleasure in killing them.

This pleasure—at once excessive, enjoyable, and traumatic—is a prime example of what Jacques Lacan terms jouissance, and one of the central insights in Juliana Chang’s Inhuman Citizenship (which, I should note, is not about zombies per se) is that we ought not disavow this pleasure, but rethink it, especially when it’s elicited through and from racial subjects. Drawing largely from the theories of Lacan and Freud, Inhuman Citizenship not only builds upon methodologically aligned work within the field of Asian American literary criticism but also touches upon questions central to recent work in posthuman theory, animal studies, new materialisms/object-oriented ontologies, and affect theory.

In particular, Chang’s study challenges contemporary theorizations of Asian American literature in two specific registers. First, the book suggests a timely reconsideration of what Chang calls the “racial inhuman,” those figures that have traditionally been interpreted largely in terms of dehumanizing misrepresentations and exclusionary stereotypes. Against the seemingly commonsensical critical move both to disavow these representations as grossly inaccurate and undermine their effects by rehumanizing the racial subject, Chang asks us to consider the form and function of the traumatic jouissance elicited by the racial inhuman as inhuman, not in spite of it. Rather than rehumanize the inhuman (thereby disavowing the traumatic enjoyment it elicits), Chang demonstrates instead that the racial inhuman is already “a powerful trope and force of counter-hegemony” (11), one that need not be rescued from itself.

Linked to this reframing of the inhuman is the book’s second key insight, which compellingly locates the trope of the racial inhuman in narratives of domesticity and “family business.” Focusing on both the economic and ideological dimensions of family business, Chang illustrates how the type of business in which a family participates becomes, under neoliberal capital, the business of making a family itself. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the product of such a business is children; what is unexpected is how, in Chang’s words, “the involvement of children in family business and their status as objects of family business render Asian American domesticity deviant, and even inhuman” (21). As Chang suggests, it is precisely because “the child is the very telos of America” that the problematic mechanisms of her production (as reproductive labor, in both senses) register a crisis in the national imaginary: “What if the child develops not into a fully human citizen-subject but into the inhuman?” (23).

Coupling these two central insights allows Chang to ground what risks remaining a relatively abstract set of theoretical concerns more squarely in the material experience of Asian Americans. One of the more remarkable things about Inhuman Citizenship, in fact, is how deftly Chang connects psychoanalytic concepts to the embodied, affective experience of Asian Americans. Although the methodological thrust is psychoanalytic, the interpretive framework is more explicitly materialist: Chang’s close readings are always situated within the larger context of historical and political contestations over citizenship and nation. In this regard, Inhuman Citizenship continues the project of articulating linkages between discursive networks, embodied experiences, and modes of affect charted by critics like Anne Cheng and David Eng, among others (in some ways, this insistence on specific...