The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America by Christine Kim (review)

At its foundation, Christine Kim's The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America intervenes in the uncritical enfolding of Asian Canada into national and hemispheric discursive formations. This takes place not only through, as she makes clear, the logic of "Asian signifying a displacement, a diaspora always imagined as rooted elsewhere, and Canadian claiming a national fixity, a set of borders, and a banal kind of legitimacy" (25, italics original), but also in the superficial inclusion of Canada in Asian American studies.

The Minor Intimacies of Race theorizes multiple senses of the "minor," a term Kim uses to designate not only what is secondary, repressed, and alienated, but also that which is temporary, contingent, and small. The Minor Intimacies of Race apprehends Canada as a minor empire, "a former British colony currently under the influence of U.S. imperialism" (20) which nonetheless manages Asian difference through Orientalism and model minoritization. Kim considers how Asian American and Asian Canadian art objects engage minor histories, which reveal the partiality of European modernity and its universalisms. Kim's analytical scale of minor publics eschews the overly malleable term "community" to recognize the felt but fleeting sense of togetherness in difference from dominant publics—or minor feelings, which do not inspire revolutions but instead confound prevailing procedures and hermeneutics.

Kim concludes the introduction with a chapter overview that attends to ephemerality, legibility, and political resistance. My own synopsis would not do justice to Kim's thoughtful scaffolding, so here I instead engage Kim's complementary affective analytic of awkwardness—most explicitly introduced when Kim quotes academic Kim Solga's response to the Theatre Replacements' performance Bioboxes (2007). Solga describes her inability, despite her best intentions, to engage the work either semantically or emotionally because its staging felt awkward. Indeed, many of Kim's art objects are not loud or demanding, and thus, as though with a shrug, they are dismissed as illegible. This illegibility traces a larger theme of how the grievances of Asian Canada do not fit the dominant logics of multicultural nationalism, liberal empire, and color-blind humanism.

For this American studies reader, The Minor Intimacies of Race provides a lesson in the nonequivalencies of the United States and Canada as settlercolonial and reputedly multicultural nations; I hope Asian Canadian readers can forgive this parochialism. Given the genealogy of the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which overdetermines social difference both as discrete equivalencies and as addendums to national citizenship, chapter 1 reads Bioboxes and Joy Kogawa's The Rain Ascends (1995, rewritten in 2003) not through their political catharsis, but through their awkward refusals of the procedures associated with multicultural recognition. Chapter 2 engages the Yellow Peril of higher education and what she describes as the "distant familiarity" (60) of how U.S. discourses shape the Canadian imagination, even as both share the haunting figure and space of "Asia." Kim thus locates the felt connections across Asian North America that cannot cohere because of these nations' differing matrices of citizenship and structural racism.

The latter chapters use this transnational lens to consider the intelligibilities of Asian diasporic publics. Chapter 3 focalizes Kim's discomfort in feeling more for Korean Canadian artist David Khang's work about his mother over his grander, site-specific indictments of state violence. She then frames the exceptionalizing of the U.S. South in Susan Choi's Foreign Student (1998) through this feeling etiquette, instead seeing the representation of a Korean out of place as symptomatic of liberalism's injunction to forget. Chapter 4 addresses the failures of sympathy, an oft-theorized emotional politic that depends on equivalencies, through the poetry of Lao Canadian Souvankham Thammavongsa. She attends to how feeling is central to human rights liberalism, but how the refugee cannot fit within the sensible contours of the human. Kim concludes by reading Roy...