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1 Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity Jeffrey J. Santa Ana With her mouth gaping open, my mother snores loudly on the sofa. The broom lays across her lap. I am unable to leave, overcome by helplessness in the face of family, blood, and the powerful force of my own reluctant love. . . . What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood? —Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. . . . The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. . . . Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm. —Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats Having entered a new millennium, American life today is rife with the contradictions of corporate privatization, the deregulated expansion of capital, and the globalization of free trade. As the reigning political economic paradigm of our time, neoliberal capitalism, as Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, and many other critics of corporate globalization argue, vitiates democratic powers of government and obstructs the ability of nation-states to control transnational ®ows of capital. The shift from an economy of production to a culture of consumption, the turn of people as producers in a community to consumers in a “planetary marketplace,”and the alarming spread of inequality on a global scale are features central to life in the culture of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 13). In the words of David Harvey, “the shameless commodi¤cation and commercialization of everything is, after all, one of the hallmarks of our times” (Spaces 409). If such is the case, then the primary force that sustains a world system of capital accumulation and the cultural homogeneity of commodity production is the drive for a global consumer lifestyle. If, as Fredric Jameson alarmingly suggests, transnational capitalism has trans- formed U.S. citizenship into the “culture of consumption”(“Globalization”57), it has done so in a postmodern fashion: American government both tempers and nurtures a democratic public life that is now fragmented and undermined by the neoliberal interests of the free market and consumerism.Reacting against the Enlightenment norms of citizenship that constitute the narrative of American democracy and enfranchisement, the cultural logic of late capitalism is the postmodern opening up and expansion of capital to a world market. Central to the survival of this market is maintaining an illusion of limitless consumerism. “The cultural-ideological project of global capitalism,” writes Leslie Sklair, “is to persuade people to consume above their ‘biological needs’ in order to perpetuate the accumulation of capital for private pro¤t; in other words, to ensure that the global capitalist system goes on forever” (“Social Movements” 297). That consumption as a way of life in the U.S. is now identi¤able with freedom , citizenship, and assimilation shows the extent to which Jameson’s devastating pronouncement of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism has become axiomatic (“Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic” 85). Indeed, what is so hard to ignore today, because it is downright unsettling in the way it manifests the late-capitalist consumption practices that are the targets of Jameson’s critique, is the postmodern turn in the advertising and marketing of minority differences in global consumer culture. The postmodern turn in consumer culture is evident in the use of racial and ethnic minorities to glamorize and commodify diversity in the neoliberal logic of unregulated capital and maximized pro¤ts. Advancing the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, the commercializing of minority differences evinces a “consumer postmodernism,” writes Henry Giroux, that transforms “politics and difference into the stylized world of aesthetics and consumption” (“Consuming” 6). The Multiracial Asian Face of Global Consumerism: Diversity, Postethnicity, and the Commercialization of Human Feeling For people of color, women, and sexual minorities in the United States, assimilation into the culture of neoliberalism entails desiring a consumptionbased subjectivity that recasts political rights as economic liberties and reduces diversity and difference to super¤cial style for sale in the market. In this way, notes Alexandra Chasin in her study of marketplace effects on the lesbian and gay movement, “the market promotes assimilation into a homogenous national culture,encouraging identity difference only to the extent that it serves as a basis for niche marketing” (xvii...

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