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6. Asian Americans in the Age of Neoliberalism: Human Capital and Bad Choices in a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)
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l l 6 Asian Americans in the Age of Neoliberalism Human Capital and Bad Choices in a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) I am to be a weapon in the war against black America. . . . How does it feel to be a solution? Obviously it is easier to be seen as a solution than as a problem. We don’t suffer genocidal poverty and incarceration rates in the United States, nor do we walk in fear and a fog of invisibility. To be both visible (as a threat) and invisible (as a person) is a strain disproportionately borne by black America. —Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk In most any critical discussion, contemporary discourses of Asian American socioeconomic “success” are regarded as a disciplinary construction deployed by white America against the black poor. Vijay Prashad paraphrases W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known line regarding white America’s construction of a “Negro problem,” to ask Asian Americans in the new millennium , South Asians in particular, “How does it feel to be a solution”? Prashad’s text echoes earlier Asian Americanists in the late 1960s when he exhorts Asian America to refuse to be used by white supremacy as “a weapon against black folk” and to cultivate progressive solidarities with other people of color. Prashad’s point that Asian Americans are posited as x Neoliberalism and Asian American Racialization the “solution” to “the black problem” is an intertextual reference to Du Bois, but his language of “genocidal poverty and incarceration” also invokes the specter of the Holocaust and related questions of complicity in the aftermath of the final solution. The considerable ethical weight placed on Asian Americans “to do the right thing” in response to model minority discourse is one of the foundational elements of Asian American studies. Although this continues to be a necessary intervention, the political imperatives produced by globalization urge ethnic studies to ensure that this conversation remain linked to exploitative processes outside the United States, as it was during anti-imperialist struggles in the late 1960s and 1970s. I suggest that one possible approach is to center a discussion of neoliberalism in relation to Asian American racialization. If our concerns with “genocidal poverty” are broadened to a global scale, we will be prompted to examine discourses of Asian/American industriousness and success in relation to neoliberal ideologies that would link the brutalization of the U.S. black poor to the structural adjustment and austerity programs imposed on the global South in the wake of decolonization. This linkage widens the scope of critical inquiry while calling our attention to broader formations and epistemologies that demand interrogation. This chapter initiates that conversation by looking at how contemporary Asian American film engages with the dominant neoliberal mandates that have become so pervasive under the global restructuring of capitalism. I demonstrate how even a bourgeois, masculinist Asian American film can be read as exposing the dehumanizing instrumentalization of neoliberalism as well as the cynical hypocrisy of mantras of “personal responsibility” on the part of the elite. Neoliberalism was popularized in the United States in the mid-1960s by a large group of University of Chicago economists whose anti-Keynesian theories served to legitimate the reshaping of national economies and social formations of Latin America and the rest of the global south.1 More than just an economic program, neoliberalism presents the ideal conditions for global capitalism as the prerequisite for human freedom and liberation, making capitalist economic principles the basis for utopic social abstractions. George Schultz, a key member of the Chicago school and an economic adviser to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon before his appointment as secretary of state by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, gave this typical response in an interview, explaining that the Chicago school “stands for the fundamental value of freedom and, of course, in the economics realm its free markets, freedom of enterprise, freedom from undue regulation. So [it stands for] all of those kinds of [3.230.162.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:10 GMT) Neoliberalism and Asian American Racialization x things.”2 Formed in opposition to Keynesian economic theory, the key tenets of neoliberalism are deregulation, privatization, and the dismantling of social services—or what is now commonly referred to as “getting government out of the way.” This often-repeated Americanism points to a particular kind of reorientation to and naturalized resentment of the state that is constituted by a neoliberal social order.3 We...