Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature

Introduction: Inhuman Citizenship

Why is the alien villain Ming the Merciless so captivating and arousing to the speaker in Jessica Hagedorn’s 1981 poem? Why do we love to hate, and hate to love, such grotesque and outlaw figures? I begin Inhuman Citizenship with this poem because it so provocatively evokes the three major themes of this study: traumatic enjoyment, the racial inhuman, and the domestic. Taken together, these three concepts provide an intriguing entry into understanding the psychic lives of the U.S. nation-state and its subjects . Throughout this book, I employ a psychoanalytic reading of Asian American texts, focusing especially on the affect of traumatic enjoyment. Traumatic enjoyment is my translation of Lacan’s “jouissance,” a violent yet blissful shattering of the self. I find that Lacanian psychoanalysis offers compelling alternative epistemologies and ethics as we think through and navigate our relationship to power. I am especially interested in the ways that Asian American domestic narratives unexpectedly surface tropes of the racial other as inhuman, figures that threaten the boundaries of the human and evoke the trauma of jouissance for the normative national subject. 1 Introduction Inhuman Citizenship king of the lionmen come dancing in my tube sing, ming, sing blink sloe-eyed phantasy and touch me where there’s always hot water in this house . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ming, merciless ming come dancing in my tube —jessica hagedorn, “Ming the Merciless” 2 introduction Ming the Merciless, as highlighted in Hagedorn’s poem, is a marvelously suggestive example of the racial inhuman that is apprehended through the domestic (“my house”) and that gives shape to national jouissance. Racialized by his name and appearance as Asian, Ming the Merciless is the alien arch-enemy of the all-American superhero Flash Gordon, a character made popular in the United States in the 1930s through comic books and film.1 A fantasy figure of Oriental treachery and empire, Ming the Merciless was a variation on the Asian arch-villain archetype most popularly known through Sax Rohmer’s fictional creation, Dr. Fu Manchu.2 As the embodiment of pure evil, these Asian arch-villains were racialized as inhuman, and Ming’s extraterrestrial status simply literalizes this inhumanity . What I find daring about Hagedorn’s poem, which was published in a fairly early period of Asian American consciousness, is its unabashed embrace of what I call the racial inhuman.3 The poem does not take part in the more common gestures of protesting the “de-humanization” of the Asian and insisting that the Asian is as human as any American. Rather, it revels in the pleasures and enjoyment of the inhuman, as we can see from the speaker’s diction and tone. Addressing Ming as “king of the lionmen,” the poem makes Ming into a royal hybrid of human and animal, a creature with the aura of the divine, with its nobility accented by the rhyme of “king” with “ming.” Elsewhere in the poem, apostrophic addresses convey a tone of awe and fascination at this divine creature, magically morphing into the sacred and the prehistoric: “o flying angel/o pterodactyl.”4 Interrogating the nature of Ming’s inhumanity allows us to comprehend why and how Ming generates such delicious enjoyment on the part of his audience. As the dastardly villain and despot, Ming sadistically enjoys power and evil for their own sake. As we see from his moniker, Ming the Merciless, he is not bound by conscience, that is, he exempts himself from social law and morality. He not only lacks compassion for the suffering of others; he revels in and enjoys such suffering. This enjoyment is what makes him inhuman: unethical, irrational, enjoying for no reason other than for enjoyment itself. A superhero story, so the saying goes, is only as good as its villain. The villain delights and electrifies us in two major ways. First, as imaginary victims, we are not only traumatized by him, but we may masochistically enjoy this trauma. Second, we secretly wish we could be him. Because we are bound by law in our everyday lives, we fantasize that breaking the law would be exhilarating, providing us with a rush of utter freedom. We enjoy introduction 3 identifying with the villain, and then find ourselves traumatized by this enjoyment of what we otherwise vilify; for does it not call into question our own status as ethical and rational beings, as human? This is why we love to hate and hate...