- Scrutinized! Surveillance in Asian North American Literature by Monica Chiu
Monica Chiu’s Scrutinized! Surveillance in Asian North American Literature is a well-researched and menacing investigation of literary surveillance. Chiu’s monograph skillfully explores a dynamic body of Asian North American literature within the detective and mystery genres published between 1995 and 2010. The literary works she engages include Don Lee’s Country of Origin, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Susan Choi’s Person of Interest, Suki Kim’s Interpreter, Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Parsing through manifestations of surveillance on Asian North Americans through the lens of these texts, Chiu maps the specters of “yellow peril,” internment, espionage, assimilationist containment in the model minority, and post-9/11 anxieties as they shape Asian North American subjectivities. This project is revealed both in the raced characters of the stories, as well as in the stylistic choices of their authors. While each text examined makes reference to a specific historical moment or construction, chronology is not Chiu’s organizational impulse in her work. Instead she artfully weaves through her examples, often referencing earlier points in her analysis, demonstrating that instances of Asian North American surveillance have not been isolated and are not simply reactions by the dominant white majority to discrete (albeit most often, imagined) moments in history. Such referential movement within her work reinforces her point that markedly Asian bodies have been subjected to “sustained national monitoring” in both the United States and Canada—that is, racial anxieties of Asian North Americans have persisted in national social imaginaries, folding onto each other and compounding in such a way that obscures any supportable or rational justifications (3).
Chiu argues that a play with detective fiction presents itself as well suited to expose how the “scrutiny of raced subjects privileges a dominant gaze that makes legible a kind of Asian North American subjectivity” (4). Working [End Page 375] through the conventions of the genre, Asian North American authors are able to question this scrutiny and reimagine the roles of the scrutinized and the scrutinizer while also revising dominant perceptions of what is criminal. Detective fiction’s emphasis on scrutiny and its strategy of revealing the reader’s oversights or culturally inflected assumptions, Chiu notes, has allowed Asian North American authors to unravel the farce of “post-racialism” by exposing how the visual categories of race have and continue to be deployed on marked bodies as social realities. According to Chiu, the raced Asian North American subject has been imagined around a figure of visibility/invisibility: hypervisible for their physical and cultural difference, but invisible both politically and legally (3). This paradox of being “inscrutable,” visible/invisible, looked at and overlooked, is central to Chiu’s work. The exploration of detective literature in Scrutinized! explores how Asian North American authors live and write in and from this paradox (9).
Chiu’s introduction outlines this long history of Asian North American surveillance while contextualizing it within the present day. She charts the racial formation of the Asian North American subject across such sites as “Oriental” circus acts, (anti)immigration legislation, the wars in Asia, and the post-9/11 moment. She claims that the legal restrictions against overt racist practices that emerged in the softening of immigration laws and through the civil rights movement led to new, subtler articulations of race discrimination (18). The concealment of such discrimination, particularly amid claims of post-raciality, makes the “subtlety” or seeming “invisibility” of racial surveillance in the contemporary moment even more insidious than history’s more overt manifestations of Orientalism. Chiu’s brief closing notes on Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars and Fukuda’s Crossing reinforce this point. Even as the white gaze attempts to make invisible its racial anxieties through apparent embrace of Asian North American characters or subject matter, the persistent policing of the Asian North American remains in plain sight. This background provides much-needed grounding for the framework with which...