The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (review)

For the past twenty years or more, ethnic (including Asian American) studies has been caught in something of an impasse in the wake of the triumph of “social constructivist” theories of race and racialized categories: if the biological concept of race has been thoroughly discounted in favor of social constructivism, why do biological categories continue to be so persistent in theories like “strategic essentialism” (Spivak) and in classifying literary fields by the race of the author? Attempts to negotiate between or push beyond biological essentialism and social constructivism in the social and human sciences (e.g., Omi and Winant on “racial formation”; Kandice Chuh on “subjectless discourse”) have been provocatively productive but have failed to dislodge the strong trace of race that continues to haunt the field of Asian American studies. Rachel Lee shakes up the discussion, offering a radical rethinking of the field by turning our attention to the outdated notions of biological personhood as “fixed or singular” on which we have been basing our arguments. She insistently brings the humanist discussion into dialogue with concepts of “fragmented biologies” that are “multiform and distributed across time spans and spatial ecologies” (15), boldly and convincingly arguing that “we cannot begin to understand the focus on form, aesthetics, affect, theme, autonomy (and all those other things supposedly lending the field [of Asian American literary and cultural studies] coherence outside of ‘biology’) without understanding the cultural anxieties around being biological in an era that is reconceptualising the body in informational, molecular, and posthuman terms” (20). It is precisely this issue that she sets out to unpack in this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study.

The originality—some might say the audacity—of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America cannot be overemphasized; this book should have a profound impact on the field. The method Lee employs is as daring and radical as the content of her argument; indeed, it shapes the argument. Her title is not to be read as forecasting the death of Asian American cultural studies and its original, revolutionary ideals for social justice, but rather as signaling a method of experimental anatomizing of the field, “a method of Asian Americanist cultural critique on the exquisite corpse [that] is meant to cultivate an affective interest along a vibration of sufficient intensity linked to what feminism and queer theory have called a ‘politics of the open end’ (Spivak)” (26). Her method embraces the chance encounter, the unpredictable conjoining, the contingent, the sideways/slant/queer view that brings together disparate cultural productions and contemporary theories from STS (science and technology studies), critical race studies, and femiqueer studies, for example, in ways that do not predict or even desire a particular teleology. It is precisely this openness to the unexpected discovery that makes these analyses so rich and intriguing. In the process, her argument demonstrates that new science and technology studies that emphasize species sharing and innovative ways of aggregating populations don’t usher in a postrace utopia; quite the opposite, they create a suspicion and fear among critical race scholars that we will be driven back to old racial forms and categories. Her study attempts with considerable success to allay these fears by explaining the implications of new scales of differentiating biologies—from the microscopic (genomic and epigenetic) through economic stratification to nonhuman biologies (viruses and protoctist parasites) that promote species crossing—for older concepts of race. She thus takes discussions of race in literary and cultural studies into new territory.

I don’t have space to do justice to the global range of Lee’s target texts and performances, treated in the book’s “body”chapters that are cleverly structured around connected body parts, as if excavating a cadaver, the “exquisite body.” Suffice it to say that the range is the opposite of narrow; for example, her discussion of Cheng Chieh Yu’s contemporary dance theater opens...