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  • The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee
  • Emily Roxworthy
THE EXQUISITE CORPSE OF ASIAN AMERICA: BIOPOLITICS, BIOSOCIALITY, AND POSTHUMAN ECOLOGIES. By Rachel C. Lee. Sexual Cultures series. New York: New York University Press, 2014; pp. 336.

Rachel Lee waits until the concluding chapter to fully explain the striking title of her book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. Lee explains her evocation of a dead body by referencing the surrealist method of artistic collaborators assembling images into a composition (or body) without knowledge of one another’s contributions. This understanding of the “exquisite corpse” (or cadavre exquis)—as a compositional exercise that folds upon itself and thus defies heteronormative social arrangements—is presaged by the book’s table of contents, which dissects each chapter into one or more body parts, ranging from the assignment of the “vagina and GI tract” to a chapter on the scatological humor of Korean American comedienne Margaret Cho to the assignment of the “head” to a chapter on Japanese American performance artist Denise Uyehara’s meditations on mental illness. But alongside Lee’s structural mapping of the body through its disassembled parts is an assumption that is threaded more evenly throughout the monograph: that the exquisite corpse is actually the dearly departed body of Asian Americanist critique in its classical sense, which Lee defines as a longstanding project of returning to “humanistic wholeness” mainstream (white) US society’s negative, partial, and oversimplified images of the Asian body (220). Dancing on the grave of this “older tradition,” Lee proclaims her rejection of her predecessors’ “desire for an adequate interiorized view of the immigrant psyche” (ibid.), and sets out to examine the cultural productions of artists of color that both defy the model minority myth that has long plagued Asian Americans, as well as the binary structures of Western modernity that privilege humanity, health, and wholeness over nonhumans, disability, and hybridity. Her critique emits from recent critical interventions in animal studies and affect theory that problematize the reification of what Giorgio Agamben calls bios (politically worthy human life), as defined against zoe (bare, animal life) (47). Lee uses the binary of bios versus zoe to establish her own theory of zoe-ification (rendering fellow humans as a species apart), which augments classic Asian American cultural theories such as Lisa Lowe’s notion of “immigrant acts” and Karen Shimakawa’s idea of “national abjection” by adding scientific and technological layers, as well as an attention to boundary-crossing acts of caretaking (48).

Lee situates The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America at the intersection of feminist science and technology Studies (STS), Asian American studies, performance studies, and an array of other (inter)disciplines. As a result, the level of jargon that characterizes her discourse is often frustratingly thick, with pages of theoretical scaffolding delaying the onset of her mostly contemporary case studies, which include novels like Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, choreography by Taiwanese American Cheng-Chieh Yu, the visual art of Kenyan-born Allan de-Souza (composed with the artist’s own body parts and other organic materials), and spoken-word performances by Cho and Uyehara. The performing artists receive the most valuable and thickest descriptions by Lee, with a brilliant analysis of Cho’s “pussy ballistics” that adds to the already impressive secondary literature that Lee has produced about that often polarizing comedienne.1 The chapter on Cho lacks images, which is more than made up for in the highly illustrated chapters on Uyehara and Yu. The body parts of “teeth, feet, gamete” are assigned to the chapter on Yu’s acrobatic, modern dance theatre, which emerged at the turn of the last century as a form of transnational diplomacy among the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of China in Taiwan. Lee persuasively argues that Yu’s obvious focus on the uppermost and lowermost parts of the body—teeth and feet—competes with a narrative attention to recent biotech innovations at the gamete-level, such as stem cell research. Repeatedly...

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