The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America by Christine Kim (review)

Christine Kim's The Minor Intimacies of Race is a groundbreaking study of Asian Canadian culture that addresses two pervasive, albeit rarely noticed, aspects of contemporary multiculturalism. The first is the discrepancy between the entrenchment of multicultural ideology in culture and society and the constant eruption of feelings of resentment and hostility towards racial minorities. The second is the fact that even though conflicts about race frequently erupt, often in intense and even inappropriate ways, they tend to fade quickly until they are inevitably reactivated by the next crisis. Conventional analyses tend to view both phenomena as indicative of multiculturalism's role in maintaining racial hierarchies rooted in the long history of settler colonialism. Kim does not disagree, but she demonstrates how such arguments fail to account for the ways in which race circulates through the realms of affect and their social effects. By asking readers to take feelings seriously, Minor Intimacies highlights the ephemeral, and therefore difficult to counteract, modalities in which racism operates.

Drawing on critics such as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Kim calls these modalities publics. Unlike the more widely used term "community," which connotes organic and sustained connections, publics are contingent and ephemeral, "produced in response to particular issues or moments" without "the same kinds of investments or stable structures that tend to grow communities over generations." Publics can be charged and intense but just as often fade into obscurity. Asian Canadian publics, Kim argues, occupy a structurally minor position relative to mainstream publics, but they do not simply exist in a dialectic of identity and difference. Instead, they are driven by desires for, and practices of, social intimacy even as their exclusion from the mainstream signifies the opposite, namely an aversion to social intimacy in the guise of "multicultural fatigue."

The chapters of Minor Intimacies trace operations of Asian Canadian publics through a diverse archive that includes fiction (by Joy Kogawa, Kyo Maclear, and Susan Choi), poetry (by Souvankham Thammavongsa and Roy Kiyooka), performance (by Cindy Mochizuki and David Khang), and news and social media (more on this below). While these materials can mostly be categorized as Canadian, Kim echoes critics such as Roy Miki, Eleanor Ty, and Donald Goellnicht in theorizing Asian Canadian culture beyond the confines of national categories. Minor Intimacies insists that the conjunction of "Asian" and "Canadian" is symptomatic of Canada's status as a "minor empire" vis-a-vis the modern world system. In contemporary Asian Canadian culture, this history comes across in its resonances with Asian American culture and society as well as in its complicity in the long-standing colonial binary opposition between Asia and the West. More important, Kim traces how affective publics unfold across national borders, even if they do not result in identical political projects.

This point is vividly illustrated in a chapter on controversial media portrayals of Asian university students in North America. Kim examines responses to an article titled "Too Asian?" that appeared in Maclean's in 2010 in which the writers ask whether some of Canada's elite universities were enrolling "too many" students of Asian descent, resulting in the supposed deterioration of student life. This article provoked a heated backlash that galvanized organized responses across the country. Kim compares this incident to a viral YouTube video entitled "Asians in the Library" posted by a white undergraduate student at the University of California Los Angeles. The vociferous reaction to the video's racist rants offers a fascinating case study of how racialized publics emerge in the age of the Internet. Insofar as many responses displayed racism and misogyny normally deemed unacceptable in pubic discourse, what became evident was the inability of a supposedly rational public sphere to contend with negative affects of race. By comparing two incidents separated by an international border easily traversed in cyberspace, Kim meticulously shows how they led to the temporary formation of related, but different, Asian Canadian publics that come together in response to racism. Minor...