Asia-Pessimism: Modeling a Revolution in Failure

In her book Asianfail, Eleanor Ty argues that Asian Americans can appropriate failure as a strategy for subverting norms. Her sense of failure derives from the work of queer theorists such as Judith/Jack Halberstam, for whom failure exists not as the paired opposite of mainstream success but rather as a family of evolving strategies for resisting governing structures. For Asian Americans, the stereotypical "model minority," strategic failure would therefore be especially appropriate as a rebuke to those structures.

Here I propose to show that in narratives of depression, especially recent novels by women, Asian Americans subvert perceptions of the failure that causes depression and suicide by portraying themselves honestly as people who suffer, and occasionally even rise above, institutional injustices. That these books are mostly by women serves both to acknowledge the falsehood of the striving "tiger mother" stereotype and to distance these stories from the inner-directed anguish of depression memoirs by white women. This leads to a corollary argument, for an approach I will call "Asia-Pessimism," borrowing from recent critical constructions of "Afro-Pessimism." As Jared Sexton, one of its leading thinkers, discusses it, Afro-Pessimism aims to train the focus of scholars and activists on black suffering, "toward an apprehension of the world-historical transformation entailed in the emergence of racial slavery." It analyzes "how anti-black fantasies obtain objective value in the political and economic life of society and in the psychic life of culture as well" (Sexton). A similar "Asia-Pessimism" is in order, subverting stereotypes of "model minority" success with an emphasis on suffering, resistance, and justice.

Halberstam's argument in The Queer Art of Failure rests on three theses, the first two of which pertain particularly well to Asian America. The first—the need to resist mastery—seems to concern only academic professionalization, as it originates in a rejection of disciplinarity's inherent conservatism: "We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers" (Halberstam 10). Halberstam argues that disciplinarity suppresses minoritized and indigenous knowledges—the examples of indigenous peoples' long-standing disputes with Western anthropology are pertinent here—and the pursuit of those knowledges necessarily moves inquiry outside the comforts of academia. This is almost, but not quite, an argument for a kind of reverse ethnography—inquiry of colonizers from within colonized communities—that scholars are not trained to practice.

The second thesis—the need to privilege whatever is stupid, naïve, nonsensical (Halberstam 12)—seems almost to invite failure, if not to defend strident anti-intellectualism. Here Halberstam might usefully address contemporary American conservatives' distrust of higher education, expressed during the writing of The Queer Art of Failure in the rise of the Tea Party and more recently in a 2017 Pew Research Center survey finding that 58 percent of "Republicans and right-leaning independents think higher education has a negative effect on the country" (Turnage). But for Halberstam and other critics, the constrictions of disciplinarity and universities' investments in neoliberal economic principles¹ make these institutions the allies of those very conservatives. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the so-called Paradise Papers disclosure, published in 2017 in The Guardian, that many "US universities and colleges have interests offshore where they pay little or no tax and seek to grow their already phenomenal riches away from public scrutiny" (Pilkington). This desire for secrecy hides agendas that subvert schools' public image. For example, "some of the offshore funds are invested in carbon-polluting industries, despite US universities playing a key role in the fight against climate change" (Pilkington). According to The Guardian, Northeastern University publicly boasts of a commitment to sustainable energy practices in its facilities and its scholars' well-funded research, yet it is heavily invested in a hedge fund described as the nation's leading benefactor of "oil and shale gas exploration and production … an aggressive financial backer of carbon-emitting industries" (Pilkington).² Conservatives who distrust higher education may know nothing about these investments and may thus be unwitting allies of universities, but even if they know, their distrust is aimed at faculty and the curriculum, not at administrators. University leaders...