“Asian Pride Porn”: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Narrative of Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy

Introduction

Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that to combat the pervasive stereotype of the model minority “good subjects,” Asian American intellectuals have idealized the Asian American body politic as “bad subjects,” signaling “a retroactive collectivization of the Asian American experience” in opposition to the dominant social ideology. While the Asian American “bad subject” functions to disavow the model minority discourse and to resist the suturing of racialized individuals to the dominant US culture, it also generates “symbolic capital that derives its worth from the idea of political resistance and social change.” Thus, the positing of the “bad subject” and the model minority as binaries often ignores the “contradiction and excesses that made the bad subjects amenable to discipline by dominant society,” enabling some Asian Americans to become “panethnic entrepreneurs” (Race 144). Similarly, Mark Chiang points out the complicity of Asian American studies departments, nestled in the neoliberal university institution, in transforming racial identity into cultural and symbolic forms of capital. While “material inequality remains a crucial domain of racial struggles” in the post-civil rights era, Chiang observes, “for middle-class Asian Americans and other minorities, greater access to material resources has shifted the center of gravity of racial politics more toward the arena of symbolic struggles” (96).

While some Asian American scholars become more reflective about their own complicity in the neoliberal cultural economy, others illuminate the ways in which Asian American subjecthood has historically been shaped by market forces and articulated through languages of accumulation and exchange. For example, Christine So argues that Asian diasporics are represented as either deviant or exemplary economic agents—that is, either unfair competitors in the job market or model minorities, sometimes simultaneously both. In reading Asian American characters in canonical immigrant literature as “agents of capitalism gone awry,” So illuminates the racialized nature of capital exchange and its cultural implications (8). Similarly, Laura Kang points out the “Asianization” of global capitalism, especially since the 2008 economic crisis, attending to “the ‘Asian’ as appended to capital in terms of the shifting international political economy of accumulation, debt, and fiscal deficit” (301). These recent trends in Asian American studies prompt the question: How does the proliferation of neoliberal multiculturalism and the increasing global dependence on Asian capital affect Asian racial formation in the United States and globally? To answer this question, I turn my attention to Kevin Kwan’s New York Times best-selling trilogy—Crazy Rich Asians (2013), China Rich Girlfriend (2015), and Rich People Problems (2017), the first volume of which was adapted into a movie in 2018. Situating the commercial success of the Crazy Rich Asians movie and the original book series at the intersection of the neoliberal multiculturalist cultural marketplace in the United States and the postcolonial capitalist modernity in Singapore and Hong Kong, I explore the complex ways in which neoliberal discourses manage the Asian diasporic community’s claim to cultural citizenship in the United States and globally.¹

The first Hollywood production in twenty-five years to feature an all-Asian cast since Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993), Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon M. Chu, was hailed as a “watershed moment” for Asian American representation in mainstream US media (Barnes; Matthew and France-Presse; “‘Crazy’”; Yang). Although generally met with rave reviews in the United States, the movie elicited criticism from transnational reviewers such as Sangeetha Thanapal and Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Lily Kuo, all of whom rightly point out its uncritical replication of neocolonial racial hierarchies within Singaporean society and challenge the prima facie equating of the film’s popularity and commercial success to a victory for Asian American representation. Still, many renowned Asian American critics, such as Nguyen (“Asian”) and Hua Hsu, have defended the film’s representational merit within the frame of US racial politics. Nguyen, for example, points out the right of Asian Americans to experience a form of “narrative plentitude,” even, or rather especially, in various forms of aesthetic mediocrity. Similarly, Hsu argues for the necessity of having rounded and diverse representations of Asians...