Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature

Notes

Introduction 1. The “Flash Gordon” comic strip was illustrated by Alex Raymond and first published in 1934. Hagedorn recognizes Ming’s association with the “yellow peril” discourse of twentieth-century American culture in her various iterations of Orientalist fantasy later in the poem. 2. See chapter 2 of Chen, Double Agency, 35–59, for an interesting reconsideration of Fu Manchu as racial stereotype. 3. For histories of the Asian American movement in the 1960s and 1970s, see Maeda, Chains of Babylon, and Wei, The Asian American Movement. 4. Hagedorn, “Ming the Merciless,” 169. 5. See Eve Oishi for a discussion of “bad Asians.” Briefly, bad Asians eschew respectability by behaving badly, against conventional morality. Celine Parreñas Shimizu is also concerned with the “bad subjectivity” of Asian Americans, especially Asian American women, who are sexualized. Oishi, “Bad Asians,” 221–22; Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race. 6. Donald Pease provides a number of overviews of American exceptionalism , including post–Cold War American exceptionalism. Pease, “Exceptionalism”; The New American Exceptionalism; and “Rethinking ‘American Studies after U.S. Exceptionalism.’” 7. Castronovo, Necro Citizenship; Holland, Raising the Dead; Roach, Cities of the Dead; Eng and Kazanjian, Loss; Petersen, Kindred Specters; Brogan, Cultural Haunting; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. 8. Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 172–82. 9. Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 89. 10. Ibid., 181–82. 11. Lane, The Psychoanalysis of Race, 5. 12. Viego, Dead Subjects, 4. 13. Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 91–92. Notes 189 190 notes to introduction 14. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 62–63. 15. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 917–18. 16. The title of the welfare reform act of 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, emphasizes how privatization was framed as a moral as well as economic concern. 17. Cacho, “The Violence of Value.” 18. For overviews of posthumanist scholarship, see Cary Wolfe’s introductions to What Is Humanism? and Zoontologies, xi–xxxiv and ix–xxiii, respectively. A good deal of this posthumanist theory explicitly emerges from and engages with the discipline of philosophy. There is a vast body of scholarship on inhuman figures such as vampires, ghosts, and monsters in world literature. The past decade has seen tremendous growth in the field of animal studies; one recent manifestation of this in literary studies is the cluster on animal studies in a March 2009 edition of PMLA. In Winter 2008, the journal MELUS published a special issue imagining the nexus of the “Alien/Asian.” As racialized populations across the globe are rendered surplus to global capital and its Symbolic regimes, I hope that this study will contribute to a new understanding of ethical responses to such brutal and rational violence. 19. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 1–26. 20. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 6. 21. Some examples of these supernatural beings include the black voodoo priestess and the “Magical Negro” in American cinema. A recent version of the black voodoo priestess is the character Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). Tia Dalma, played by the black British actress Naomie Harris, is revealed to be the goddess Calypso, who grows into a giant and then explodes into a multitude of crabs. The Magical Negro is an archetypal mystical character who helps the white protagonist to redeem himself or herself. Recent cinematic incarnations of the Magical Negro include Michael Clarke Duncan’s character in The Green Mile (1999) and Will Smith’s character in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). See Hicks, “Hoodoo Economics,” for an extended discussion of magical black men in the films Unbreakable (2000), The Green Mile, and Family Man (2000). 22. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 4. 23. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 47; emphasis added. 24. Ibid., 46. 25. Lee, Urban Triage, xiv. 26. A speech by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 provides an example of how moralistic “family values” became equated with economic production under neoliberalism . Praising Asian Americans for their belief in “the responsibility of parents andschoolstobeteachersoftolerance,hardwork,fiscalresponsibility,cooperation,and love,” Reagan also remarked, “It’s no wonder that the medium incomes of Asian and Pacific-American families are much higher than the total American average.” Cited in Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 475. notes to introduction 191 27. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Brown, Domestic Individualism; George, Burning Down the House; George, “Domesticity”; McHugh, American Domesticity; Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. 28. Berlant, “Citizenship,” 37. 29...