"A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice": Race, Affect, and the Animated Subject

an-i-mate vt : 1: to give spirit and support to: ENCOURAGE 2a: to give life to b: to give vigor and zest to 3: to move to action 4a: to make or design in such a way as to create apparently spontaneous lifelike movement b: to produce in the form of an animated cartoon syn see QUICKEN

an-i-mat-ed adj : 1a: endowed with life or the qualities of life : ALIVE . . . b: full of movement and activity c: full of vigor and spirit: LIVELY . . . 2: having the appearance of something alive 3: made in the form of an animated cartoon—Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, 1995

A foul lump started making promises in my voice," notes the speaker in John Yau's poetic series "Genghis Chan: Private Eye" (1989), giving new "life," "spirit," or "zest" to a clichéd expression for the inability to speak due to excessive emotion: a lump in the throat.¹ In fact, the cliché seems reinvigorated here to the extent that the "lump," the inhuman entity obstructing speech, comes to assume a life of its own, perversely ventriloquizing the Asian American speaker. We thus move from a racially marked subject who is "all choked up" to a situation in which the inhuman object restricting his speech becomes a subject dangerously capable of speaking for him, purportedly on his behalf. Insofar as we often regard the cliché as a "dead image"—what Robert Stonum calls a "fossilized" metaphor whose "expired figurative life" is rarely capable of being "restored or reinvented"—Yau's announcement dramatizes "giving life" in more ways than one, reanimating by rhetorically doubling the disturbing scene of animation it depicts.² Moreover, in presenting the transformation of this inanimate, "foul lump" into a living, speaking agent within a series of poems whose title marries Genghis Khan with Charlie Chan—the American cinema icon from the 1940s turned into a television cartoon in the 1970s through Hanna-Barbera's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan—Yau's statement amazingly encompasses all the definitions of animate and animated provided by Webster's.

An interesting slippage occurs as each term is elaborated. In both definitions, we move from biological existence, articulated in nouns signifying vitality ("life," "movement," "action"), to socially valenced, emotional qualities ("lively," "spontaneous," "zest"), and finally to a historically specific mode of cinematic or televisual representation (the "cartoon"). While all these meanings become spectacularly condensed in Yau's anthropomorphized, voice-stealing "lump" (an image that, on one level, endows lifelike qualities to insensible matter and, on another, figuratively reinvigorates a "dead metaphor" for the deverbalizing effects of an emotional excess), the already counterintuitive connections in the standard dictionary definition of animated—between the organic-vitalistic and the technological-mechanical, and between the technological-mechanical and the emotional—are further complicated by the way in which the orientalized and cartoonish Genghis Chan introduces race into the equation.

In this manner, Yau's Asian American subject, overcome by emotion and unable to speak while ventriloquized—transformed into a puppet for the verbal expressions of the very object responsible for obstructing his own speech—calls attention not only to animation's role in impassioning subjects but also to its capacity to racialize them. For just as the caricature of the raced subject as excessively earnest, emotional, and expressive continues to haunt the American cultural imagination, the affective qualities that surface in the dictionary entry for animated—"lively," "full of activity, . . . vigor and spirit"—have a long history of bearing racial connotations, not only in American screen traditions (and particularly in cartoons) but in American literature as well. Epitomized in figures ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe's ebullient Topsy (1852) to Warner Brothers's hyperactive Speedy Gonzales (who first emerged in the 1950s), the ostensibly positive qualities of liveliness, effusiveness, spontaneity, and zeal become affects harnessed to a disturbing racial epistemology, such that...