Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation ... (ISBN 0804747296)

Excellent hard-hitting study, shaking up US racial frames...:
Susan Koshy's first book (foreshadowing many to come) offers a sustained and lucid analysis of the structural and geopolitical constraints (as opposed to more liberal or volunaristic accounts) that act upon producing a certain kind of discourse on race and, later, ethnicity, within white-centered frameworks of the US legal system. She enacts an important intervention into the whole way American and Asian American Studies conceive of "whiteness" as a constituitive category of national belonging or the Asian American as an automatic subaltern, however privileged he or she is in class or worldly situation. The racism produced by various Asian groups against other Asian immigrants and blacks, in shifting historical contexts of capitalist modernity, is shown to be an ongoing function of legal constraints upon how (white) citizenship is established, and, later, how minority citizenship is signified and valorized as hybrid or exemplary as such. This later shift from racial to ethnic senses of belonging is an important one for the field-imaginary in a transnational era, and shows how the new discourse of ethnicity in a transnational context (within Asian-friendly Pacific Rim discourse) often obscures (yes this is so) the operations of race and class. Koshy's examples-of Mississippi Chinese and shifting claims and constructions of South Asians-help to expose the porousness of whiteness as a container for that construct as wielded against black US citizens. The well-argued difference and originality in her account both outlines the complicity of various Asian American groups in affiliating themselves with forms and claims of white citizenship. At the same time her account shows how such claims had to emanate from within a hegemonic legal system (and related, more fluid cultural genres of representation) that did not allow for the subversive power of difference and counter-hegemonic force many credit Asian American legal subjecitivity and literature with. Thus, Koshy offers a grim, well researched, and Foucault-wise project that shows the full range of power to produce forms of complicity and to contain and delimit forms of resistance. Through thick descriptive detail and close reading of key libidinal texts, the project traces the shift from narrating visions of tragic and sentimentalized exclusion (Long and Griffith) to more hybrid and creolized forms of US national belonging via "racial hybridity tropes" and cross-racial romance (Bulosan and Mukerjee). The latter examples by Asian American authors threaten to fall into versions of democratic idealism and what Koshy calls "conservative multiculturalism," Koshy's study thus reveals that the minority texts cannot be read as utopic instances of subaltern resistance and difference but as romantic-national works themselves implicated and contained in the legalistic and hegemonic force-fields of American liberal culture. Her chapter on the "Madame Butterfly" syndrome and long historical transformation is the best I know and a delight to read. This book is important he said she said...