Making the Human
Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Published November 15th, 2024
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"What are the consequences of understanding 'Asian American' as a term wrapped up in carceral warfare, antiblackness, coloniality, and extraction? Positioning the figure of the 'Asian American' within a Civilizational project that imagines, institutionalizes, and enforces Western 'Man,' Making the Human demystifies the de facto liberalism embedded in dominant racial categories—and of 'anti-racism' itself."
~Dylan Rodríguez, professor in the departments of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside
“Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s book is an expansive, ambitious examination of how Asian/Americans are constructed through racial allegory. In this tour de force, Sugino artfully analyzes the rhetoric of 'Asian/American' as fetish, disease vector, carceral subject, and victimized college applicant across popular discourse, film, and the law to construct 'Western Man'. It’s a must read for scholars interested in the intersection of Asian American Studies, rhetoric, and race."
~David C. Oh, author of Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture
Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Rutgers University Press (2024, Asian American Studies Today Series)
From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.