Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Ph.D.
Scholar & Teacher of Asian American Rhetorics
Thank you for taking the time to visit my website! Here, you can find information about my scholarship, teaching, and contact information.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Asian American Rhetorics in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. My research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and media studies. I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. I also hold an M.A. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. in Politics & International Affairs and Religious Studies from Wake Forest University.
My book project, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) explores how contemporary racial and gendered violence against Asian Americans naturalizes a limited understanding of what it means to be human (see below). Outside of this project, my research interests also include discourses of false inclusion, comparative racialization, the Asian American movement, and transpacific race relations in Japan. I have published in journals across disciplines including Lateral, Liminalities, and Western Journal of Communication. In addition to these scholarly interests, I teach classes on topics such as rhetoric, intersectionality, Asian American studies, and critical/cultural communication. I am interested in continuing to develop pedagogical practices that engage students in creative ways to think about power, oppression, resistance, and communication.
Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Rutgers University Press, Asian American Studies Today Series (November 2024)
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.
Praise for Making the Human
"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