Description
Book SynopsisIn
Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. Ho argues that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.
Trade Review"With nuanced, original readings and fluid prose,
Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture exceeds other studies of multiracialism by presenting a lucid, yet complex meditation on category confusion and epistemological uncertainty and their political stakes for Asian Americans."
-- Leslie Bow * author of Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South *
"With a nuanced approach and original analysis,
Racial Ambiguity brings comparative ethnic studies and critical race studies into necessary dialogue. Ho skillfully maps the contours of U.S. racial formation by investigating mixed subjectivity and its particular resonances to Asian America." -- Cathy J. Schlund-Vials * author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing *
"Looking through the dual lenses of critical and comparative race studies, Ho offers an engaging and provocative reflection on racial categorization, epistemological indeterminacy, and identity complexity in Asian American literature and culture … Highly recommended." * CHOICE *
"[Ho's] engagement with the phenomenon of visuality is explicit and interesting." * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Ambiguous Americans: Race and the State of Asian America1 From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration2 Anti-Sentimental Loss: Stories of Transracial/Transnational Asian American Adult Adoptees in the Blogosphere3 Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-first Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods4 Ambiguous Movements and Mobile Subjectivity: Passing in between Autobiography and Fiction with Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki5 Transgressive Texts and Ambiguous Authors: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American LiteratureCoda Ending with Origins: My Own Racial AmbiguityNotesBibliographyIndex
