Description
Book SynopsisIn
Racist Love Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of
Trade Review“Thought-provoking and illuminating. Professor Bow’s analysis is both broad ranging and a deep dive into culture, history, psychology, and much more. Her work provides context, vocabulary, and insight—a powerful framework for understanding.” -- Charles Yu, author of * Interior Chinatown *
“This book comes at a timely juncture—the latest reckoning of anti-Asian violence—and its analysis of the critical interplay of racial affects is deeply welcome. But Leslie Bow also asks much more of the reader in an incisive treatment that is vast in scope yet consistently uncompromising. If it has been possible until now to foster a sense of the inhuman contingencies of Asianness,
Racist Love finally disabuses us of intrahuman fantasies of racial feeling and shows us how objects matter.” -- Mel Y. Chen, author of * Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect *
"In
Racist Love, Leslie Bow deep dives and shows how Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to objects of anxiety and desire in the United States." -- Casey Cha * International Examiner *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Racist Love 1
1. Racial Transitional Objects: Anthropomorphic Animals and Other Asian Americans 25
2. Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii Style, and the Asian Thing 69
3. Asian ● Female ● Robot ● Slave: Techo-Orientalism after #MeToo 108
4. On the Asian Fetish and The Fantasy of Equality 153
Conclusion. Racist Hate, Racial Profiling, Pokémon at Auschwitz 191
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 205
References 237
Index 253
