Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies
The Exquisite Corpse of
Asian America
addresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or social
construction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists,
authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engaging
novels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. and
internationallysuch as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me
Go or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of Body
Worlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisonsRachel
C. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthuman
ecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. She
unpacks how the designation of Asian American itself is a mental construct
that is paradoxically linked to the biologica
Trade Review
Lee convincingly shows that Asian Americanist critique in science and technology studies and analytic that takes seriously the biological in critical race and ethnic studies is not far-fetched. * Catalyst *
[T]he study is provocative and evocative, raising such issues and questions as why Asian American artists (in fiction, theater, poetry, and comedy) are so preoccupied with fragments of 'self.' * Choice *
Lees propositional and performative writing style will prod readers in (Asian) American studies, performative studies, and critical race theory to reexamine their scholarly assumptions... * Theatre Journal *
Ambitious, original, and immensely generative,The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America challenges us to move outside the paradigms of the racialized body weve relied on in Asian American studies.Lee pushes our thinking in productive new ways to consider more broadly how critical race studies might incorporate new concepts and technologies related to the biological body. -- Josephine Lee,author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage
Rachel Lees stunning new book explores contemporary Asian American performance, comedy, written word, and a body exhibit that concern racialized, gendered, militarized body parts. Drawing upon Science and Technology Studies and Asian American Studies, with the aid of transnational femiqueer, critical race, and disability studies, Lee eviscerates what we thought we knew about biopolitics and biosociality. -- Charis Thompson,author of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research
Table of Contents
Contents Corpse Blood Introduction: Parts/Parturition 1 Kidney Lymphocytes 1. How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-a-vis Race 39 Teeth 2. The Asiatic, Acrobatic, and Aleatory Biologies Feet of Cheng-Chieh Yu's Dance Theater 66 Gamete Vagina 3. Pussy Ballistics and Peristaltic Feminism 97 GI Tract Parasite 4. Everybody's Novel Protist: Chimeracological Chromosome Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction 126 Head 5. A Sideways Approach to Mental Disabilities: Incarceration, Kinesthetics, Affect, and Ethics 161 Breasts 6. Allotropic Conclusions: Propositions on Skin Race and the Exquisite Corpse 210 Tissue culture Tail Piece 245 Notes 259 Bibliography 295 Index 313 About the Author 325 An insert of color images follows page 138.
