N.K. Jemisin's speculative tropes in The City We Became capture a significant legal reality: the entanglement of legal personhood with jurisdiction and how the powers of jurisdiction are often exercised in racial directions. This article juxtaposes her novel with canonical case law, re-reading Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Parents Involved in Cmty. Sch. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1 in order to show how speculative imaginings intertwine jurisdiction with the racialized legitimation of certain selves. The City We Became critiques the ways in which we overlook these entanglements of personhood and jurisdiction and offers new ways of envisioning collectivity.

Both Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) use Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to help them theorize reading practices for analyzing the interrelationships between literature and sociopolitical experience. In doing so, both disavow powerful understandings of the “social” produced across race and gender critique in African American and ethnic literary studies. This essay traces a connection backwards from Latour to the sociologist Gabriel Tarde to critiques of sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s understanding of the social and literary dimensions of “environing” critique assumptions embedded in the idea of networks, highlighting crucial experiences of being made not to act as constitutive of the social. The argument turns to brief syntheses of work by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong for models of thinking literary and social experience, suggesting that they need to be brought into these discussions of the normative values and methods of literary study. The essay concludes by reconsidering Winfried Fluck’s examination of these normative values in relation to dominant philosophies of history and questioning his assumptions about conditions of unfreedom.

I have visited the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento several times. Each time, I pay for the tickets, turn the corner, and am immersed in a dark, cavernous space highlighted by a diorama of Chinese railroad workers against a scenic backdrop. The three-dimensional figures of Chinese persons are frozen in acts of hard manual labor; at least one is suspended precariously on the side of a fake mountaintop. This is the grand entrée into the museum. The use of the diorama—long a staple of natural history museums—stages the naturalist aesthetics of this scene: its beauty shadowed or perhaps heightened by the history lesson it imparts, a reminder of the labor exploitation and racialized logics on which the transcontinental railroad rests. Along with all the other museum visitors, I move on to the large warehouse space that is an encomium to the great engines and cabs of the early Pacific Railroad system. Meanwhile, the Chinese figures remain in suspension, ready to greet another round of visitors, endlessly repeating the political narrative of historical recuperation and hoped-for agency.As Amy C. Tang's Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism demonstrates throughout its pages, there is a kind of Asian American popular common sense embedded here, constructed by the successes of Asian American studies: we must continually be reminded of these past exclusions and forms of exploitation and politically recuperate them. Related axioms, Tang shows us, follow from this one: the repeated projection of the Asian American as a politically oppositional subject; the need for a specific, authentic cultural vernacular; the assumption that ethnic writers' style always voices political critique. Asian American literary studies played a large role in constructing and disseminating this common sense. They organize our interpretive desires and which texts we read and teach. They provide the imprimatur through which the Asian American studies department provides value to the university. Part of the brilliance, challenge, and riskiness of Tang's book is that it rips these bandages off: no longer can we rest in easy assumptions of an “unambiguous political oppositionality” (37). Tang's work thus begins with the bold acknowledgment that we must grapple with, rather than disavow, our inclusion and absorption into the economic logics and institutionality of liberal multiculturalism. Indeed, the 2012 publication Left or Right of the Color Line? Asian Americans and the Racial Justice Movement, produced by the grassroots organization ChangeLab and written by Soya Jung, attests to this sense that Asian American groups have bought into narratives of race neutrality, capitalist individuality, and depoliticization. But rather than shy away from confronting the political ambivalence of this incorporation, Tang unceremoniously punctures the commonsense critical and political assumptions that facilitate the legibility of Asian American studies (like the diorama does for museum visitors) but that also limit its political, social, and aesthetic engagements.Tang's starting point is that both the critical frameworks of Asian American fiction and criticism and the politics of multicultural inclusion and incorporation are structured by the logics of repetition. Just as the politicization of racialized subjects relies on a repeated assertion of identity and recognition on the basis of erasure, exclusion, or wounding, literary fiction and criticism rely on repetition as their most privileged structure of meaning. This intersection of the conditions of politicization and literary criticism along the lines of repetition allows Tang to diagnose how the critical practices of Asian American literary studies are structured by liberal multiculturalism. In other words, the “after” in the subtitle does not mean that Asian American literature is somehow past these logics. Rather, Asian American literature continues to be organized by them. The trick, Tang shows us, is not to simply critique this repetition as a failure or to resolve it through an imagined political oppositionality or historical continuity. In order to actually engage the political conditions of this present, we must linger in the ambivalence. Such lingering requires engaging uncomfortably with questions like: Who comes after the Asian American subject (as politicized through liberal multiculturalism)? In what ways do we need to challenge an Asian American common sense that organizes how we are positioned in the world? Tang answers these questions with not less but more repetition: an immanent exploration of repetition so as to enlarge the field of political and aesthetic possibilities and the relationships among them.Repetition and Race contains four main chapters, which engage principally with works and authors at the center of Asian American literary studies. Chapter 1 reads The Foreign Student by Susan Choi, an author whose work is fast becoming canonical within Asian American literary studies. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, respectively, both works being some of the most common on Asian American literature syllabi. Chapter 4 takes up a marginal work, The Fifth Book of Peace, from arguably the central figure in the history of Asian American literary studies, Maxine Hong Kingston. The centrality of these books for the study, criticism, and teaching of Asian American literature is no accident. Tang's critique of the field's preoccupations and organizing frameworks is best carried out through the works and authors who have carried the most imaginative weight in producing those main presuppositions. For Choi, this means historical silences and traumatic reawakenings. For Lee, this means reflections on dimensions of Asian American racialization such as speech, language, and US cultural belonging. For Yamashita, this means a long-standing critical discourse on multiethnicity and multiple diasporas. For Kingston, this means her longtime engagement with the status of “tradition” for Asian American culture, history, and subjectivity.Not to lessen the artistic achievement of these authors and works, but one of the reasons for their success is their ability to tap into the desires of Asian American literary studies for conventions such as historical recovery, political oppositionality, the potential of coalitional politics, and the importance of a cultural vernacular. On Tang's reading, those desires have simultaneously been blinders for imagining alternative political fields, and it is the strength of her readings to open up such alternatives. For example, her rereading of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker places it in relation to both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, the latter of which is an intertextual relation hiding in plain sight. The possibility of entertaining this relationship to Warren was foreclosed in large part by our critical desires for aligning the Asian American literary-cultural project with the African American literary-cultural project. Such a reading involves a confrontation with a much more ambivalent politicization: in this case, not just an inability but a refusal on the part of Lee's Native Speaker to deliver a specific cultural vernacular for the Asian American subject. Repetition and Race is filled with wonderfully perceptive interpretations like this one, continually drawing attention to how habitual critical moves (e.g., locating the Asian American firmly by means of some interpretive, aesthetic perspective, as readings of Tropic of Orange tend to do) foreclose other ways of imagining relationships among the social, political, and aesthetic.As such, Repetition and Race is best understood within what has been called the “formalist turn” in Asian American literary studies. Scholars such as Christopher Lee, Colleen Lye, Josephine Park, Elda Tsou, Dorothy Wang, and Timothy Yu, among many others, complicate the very terms of “Asian American literature” and “Asian American representation” through aesthetics and form in order to rethink social, historical, and institutional parameters and politics. What this scholarship has broadly engaged are two fundamental impasses that structure Asian American literary studies. First is the vexed imagination of Asian American politicization, caught as it is between complicity and resistance, material prosperity and immiseration (depending on the subjects privileged), incorporation and exclusion, and woundedness and a normalized recovery. Attention to formal matters works to enlarge political engagements beyond these reductive and repetitive binaries. Second is the vexed field of reference for Asian American culture, experience, history, and identity, where differing logics for defining the field accumulate, collide, and diverge. “Asian American” may well name a “subjectless discourse,” as Kandice Chuh theorized it, but attention to aesthetics focuses on the diverse terms of political emergence, relevance, and visibility. Such impasses of differential psychic, economic, and political incorporation have been generative sites more broadly for theorizing Asian American subjectivity and history, because they have allowed critics such as Anne Cheng or erin Khuê Ninh to imagine multiple fields of subjective interpellation. Likewise, the referential uncertainty of the Asian American subject has been generative for more precise historicizations, such as Christina Klein's “cold war orientalisms” or Jodi Kim's focus on empire and militarization, to name two significant examples.Engaging with these impasses of politicization and referentiality, the formalist turn critiques reading practices that presume unproblematic correspondences between politics and representation, social experience and literary act, referent and subject in order to enlarge the fields of politicization. In Unquiet Tropes, Elda Tsou, for example, fully internalizes the problem of reference in describing an Asian Americanness characterized by its rhetorical turns. Within such a reading practice, relationships among history, experience, and politics become deeply contingent and relational, and the strategies for responding to power's effects become embedded in a different set of rhetorical possibilities. In The Semblance of Identity, Christopher Lee thinks with and against what he calls the “idealized critical subject” in order to theorize the conditions through which knowledges based in identity and consciousness are turned into political contestation (Lee 9). For Lee, attention to form sounds out our investments in identity, as well as the fractures within those investments. The formalist turn, itself representing a diverse range of reading practices and units of analysis (including trope, narrativization, sound, and poetics, among others), aims for a better historicization, to borrow Colleen Lye's meditations on “racial form.” Such a historicization suggests that there is no easy return to the progressive, oppositional Asian American subject longed for in Left or Right of the Color Line? One of the things that makes Tang's work distinctive is that her primary unit of analysis, repetition, is narrative structure and psychic drive and formal trope. Being alive to all these registers of repetition allows Tang to capture a remarkably diverse array of authorial strategies used to engage the political impasses produced by liberal multiculturalism. This critical capacity to endure within the impasse owes not a little to the powerful if understated role of psychoanalytic thought in her work. This occurs at the levels of both diagnosis and analysis. At the level of diagnosis, Tang uncovers the form of psychoanalytic common sense that generates some of the impasses in the first place: the emphasis on historical trauma and recovery; the continuity of psychic experience drawn from earlier historical moments. At the level of analysis, repetition becomes a powerful vehicle for thinking through the psychoanalytic registers that have a more complex temporality, that do not rely on a common sense of continuity or trauma but acknowledge the discontinuities that psychoanalysis is good at bringing to the surface. This is a go-to critical move for Tang: instead of calling repetition a failure, we need to go deeper into repetition; instead of disavowing psychoanalysis as a failed mode of analysis, we need a deeper understanding of psychoanalysis; instead of restoring the referent, we need to deepen our sense of referentiality.Across literary studies, the turn to aesthetics and form has encompassed a great variety of approaches: Victorian studies scholar Caroline Levine sees both literary and social forms as “ordering principles” (3); “new formalists” such as Susan Wolfson and Robert Kaufman advanced conceptions of form as modes of perception and thought; Lauren Berlant utilizes materialist notions of form drawn in part from the work of Raymond Williams in order to analyze genre, event, and affective experience. As Lye brilliantly points out, what is unique and nonderivative about this movement in Asian American studies is that, precisely because of the interdisciplinarity of the field from its start, we must engage the “heteronomy of the aesthetic,” that is, the multiple determinations on the aesthetic (92). In Tang's hands, the promises of formalist approaches include better diagnoses and engagements with the political present and the incorporations of liberal multiculturalism. But it does not seem to me that we have exhausted the turn to form. Here, for example, are three sites that could use further attention to formal matters: capital, comparativism, affect.First, a renewed attention to form and aesthetics has the potential to engage the other dominant form of absorption implied by Tang: the particular economic circuits and forms that imbricate Asian Americanness with capital. The capacity to unlock Asian American literature from any unmediated relationship to the representation of racial identity potentially opens up figuration, repetition, and the construction of our worlds of reference to old and new economic processes of accumulation, valorization, and exchange. But it also articulates relationships between Asian American fiction and economic modes of thought such as prediction, speculation, and the structuring of financial expectations. We might utilize the critical energies behind formalist projects such as Tang's in order to wonder, alongside the late Stuart Hall, whether we can think Asiatic racial logics as modalities through which processes like “capital,” “prediction,” or “speculation” are lived. Second, the ambivalent politicization of “Asian American” in relation to other racialized groups is a site of multiple models (parallel minoritization, coalitional politics, racial triangulation) but also lingering worries over the specificity of Asiatic racialization, class and economic interests, and whiteness. What would a formalist comparative race studies look like? Tang's book offers a sketch of such a possibility in moments in Repetition and Race where she resists an easy reading of Afro-Asian solidarity and looks instead to important differences between when such moments of solidarity occur and when they do not. This kind of attention to narrativization is important so as to not hypostasize such moments and, instead, to carefully read their function and effects. Third, the affective registers of racial politics remain important to understand. If one of the things that literature teaches us is how to respond to certain events, behaviors, and actions in specific ways, analyses of affect and form require each other. As any outcry over casting and over decisions about narrative diegesis in TV or film repeatedly demonstrates, affect moves in racial directions. It is the more mobile understandings of formal processes that help track and understand such affective movements.In exploring the embeddedness of Asian American literature and critical frameworks within the “repetitious logic of liberal multiculturalism,” Tang produces a powerful diagnosis of the way our present critical frameworks serve to reify a field of limited political possibilities. Like the best scholarship, Repetition and Race further imagines the critical frameworks that must attend an “Asian American literature after multiculturalism” if we are to creatively navigate and, more importantly, remake the political and institutional conditions of our present.

AbstractBoth Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) use Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to help them theorize reading practices for analyzing the interrelationships between literature and sociopolitical experience. In doing so, both disavow powerful understandings of the “social” produced across race and gender critique in African American and ethnic literary studies. This essay traces a connection backwards from Latour to the sociologist Gabriel Tarde to critiques of sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s understanding of the social and literary dimensions of “environing” critique assumptions embedded in the idea of networks, highlighting crucial experiences of being made not to act as constitutive of the social. The argument turns to brief syntheses of work by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong for models of thinking literary and social experience, suggesting that they need to be brought into these discussions of the normative values and methods of literary study. The essay concludes by reconsidering Winfried Fluck’s examination of these normative values in relation to dominant philosophies of history and questioning his assumptions about conditions of unfreedom.

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

This chapter analyzes Korematsu v. U.S. for the development of the legal doctrine of “strict scrutiny” and how it shapes racial perception. It then surveys alternate histories of World War II, focusing on those modes of storytelling that dramatize the defeat of the U.S. by Germany and Japan. The chapter isolates a particular narrative technique - the index - as it is used across both legal storytelling and alternate histories. Finally, it engages Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle as an example of an alternate history that shows the limits of our capacity to imagine an anti-racist world.

This chapter discusses alternate histories of the Civil War in relation to U.S. Equal Protection jurisprudence and race discrimination law. It shows how the racial counterfactual shapes what counts as discrimination in an important anti-affirmative action legal case, Ricci v. Destefano. In particular, it analyzes the prominent use of racial counterfactuals by the Supreme Court justices in order to organize the perception of race. It then surveys alternate histories of the U.S. Civil War and describes their logics of narrative explanation. Finally, it turns to Terry Bissons’ Fire on the Mountain and Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood as examples of a strategic use of the racial counterfactual in order to envision different understandings of racial freedom and equality.

The essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novel Never Let Me Go in the context of both fictional representations of cloning and the contemporary debates on the ethics of cloning. In certain debates human cloning has been framed primarily in terms of its effects on the parent-child relation and the family. But an investigation of arguments both for and against cloning reveals how this scenario privileges a specific normative narrative of individuation that prescribes the proper form for life. The conventions of cloning narratives highlight the role of this normative narrative in our constructions of the human. From movies like The Island to science fiction classics like Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang , these narratives betray anxieties over individuation. Never Let Me Go , on the other hand, reflects on the narrative modes that shape what it means to be human. It measures the human not in terms of some narrative of internal or immanent development but rather through the process of relating to another.

The Character of Race: Adoption and Individuation in William Faulkner’s Light in August and Charles Chesnutt’s The Quarry Mark C. Jerng (bio) “Am I not still a Negro?” Donald Glover in Charles Chesnutt’s The Quarry (1928) “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.” Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) The Adopted Child of Uncertain or Unknown race is a seldom-noticed but recurring figure that interests prominent writers such as Charles Chesnutt and William Faulkner.1 As highlighted in the epigraphs, both writers dramatize the anxieties of racial individuation—what it means to emerge as a separate and undivided entity—through their adopted orphans. Donald Glover asks “Am I not still a Negro?” when he finds out that he was adopted. Joe Christmas’s famous line about the possibility of being part-Negro—“If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time”—follows his admission that he does not know who his biological parents are. These passages use adoption to ironize the assumption that race can secure the permanence and sameness of selfhood. Here, racial identification is profoundly unsettling because it raises the problem of the continuity of self—the sameness of identity over time: “Am I not still a Negro?”; “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.” For these characters, mixed-race adoption posits that race is something that changes from one moment to the next. In Chesnutt’s novel, race may change depending on who adopts. [End Page 69] In Faulkner’s novel, Christmas’s racial identification is revealed as a fantasy about his “real” parents. The time-lag in both instances articulates the gap between the disclosure of who you are and what you are in relation to another.2 For Glover and Christmas, the inability to account for themselves to another opens up a more dynamic, interactive, and relational model for thinking about race. The time lag that marks the anxieties of individuation underlying these passages has not been adequately addressed in readings of these texts. Both Charles Chesnutt’s The Quarry and William Faulkner’s Light in August have customarily been framed in terms of racial passing, the phenomenon of light-skinned mixed-race persons who hide their black heritage and pass as white in society. Several critics notice that Donald Glover and Joe Christmas pose a unique twist to passing: the characters pass as white and pass as black, and ultimately settle, however uneasily, into a black persona.3 Whether or not one decides that Glover and Christmas choose to pass or choose not to pass, pass as white or pass as black, the theme of passing powerfully poses the social construction of race, even as it frames the problem of racial identity in terms of an individual choice.4 Passing privileges racial identity as a problem of being true to oneself, because to pass presumes that one is masquerading as something that one is not. Despite exploring how race operates as a fiction, then, narratives of passing often operate within an ethics of individual choice guided by binary assumptions of true or false identity, loyalty or betrayal. Passing stories typically end by establishing who an individual “really” is, stabilizing situations of flux and dissembling. This is why passing plots so often stage a sentimental drama of betrayal and disloyalty to one’s race. Privileging ethical implications of individual choice in passing plots misses a crucial dynamic of racial personhood because that focus assumes that race is a stable referent to which the individual can relate and that the individual is an already integrated entity. It assumes and reproduces both race and the individual as static givens. Adoption, on the other hand, disrupts these assumptions. Both Donald Glover and Joe Christmas express anxiety when confronted with their adoption because they cannot maintain unified selves insulated from external speculation and definition—that the what they are for another is never separate from who they are. The question “Am I not still a Negro?” in response to adoption reveals that one’s race is not one’s own at all...