Asian Americans as racial contagion

Abstract

ABSTRACT The convergence of racism against Asian Americans and the tightening of borders to prohibit and control the entry of Asian immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, though distressing, is not unprecedented. It is in fact a repetition of a historical pattern where exclusion or restriction of Asian immigration and racist scapegoating of Asian Americans converge and surge during periods of public health crises in the United States. Yellow Peril narratives, Orientalist tropes of ‘filthy, backward and morally depraved’ Asians, and racialized discourses about disease, migration, and belonging, which have historically played a crucial role in the cultural production of Asians as a racial contagion, have reemerged in the context of COVID-19, although the specific discursive conditions and impact are not always identical. Nonetheless, reduced to their bodies, which in turn are ethno-stigmatized (by their presumed connection with China), Chinese Americans and Asian Americans are being invested with the epidemiological properties associated with COVID-19 – infectious, contaminating the air around them, and contagious. While Asian Americans are being viewed as an embodied form of the contagion that needs to be expelled, Asian immigrants are being projected as a potential risk and as a future threat that needs to be contained. The anti-Asian racism during COVID-19 illuminates the through lines of white supremacism and virulent nativism that are integral to the foundation of the United States and its past and present imaginaries of ‘American’ national identity, culture, and security. Asian Americans are being reminded, yet again, of the precarity of their belonging within the white American nation, and their vexed condition redirects our attention to the need for a more contextualized analysis of the complicated entanglement of ideologies of liberal multiculturalism and racial capitalism with those of settler colonialism and white supremacy in the current socio-political moment.