Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Abstract

Scholars producing historical scholarship on race must confront and acknowledge the archives as a site of racialization themselves. How do we fight the colonialist and imperialist imperatives of history when the goals of its structures are to naturalize certain hierarchies of race? How do we negotiate our reliance on archives that often only included racialized subjects through lenses of suspicion? Is it possible, in other words, for a history of the racialized body to speak differently? A Race So Different, by Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, and The Racial Mundane, by Ju Yon Kim, suggest that performance studies offers alternatives.Chambers-Letson’s book organizes itself around the law, while Kim’s book is organized around the everyday, but both use performance studies to explore the contested territory of Asian American historical subjectivity. History relies disproportionally on extant materials, which in turn tend to amplify narratives that state power sanctions and codifies. In contrast, performance studies is capable of taking up key sites of analysis that routinely evade historical scholarship. This interdisciplinary field attends to texts that historical practice often ignores. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) Diana Taylor underscores how performance studies insists that embodied knowledge be recognized as historical knowledge.1 The performance repertoire can thus be understood as a repository of knowledge outside the written records of the archive.Attending to racialization specifically, Chambers-Letson and Kim use performance to pay closer attention to the body, its everyday behaviors, and the accumulation of minutiae that both buttress history and often escape history’s analysis. These scholars focus both on ways of being and speaking that may contravene the archive’s internal logics of racialization and on how the differential attention given to certain everyday practices serves as a key instrument of racialization.2 Rather than being beholden to archives, which often reflect the racializing processes of states and other institutions, Chambers-Letson and Kim find insights in embodied actions that transmit personal and community memories. They read how the body performs itself and turn the body into a site of analysis. Doing so describes particular techniques of racialization and investigates the repertoire of the body the archive elides and cannot account for.Asian American racialization provides an apt avenue to understanding state racism and archive formation because of how entangled Asian American subject formation is with the formation of US national identity. Scholars of Asian American cultural production have underscored how the boundaries of US national sovereignty were negotiated through the varying pronouncements of exclusion and inclusion of Asian American bodies into the national body politic.3 Moreover, this process is formed through the simultaneous and interrelated processes of aesthetic representations and legal negotiations of the Asian American body. In particular, Colleen Lye cautions that isolated analyses of aesthetic regimes or legal regimes fail to render a cohesive understanding of these interrelated forces of racialization.4Chambers-Letson’s book takes up performance as a condensed site of racial meaning making where the legal and the aesthetic meet. He notes that “the law . . . is a process that comes to life through the interplay of juridical performativity and embodied action: the law’s realization is inextricable from the performance of law” (rsd, 2).5 He also underscores how this process placed unique pressure and scrutiny on Asian American subjects as “the law does more than project this curious juridical status onto Asian American bodies; it calls on the Asian American subject to perform in a fashion that confirms his or her exceptional racial subjectivity” (rsd, 5).Kim, on the other hand, takes up performance to put heightened pressure on the relationship between the racial and the mundane. She notes how racialization and the surveillance of racialized bodies, situations, gestures, and realities create performances out of the ordinary: “The motions of the body throughout a day are innumerable, and not every gesture becomes racially representative. The racial frame instead captures certain mannerisms and behaviors, and in doing so draws them closer to the marked body while also turning their relationship into a question” (rm, 9). The coherence of these individuals as racial subjects depends on their adherence to racial norms, and in turn these racial norms make actions that deviate from those norms suspect.Using the framework of performance studies, Chambers-Letson and Kim provide novel accounts of the historical contours of Asian American subject formation and its contradictions. They trace how Asian American racial norms are constituted through performance and performativity over time. Where they both stumble is in their sweeping use of the term Asian American without clarification or complication. Despite engaging with the history of Asian American subject formation, they both avoid defining their own understandings of the boundaries of the “Asian American” and fail to acknowledge the historical specificity of the term’s emergence in the late 1960s as well as the subsequent ethnic heterogeneity associated with it.6 As such, in this absence, their texts cohere sometimes anachronistic, sometimes exclusionary, notions of Asian Americanness, which runs counter to Taylor’s call to use performance studies to decenter the US hegemony on the production of knowledge.7 For Taylor, one of the major possibilities of performance studies is its ability to remap the borders of knowledge, so that we are compelled to think differently about the epistemological boundaries of our very categories.This decentering of knowledge hegemonies has particular salience for Asian American scholarship. Monolithic narrations of Asian Americanness avoid confronting the complexity of the migration throughout the Asian and American continents and of the transpacific relationship between the various geographies. Sedimented layers of war, imperialism, and other violence connect and fracture populations and geographies throughout Asia, which can get easily lost when the constructed nature of a term such as Asian American goes unacknowledged. The strife between Asian ethnic groups gets erased, often in ways that reproduce violent hierarchies. Therefore, though Chambers-Letson’s and Kim’s usage of performance studies constructs theoretical frameworks that more readily capture the myriad ways that racial knowledge codified differential embodiments, their frameworks may have implications their own texts leave unacknowledged.Chambers-Letson and Kim primarily organize their analyses of the intersections of Asian American subject formation and performance chronologically. They have a capacious understanding of performance and analyze a wide array of sources. Together, they read stage scripts, theater productions, audience reception, novels, memoirs, media displays, scrapbooks, photography, legal arguments and transcripts, and musical performances. This broad understanding of performance casts a necessarily wide net to excavate the multifaceted ways performance and racialization intersect. However, the overarching organization for their analyses still relies heavily on a linear chronology.For instance, both Chambers-Letson and Kim begin with cultural objects from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—long before the term Asian American was coined in 1968.8 Chambers-Letson opens with an analysis of Madame/Madama Butterfly. While Madama Butterfly is routinely analyzed in Asian American studies, Chambers-Letson’s analysis of Giacomo Puccini’s opera (1903) is unique in its pairing with two predecessors: John Luther Long’s 1898 novella and the play Long and David Belasco later adapted for Broadway. Throughout his reading of the gendered and racialized positions in which Cio-Cio-San is constructed, Chambers-Letson notes how the law permeates all three versions of the narrative and how it undergirds the precarious position in which Cio-Cio-San finds herself during an era in which the United States excluded Asian persons—and Asian women especially—from both presence and citizenship within its borders.Similarly, Kim begins her project with an analysis of an early twentieth-century text that predates the circulation of the term Asian American and its attendant political consciousness. She begins her analysis of the inherently racialized nature of the mundane with a comparison of J. Harry Benrimo and George C. Hazelton Jr.’s Yellow Jacket (1912) to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938). Benrimo and Hazelton’s play was billed as a “Chinese Drama Played in [the] Chinese Manner” and was a racial masquerade produced in yellowface (rm, 38). In contrast, Thornton’s play is considered a quintessentially American production that stages “ordinary” life through its dramatic rendering of an early twentieth-century New England town. Kim connects the two plays through their formal elements, whose parallels suggest that Thornton took inspiration from Benrimo and Hazelton’s earlier play. But whereas The Yellow Jacket is deliberately presented as a foreign experience, Our Town attempts to underscore the universal rather than particular mundanity of the story.A turn to apply the term Asian American retroactively is not necessarily anachronistic if we understand these texts as genealogical readings connecting present-day racial realities to (1) the continued circulation of these objects and (2) the accumulation of racial knowledge over time. Both these chapters suggest such readings with endings that turn to recent productions of these early twentieth-century texts. Chambers-Letson highlights a recent 2006 Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly. He notes that the circulation of these aesthetic productions continues to reproduce, organize, and justify racial hierarchies and imperial relationships between Asia and the United States. In addition, Kim focuses on a Harlem high school production of Our Town. Here the racial makeup of the high school and the realities of the students’ everyday lives in New York City accentuate the particularities of the play’s rural New England life. As such, this contrast challenges the play’s universalisms and claims to ordinary American life.Nonetheless, neither Chambers-Letson nor Kim explicitly claims these orientations to understand the historical trajectory of Asian Americanness. They have a long view of the twentieth century’s production of Asian Americanness, but neither defines the term Asian American. In failing to do so, they risk reproducing a standard narrative of Asian American experience and history—one that, for example, imagines Asian American history as beginning only with Chinese immigration to the US West in the nineteenth century, centers the United States in its analysis of Asian Americanness, privileges the experiences of Chinese and Japanese immigrant settlers to the United States, and ignores the much more complicated realities of Asian migration to the Americas.9 As such, the lack of explicit acknowledgment or explanation creates uncertainty about how they delineate the boundaries of their own racial imaginaries.Chambers-Letson’s second chapter on reparative justice and Ping Chong’s Chinoiserie (1995) also refuses to critique Asian American racialization’s own internal contradictions even as it puts forward a critique of Asian American subjectivity’s complicated and unstable position in the US national imaginary. Chinoiserie is a transhistorical piece that confronts multiple moments of cross-racial masquerade, historical violence, and the terms of justice. Chong’s piece begins with the Boston Tea Party, an inciting moment for US national mythos, but whose particular details, such as the colonists’ masquerade in Native American garb, are often erased. Other historical scenes of implicit racial meaning making, such as the famous Promontory Point photo that memorialized the completion of the transcontinental railroad without acknowledging the labor of Chinese railroad workers, are also restaged.Throughout Chong’s piece, performances are deliberately and conspicuously presented through cross-racial casting, demanding that the audience confront their own racial imaginaries around potential perceptions of the actors’ mismatched embodiments and performances. In the final scenes, black actress Aleta Hayes performs the role of Lily Chin, the mother of hate-crime victim Vincent Chin. Hayes’s performance recalls other black mothers grieving for their children murdered under white supremacy, but it also refracts the audience’s expectations of Lily Chin’s racial embodiment through both Hayes’s body’s (lack of) specific racial markers as well as her fluency and (lack of) accent.Chambers-Letson’s analysis of Chinoiserie argues that an audience’s or an individual’s own racial knowledge and own excavation of the history of racial violence is imperative for the attainment of reparative justice for the future. This reparative justice relies on the ability to coherently interpellate Hayes as Lily Chin and understand the complex and interconnected histories of racial violence, which in turns depends on the audience’s own racial knowledge. However, Chambers-Letson’s challenge of racial meanings across categories is forefronted in this chapter to the detriment of an analysis of how racial boundaries themselves cohere. He analyzes Chinoiserie as an attempt to dissolve the boundaries of racial association with the Asiatic versus other racial associations, but that project presumes prior separations of these racial categories. In contrast, other racial systems, such as the interconnected racialization of Asian slaves and indigenous peoples in colonial Mexico, lack the clear delineations Chambers-Letson presumes.10 Therefore, when Chambers-Letson leaves his own historical understanding of what constitutes the Asian American open, it also leaves open the question of what constitutes “cross-racial” embodiment.The middle chapters of Chambers-Letson’s and Kim’s books continue to take on historical moments of Asian American subject formation to challenge normative understandings. Chambers-Letson approaches the history of Japanese incarceration during World War II through two perspectives. The first is in “Pledge of Allegiance: Performing Patriotism in the Japanese American Concentration Camps.” In this chapter Chambers-Letson confronts the peculiar forms of patriotism required under the strict surveillance of these concentration camps and the possibility for negotiation and resistance to these prescribed performances. Using oral histories, personal records, and memorabilia from the concentration camps, Chambers-Letson traces how the ethnically Japanese body in the United States, under the surveilling gaze of the state, created an environment that both required and made suspect pronouncements and performances of US patriotism.However, Chambers-Letson is careful not to universalize any expression or performance of patriotism and racial identification, instead stressing the complexity of this negotiation of race and citizenship. The chapter ends with a reading of Frank and Arthur Emi, two brothers who refused to answer the final two questions on a loyalty survey distributed to all incarcerated Japanese persons. The questions demanded that Japanese Americans agree to serve in the US military and to foreswear allegiance to Japan. In both their refusal to answer the questions and their subsequent testimonies, the brothers continuously affirmed the illegality of the questions. Their performances before and of the law refuse the posturing of both the subjugated minority citizen and the racialized citizen-traitor. They produce relationships to the law that state power neither sanctions nor anticipates. As such, despite the omnipresence of surveillance and discipline in the concentration camps, their actions demonstrate “the disruptive political power of such performances” (rsd, 132).Chambers-Letson’s second chapter addressing Japanese incarceration during the war attends to performances of solidarity, community making, and narratives beyond and outside the logics of state racialization. To do so, this chapter analyzes Moriyuki Shimada’s scrapbook of photographs from his time at Heart Mountain. This scrapbook directly contravened the government’s proscription of photography by Japanese camp inmates. Contrasting Shimada’s scrapbook to the surveillance apparatus of the camps, Chambers-Letson traces and articulates how ephemera and marginalia suggest different understandings of the social, communal, and affective ties that structured life in the camps. These images and the notes the inmates wrote each other demonstrate how these subjects imagined visions beyond and outside the purviews of the state, opening up utopian imaginaries in the subject’s present as well as for their own collective futures.In comparison, Kim focuses on racial assimilation into a white body politic through the postwar experiences of Japanese war brides and the post-incarceration resettlement of Japanese persons in both the United States and Canada. Kim addresses the pressure to conform to hegemonic norms and ultimately to disappear one’s racial difference through the reorganization of everyday life, and how refusing those pressures serves as a means of resistance. Kim reads Velina Hasu Houston’s drama Tea (1987) and Joy Kogawa’s novel Itsuka (1992) through the lens of both performance and ritual studies to underscore how ritual can interrupt state-initiated and culturally sanctioned dispersal of Japanese American racial difference in the postwar era.11Itsuka follows a Japanese Canadian woman’s sometimes ambivalent participation in organizing for redress of Japanese incarceration from the Canadian government. Tea dramatizes the memorial that a dispersed community of war brides in Junction City, Kansas, holds after one commits suicide. Kim’s focus on the mundane demonstrates how repetition is not always mimetic but instead may herald the production of alternative futures. Itsuka and Tea confront the imperative both to assimilate and to disappear into a white body politic through the disciplining of mundane behaviors. The texts demonstrate, however, that ritual practice in the everyday can be a deliberate choice to refuse such assimilation.Having deep and detailed engagement with the many facets of an ethnic community under the umbrella of Asian America demonstrates the specificity of the multiple arrangements of people’s mundane lives and their complex negotiations of racial meaning making. Even more, both Chambers-Letson and Kim are committed to demonstrating insights that performance studies can bring to the analysis of historical events and cultural objects. However, these chapters also continue to reinforce a standard narrative of Asian American chronology. Here the focus on Japanese incarceration in their middle chapters suggests that the experiences of a single ethnic group stands in for the formation of all Asian Americans at midcentury.Such a narrative fails to acknowledge the complicated appeals to national belonging that occurred during and after the war period among other national-ethnic groups. The repeal of the long-standing immigration exclusion of other Asian ethnic groups—notably permitting Chinese, Indian, and Filipinx immigration to the United States—occurred either during or immediately after World War II.12 The state’s differing treatments of these various Asian-origin ethnic groups suggests that Asian American political and historical subject formation at midcentury was far more contentious and complex than either Chambers-Letson’s or Kim’s texts account for, given their explorations of exclusively Japanese American and Japanese Canadian negotiations of World War II and its aftermath.In the ending chapters of their books, Chambers-Letson and Kim tackle a range of topics, representing some of the multiplicitous issues, geographies, and subjects that make up Asian America as both population and attention increases. Chamber-Letson’s final chapter addresses how the law performs and, as such, creates the framework through which documented versus undocumented immigration is discussed and the terms by which certain bodies are rendered “illegal.” This chapter centers on the transnational Cambodian American band Dengue Fever and its frontwoman, Chhom Nimol, an undocumented resident from Cambodia. In Dengue Fever’s performances of a mix of their own music and covers from the vibrant Cambodian rock scene of the 1970s, they contest the historical and political amnesia that attempts to absolve the United States of its participation in the imperial wars in Southeast Asia. The band flouts demands for authentic performances or cultural mimeticism, refusing the deference that states and the legal system require for “authentication.”Performance, here as in all Chambers-Letson’s examples, acknowledges the structuring capacity of the law but, by understanding the law as a performance, recounts how agents can challenge the law through their own performances. The law becomes itself through the various ways subjects enact and interact with the law: statements, repetitions, enforcements, and refusals. I reiterate Chambers-Letson’s explanation of the law as a product of performance, as quoted earlier: “The law . . . is a process that comes to life through the interplay of juridical performativity and embodied action” (rsd, 2). In other words, the law is produced through its performances as much as it is codified in its texts. Such an understanding opens up alternative ways for subjects to engage with the law—to recognize that subjects produce the law in their engagements with it. As such, rather than assessing Dengue Fever through the definitions of national belonging the United States has mandated, Chambers-Letson situates the band as a product of political violence and imperial war and its performances as attempts to excavate a past filled with the brutalities of US violence in Southeast Asia.Kim’s final two body chapters address the entanglements of racial and economic oppression. Her third chapter confronts the friction that arises when competing understandings of mundane behavior clash under the constraints of structural poverty. This chapter pairs Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, on the events leading up to and in response to Rodney King’s beating, and Elizabeth Wong’s Kimchee and Chitlins (1990) on the boycott of Korean grocery stores in New York City. The dramatizations of interethnic conflict trace the accumulative effects both of everyday interactions and of systematized race-based economic oppression. Kim articulates how interferences in cross-cultural understanding alongside the stress that deliberately impoverished communities are placed under ignite deep tensions and violence between racial and ethnic communities. However, she is also careful to note that this tension diverts scrutiny away from the structures and institutions that control the flow of resources and capital to these communities.Moreover, this chapter underscores the possibilities performance implies for knowing differently. In her analysis of the actors’ performances, Kim notes multiple moments wherein performers fail to convincingly inhabit the everyday mannerisms of the people they intend to be. For instance, Smith communicates the words of different witnesses of the aftermath of the King beating while acting as and embodying their persons. Often, she fails to fully mimic the voices, accents, and gestures of her interlocutors. Nonetheless, Kim does not write off these attempts as imperfect artistry so much as characterize them as part of the process of knowing the self and the process of racialization differently: “Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins tentatively propose . . . that attempting to play the mundane of others may lead the body to believe differently” (rm, 171). Practicing the body of another—any other, Kim proposes—may be a means of articulating and learning the knowledges of others, even if the body fails to do so with fluency.In her final body chapter, “Homework Becomes You: The Model Minority and Its Doubles,” Kim traces the multiple forms of doubling of the Asian American subject, which reflect the economic, political, and social stratifications internal to the Asian American community. This chapter places Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) against readings of Lauren Yee’s play Ching Chong Chinaman (2007) and Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). The doublings in all these texts reflect the doubled forms of typical Asian American racialization, split between the model minority and yellow peril. The protagonists of these various texts are embedded in the economic comforts of their class positions and their material, if tentative, attachments to US national belonging. However, to create overtures of racial belonging, these characters also attempt to forge attachments to racial authenticity through the appropriation of working-class and immigrant hardship narratives.This identification, however, is always conflicting. Despite Chua’s—and other economically privileged characters’—identification with the spirit of immigrant work ethic, Chua makes an effort to distance herself from the habits of these stereotypical embodiments of Asian immigrant behaviors, as such behaviors jeopardize her status as part of the US body politic. Kim writes, “While praised for being hard-working and self-reliant, the model minority can never be American, but can only mimic Americanness, performing it badly, partially, or so well that the performance elicits incredulity” (rm, 189). The doubling of the model minority and perpetual foreigner is shown to be more complicated and more intertwined than the myth of immigrant assimilation would attest. The model minority is therefore just another form of perpetual foreignness. Ultimately, Kim draws out these tensions not to disintegrate the collectivizing gestures of these racial imaginaries but to caution against erasing these differences in attempts to construct political solidarity. Addressing these differences is vital to Asian American politics because “differences must be confronted not to dismantle affiliations, but to redefine them” (rm, 229). Here Kim acknowledges the problem of Asian American multiplicity even as her own book reproduces a narrative of Asian American subjectivity that erases some of this multiplicity.In the latter portions of their books, Chambers-Letson and Kim explore the fragmented multitudes that make up Asian American subjectivity and attempt to theorize frameworks to approach this multiplicity. From Dengue Fever’s refusal to perform strict notions of authenticity and enact appeals to enter the protected confines of legal immigration to failed or doubled identifications with others, Chambers-Letson and Kim present a complicated understanding of Asian Americanness in recent history. This emphasis on embodiment and multiplicity shows performance studies’ insights into the question of racialization and Asian American subject formation. For instance, Chambers-Letson’s analysis of the musical career of Dengue Fever and Nimol articulates how individuals can reject embodying the (trans)national subject positions that states and immigration structures conscript people into. Moreover, Kim’s analysis of the performative production of the model minority underscores how subjects’ attempts to negotiate their own racial identities produce contradictions that highlight the vast heterogeneity of economic and political access in the category of “Asian American.” However, a self-reflexive application of this approach to their examinations of earlier eras might have further strengthened their analyses.Performance studies demands that we expand our understanding of who or what speaks beyond traditional textual sources. Through a performance framework, Chambers-Letson and Kim more readily capture the everyday moments that, in their accumulation, scaffold history. Archives and other traditional sources for history often overlook the repetition and foundation that ritual, custom, and other implicit embodied knowledges provide even though, as the books argue, they serve as dense sites of racialization and racial knowledge making. Through these analyses Chambers-Letson and Kim illustrate that the Asian American subject is a contingent site of contestation.Where both Chambers-Letson and Kim might have delved more deeply, however, is in investigating or even acknowledging the larger incoherences and contradictions in Asian American subject formation. They both skirt the construction of Asian American as a racial category. They elide the history of the term and sometimes apply it anachronistically to eras of racial categorization before the term emerged into everyday usage, much less acquired its contemporary density of meanings. This failure to name their own imaginaries of Asian Americanness has reproduced the standard narrative of Asian American experience and history, although both authors call for a greater understanding of the multiplicity of Asian American subjectivity. The books, taken together, reproduce the familiar litany of Chinese exclusion, Japanese incarceration, war brides, wars in Southeast Asia, and entrepreneurship and interracial conflict. The inclusion of Filipinx, Pacific Islander, and South and Southeast Asian subjects is sporadic. The geographic boundaries of Asian America end at the southern border of the United States. This litany’s consolidation of a monolithic narrative risks ignoring the tension and violence between various groups underneath the umbrella of Asian American and how these conflicts also perpetuate the consolidation of power under whiteness.If performance studies can inform our understanding of who or what speaks on the history of race, understanding how our own scholarship performs certain solidarities while reproducing other exclusionary understandings of racialization is a critical area for self-reflexive scrutiny. Chambers-Letson and Kim both model the possibilities and specific insights that understanding race through the lens of performance allows for Asian American studies. Our task now may be to build on the foundation they have laid to see how attending to what performances say can help us shift our scholarly attentions. As scholars, we must continue to excavate Asian American subject formation, which in its multiplicitous reality challenges the epistemological boundaries of Asian American experience and history.Thank you to Evyn Lê Espiritu and Rachel Lim, whose comments and careful reading were essential to this review.