The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities by Tara Fickle

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities by Tara Fickle Huan He (bio) The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities, by Tara Fickle. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 272 pp. $89.00 hardcover, ISBN: 9781479868551; $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479805952. If prevailing theories of Asian American racialization have been defined by labor, then Tara Fickle's The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (2019) considers how racial meaning and ideas are constituted by games and play. Fickle persuasively shows that games are not merely artifacts of leisure or entertainment (as one might assume) but reflect and shape the imaginaries of modern US race relations. Drawing from a rich archive of Asian American culture, ranging from games, literature, sociology, journalism, and visual media, The Race Card demonstrates how Asian Americans have functioned as a racial avatar for neoliberalism by encapsulating game-based ideas of fairness and deservedness through their perceived "exceptional" history as model minorities. Fickle reinterprets histories familiar to Asian American studies—such as Asian exclusion, Japanese American internment, and the model minority myth—to suggest that the ludic played a key role in these moments of racial formation. The stakes associated with racial inclusion and assimilation depended upon perceptions of Asians being not only hard workers but also hardcore gamers, stereotypes that persist into the digital present. Fickle reveals how Asian American studies is uniquely positioned to demonstrate how racialization is constituted through the logic of gaming, the technologies that "transform an imagined fiction into a social reality" and explain how "arbitrary typologies of human difference are made to feel not only real but justified in the contemporary epoch" (9). In the introduction, The Race Card offers its central concept of "ludo-Orientalism, wherein the design, marketing, and rhetoric of games shape how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced" (3). Uniting insights from critical game studies and Asian American studies, ludo-Orientalism allows the reader to understand how ludic processes constitute the contradictions most familiar to scholars of Asian American studies, such as the simultaneous embodiment of "yellow peril" and "model minority" ideas or the limits and possibilities of Asian American political identity. Racialization and identity formation are "played out both in and through games" (3), cohering the terms of agency, individualism, and representation under US liberal capitalism. Extending the work of feminist media studies scholars such as Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Tara McPherson, Fickle understands race not simply on the level of visual representation or content but as a phenomenon behind the screen, encoded within the formal logics and infrastructure of gaming itself. For this reason, the book's playful organization also embodies [End Page 515] a formal and structural experiment based on the logic of a six-sided die. An "oppositional yet complementary coherence" (22) links chapters one with six, two with five, and three with four, allowing the book to offer a historical chronology of ludo-Orientalism without fortifying any notion of racial or technological progress. These pairings structurally reveal the lasting effects of ludo-Orientalism and its role in nation-building of the United States and the "West" through the "abstract game ideals of fairness and freedom" (21), against racialized ideas of Asian difference and threat. Chapters one and six address the topic of Chinese laborers and how ludic pursuits were pathologized and/or venerated along racial lines. Chapter one examines the role of gambling in ushering in anti-Asian sentiment and laws in the nineteenth century, as depictions of Chinese gamblers were levied by exclusionists as an "affront to the 'fair play' on which U.S. democracy was ostensibly founded" (21). Challenging assumptions that notions of "inveterate gamblers" (34) only played a minor role in comparison to the rhetoric of racialized labor in exclusion debates, chapter one demonstrates that "gambling allowed both sides of the exclusion debate to discuss work and play … as two sides of the same racial character trait" (42). Fickle turns to historical and literary materials, most prominently Bret Harte's poem "The Heathen Chinee" (1870), in order to illustrate how Chinese labor was perceived...