REVIEW
Review of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America:
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C.
Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
Cynthia Wu
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
cw229@buffalo.edu
How might an analytic that foregrounds race inform
prevailing concepts of the biological? This is the question that
undergirds Rachel C. Lee’s ambitious and playful recent book. Lee
convincingly shows that an Asian Americanist critique in science and
technology studies (STS) and an analytic that takes seriously the
biological in critical race and ethnic studies is not far-fetched. The
mutual constitution of these strains of thought is absolutely necessary
in order to understand the present’s ongoing
structural disparities. The antiracist critiques that have issued from
both in and outside of the academy in the past few generations have
rightfully undermined biological explanations for racial difference
that were birthed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific
racism. Indeed, the weight of our contemporary understandings about US
structural inequalities rests on a tacit separation between the
biological and the racial; the state and its collusion with capital,
not genetic differences, are what create inequality. These
interventions of the past were, and continue to be, productive, to be
sure, which is why Lee’s book, which proposes to rethink the place of
the biological in critiques of racially inflected power, is bold.
Lee demonstrates how modernity’s exercise of power is
both biopolitical and necropolitical and that the specificities of its
deployment are defined by a history of colonialism and racial
classification. Modern states are, by and large, produced and motivated
as well by the selective generation of death, however much we might
want to distinguish them thusly from older forms of governance. This
parceling of life into bios—that
is, life that entails protection or recognition, and zoe, or bare life not thusly
protected and recognized—is at the heart of broader concepts of what it
means to be human. This distinction is defined along racial lines as
well as in ways specific to gender, sexuality, colonial subject status,
and ability status. Although it may be understandable to assert a
reactionary claim to human-ness (and a corresponding disavowal of the
nonhuman) for those who do not currently possess it, Lee insists that a
more enabling goal “intervenes into zoe-fication
by adopting a hospitable regard toward the intertwinement of nonhuman
and human populations” (p. 48). The hallmark of the regulation of life
in contemporary times might be readily understood as that which subtly
but coercively “makes live.” However, a corresponding dynamic
occurs, too, where the denial of life is not merely relegated to an
unintentional side effect of the state’s (selectively directed)
life-giving actions. Lee argues that, in order to redress disparities
between rights-bearing and non-rights-bearing life forms, we must
dismantle the conceptual barriers that have historically distinguished
them from each other. In short, we must put an end to the separation
between the human and the nonhuman.
Lee’s book thus presents deftly argued and almost
kinesthetically-imposing close readings of contemporary cultural
productions that launch an Asian Americanist critique of transnational
capital, distribution of resources, and regulatory mechanisms informing
gender, sexual, and ability comportment. From the fragmented bodies in
the poetry of Lois-Ann Yamanaka, the dance of Cheng-Chieh Yu, the
fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, the comedy of Margaret Cho, or the
performance art of Denise Uyehara, the privileging of the part over
Enlightenment-descended concepts of the whole prevails. The
cross-species intimacies suggested by Ruth Ozeki, Amitav Ghosh, and
others implore us to recognize that much of the havoc wrought by
colonialist, neo-colonialist, and/or neoliberal forces can be explained
and undone by a critical framework that de-centers the human.
Throughout these examples, Lee puts the disparate sources of her
archive into coherent, complementary (but also productively frictive)
conversation about the creation of interfaces among differing
categories of biological life produced by modernity.
For instance, Lee effectively shows that narratives about
disjointed or denigrated corporealities—even when they are not
explicitly about race, as in the example of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go—carry with them the
racial registers with which we are familiar. Presumably racially
neutral figures are the providers of somatic, life-sustaining parts
without being able to occupy the uncomplicated position of their
recipients. When they do enter that charmed circle, Asian-raced
subjects can mitigate the surveillance that coerces sanctioned models
of health. Moreover, they can call out the very biopolitical project
itself on an aggregate scale. These interventions take the form of
unsettlingly queer, feminist, and crip articulations, such as in Yu’s My Father’s Teeth in My Mother’s Mouth
or Uyehara’s Big Head.
Lee’s book also makes an indirect, yet provocative,
statement about form. The exquisite corpse signaled in her book’s
title—based on the form originally called cadavre exquis by writers like
Andre Breton in the early twentieth century—is a jointly-composed poem
created among multiple authors, each composing one line after the
previous contributor has laid and hidden theirs. The final product
bears the characteristics of its idiosyncratic fusion. Similarly, in
Lee’s book each chapter attaches itself to the next not in terms of
chronology or other transparent ordering logic but through thematic
resonance. Rather than place an acknowledgements section preceding the
narrative proper, Lee appends to the conclusion what she entitles a
“Tail Piece” that performs that and other functions, asking “Can an
epilogue mark a becoming rather than an ending?” (p. 256). In these
ways, the book is performative. It does what it says as it
embraces nonlinearity and fragmentation in its composition.
The one question with which I am left after reading The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America
is not specific to the book itself. It is one I pose to the recent and
not-so-recent trends alike in the fields of STS, critical race and
ethnic studies, queer theory, and gender studies that propose a
politics of non-hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman. In a
different context, I had asked it of Mel Chen’s (2012) Animacies, and we can ask it,
too, of older texts in this tradition, such as Donna Haraway’s (1991)
iconic Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
In calls to cast away the stifling separations between the human and
the nonhuman, are we overlooking how this imperative might be
politically enabling to differential extents for those who do and do
not already have full human status? Who can and cannot afford to make
these boundaries permeable?
To be sure, Lee is careful to acknowledge that her
proposition to embrace cross-species relationships is not the exclusive
provenance of the elite, academic Asian Americanist left. Her stance is
not purportedly “more ‘advanced’… in comparison to articulations that
prioritize social justice on behalf of those human-animals” (p. 50)
subjugated by the forces of racism and colonialism. As she recognizes,
some populations, such as people with disabilities and indigenous
people, have always respected the porosity between the human and the
nonhuman. Still, I wonder if the social location of the speaker,
specific to time and place, matters in these appeals for a
non-hierarchy among species. Whose words carry more weight when making
these claims? Is the posthuman turn ultimately most efficacious for
those whose human-ness has already been recognized? Is the renunciation
of a charmed status associated with the human more earth shattering—or,
at the very least, practical or affordable—for some than for others at
the present time?
Lee asks us to consider the myriad ways in which “Asian Americans
ruminate over their bodies and body parts as sites of governmentality
and norming” and provide “living testaments to the organism’s
resilience and unpredictability in expressing biopolitical agency” (p.
101). My hope is that the book will inspire further experiments with
form as well as further experiments in cross-fertilization between STS
and Asian American studies.
References
Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies:
Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians,
cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York/London:
Routledge.
Lee, R. (2014). The exquisite corpse
of Asian America: Biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies.
New York: New York University Pres.
Bio
Cynthia Wu is an
associate professor of American studies in the Department of
Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She is the
author of Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture (Temple, 2012).