The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America : Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies / Rachel C. Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Rachel C., 1966- Author.

Series:

Sexual cultures.

Sexual Cultures ; 16

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Asian Americans--Social conditions.

Body image--United States.

Human body--United States.

Prejudices--United States.

Asian Americans--Social conditions--United States.

Human body.

Local Subjects:

Asian Americans--Social conditions.

Body image--United States.

Human body--United States.

Prejudices--United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (336 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : New York University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural StudiesThe Exquisite Corpse ofAsian Americaaddresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or socialconstruction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists,authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engagingnovels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. andinternationally—such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s science fiction novel Never Let MeGo or Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of BodyWorlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons—RachelC. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthumanecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. Sheunpacks how the designation of “Asian American” itself is a mental constructthat is paradoxically linked to the biological body.Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard forreading Asian American texts, Lee inaugurates a new avenue of research onbiosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on theliterary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergentscales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects.She establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy betweenAsian American studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), biocultures,medical humanities, and femiqueer approaches to family formation, carework,affect, and ethics. In pursuing an Asian Americanist critique concerned withspeculative and real changes to human biologies, she both produces innovationwithin the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to otherdisciplines.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Parts/parturition

1. How a critical biopolitical studies lens alters the questions we ask vis-à-vis race

2. The Asiatic, acrobatic, and aleatory biologies of cheng-chieh yu’s dance theater

3. Pussy ballistics and peristaltic feminism

4. Everybody’s novel protist: chimeracological entanglements in amitav ghosh’s fiction

5. A sideways approach to mental disabilities: incarceration, kinesthetics, affect, and ethics

6. Allotropic conclusions: propositions on race and the exquisite corpse

Tail piece

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

1-4798-1374-5

OCLC:

896492858