| A key challenge in ethnic and cultural studies today comes from a political impasse and critical exhaustion in confronting the ethnic subject's identity crises, psychic ills, and traumas. How is this challenge being addressed in the spheres of Asian American and Transnational Asian literature and film in the late twentieth century? What kinds of cultural production are motivated by the desire for a practice of living politically in the face of threats to the subject posed by constrictive ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality and biopolitical techniques of control? Contagion of Living explores why Asian American and transnational Asian writers and filmmakers in the 1980s and '90s align the crisis of the subject with crises of East-West politics, emerging at the end of the Cold War and especially with the rise of China within the global capitalist economy. Insufficiency of modern institutions such as the nation-state to secure the subject's identification has precipitated new formulations of 'the ethnic subject' as mediator for transnational capitalism within studies of postcolonialism and American minority social formations. The authors discussed in Contagion of Living envision political potentiality in the very fragility of the subject that is the target of the violence of ideology and biopolitics, and claim affective experimentation as a new mode of writing the nexus of affectivity, subjectivity, and political embodiment. I explore at the level of rhetoric, genre, media and aesthetics the question of English as the global language, the bodily inhabitation of subjective tropes, and the political force of desire that always exceeds subjectivation. In four chapters, I work through four rhetorical tropes of ethnicity, which I term the turn, fold, cut, and switch. These tropes work collaboratively to show that complications of ethnic identity are precisely the place from which a new understanding of the politics of the ethnic body, beyond biopolitics, might emerge. The significance of subjectivity then lies in its potential---as a site of crisis and, thus, a site for affective experimentation---to engender new modes of embodiment. |
