intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is located in the early pages of chapter four, which focuses on public discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to anti-Asian racism. Global catastrophes like pandemics often create a widespread sense of public panic and uncertainty. They shake social senses of security and normalcy, and as a result, not only do scientists search for solutions but a number of public narratives emerge to make sense of them as well. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the U.S. witnessed the overtly racist narrative that Asian and Asian American communities were to blame for spreading the virus, as well as public criticism that the U.S. was handling the pandemic like a “Third World country” or “failed state.” While criticism of the U.S. pandemic response is certainly warranted, this particular comparison nevertheless illustrated that the pandemic had scandalized a widespread public assumption: that “First World” nations like the U.S. are immune to these devastating disease and viral outbreaks, often imagined to be confined to faraway Asian and African countries. Page 99 discusses how these narratives function, illustrating how many public discourses around COVID-19 attempted to make sense of its social and geopolitical significance in ways that were highly racialized. Page 99 situates these narratives in larger histories and scholarship on pandemic narratives. It also argues that as public narratives attempted to make sense of COVID-19 as an imperceptible virus that moves seamlessly through human carriers, they targeted Asian and Asian American people (and their environments, such as the commentary on wet markets) as embodiments of the virus itself. As the page argues, this narrative “manages anxieties about a ‘leaking’ Third World or threatened U.S. geopolitical dominance. By associating the virus with Asian/Americans, U.S. public discourses can replace an unlocatable and unstable anxiety with a definitive object- the virus can be given a cause, blame can be assigned, and Asian/Americans can stand in as symbolic embodiments of COVID-19 itself.” (99)Visit Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's website.
Although not a perfect representation of the book in its entirety, page 99 does touch on a key idea that brings it together: racial allegory. Making the Human theorizes racial allegory as the way that media, institutional, and cultural discourses narratively mobilize Asian American difference to naturalize a limited understanding of what it means to be human. The book addresses a range of contexts and sources across law, media, and popular culture, so a reader opening the book to page 99 wouldn’t know that the book also considers narratives of “justice” and “meritocracy” in the recent SCOTUS battle over affirmative action in chapter three, or that chapter two talks about gendered representations of Asian American families and mothering in popular film. Nevertheless, they would see the larger concept of racial allegory at play, namely in the discussion of how pandemic narratives are as much about power as they are about health. Making the Human is interested in how Asian Americans appear as key narrative figures in the stories we tell about social phenomena, including COVID-19: what are Asian Americans doing in these stories, and what do they represent? What value judgements do these stories use Asian Americans to imply, and what hierarchies do they implicitly normalize as a result? In the case of COVID-19, Asian Americans are framed as disease-ridden carriers, as conspiratorial agents of the Chinese nation state, as the specter of a supposedly backwards “Third World,” as indicators of U.S. national decline, and more. All of these stories are doing work: to shore up U.S. exceptionalism, to stoke fears of a geopolitically powerful Chinese nation-state, to resecure the boundaries of the (white) national body, and so forth. Other chapters focus on different narratives: for example, how the SCOTUS battle over affirmative action cast Asian Americans as studious, innocent, and victimized citizens, which then did the work of reframing age-old anti- Black backlash to affirmative action in the supposedly “anti-racist” language of defending Asian Americans. So, like the other chapters, this chapter illustrates that it is not only important to name a narrative as a racist stereotype, but also to understand what symbolic and material work that narrative is doing to normalize (or challenge) larger hierarchies.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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