The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America addresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or social construction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engaging novels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. and internationally-- such as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me Go or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of Body Worlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons-- Rachel C. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthuman ecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. She unpacks how the designation of "Asian American" itself is a mental construct that is paradoxically linked to the biological body.

Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard for reading Asian American texts, Lee inaugurates a new avenue of research on biosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on the literary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergent scales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects. Lee establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy between Asian 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 with speculative and real changes to human biologies, she both produces innovation within the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to other disciplines.

Author: Rachel C. Lee
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 12/05/2014
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781479809783

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2015 pg. 1486

About the Author
Lee, Rachel C.: - Rachel C. Lee is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, co-editor of the volume Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, and editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture.