Book Roundtable: Leslie Bow's Racist Love

This roundtable discussion engages the theorizations offered in the highly regarded new monograph by Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke UP 2022). In Racist Love, Bow traces how Asian Americans become objects of both anxiety and desire. Taking as her departure point Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan’s famous 1972 proclamation that “each racial stereotype comes in two models…there is racist hate and racist love,” Bow’s book charts innovative approaches to thinking about racial representation beyond straightforward assessments of “good” or “bad” representation, such as the possibilities and perils of objectification as a nexus of racial feeling and aesthetic form. In so doing, Bow probes the ambivalences of Asian American racialization to reveal how race itself is a desiring structure.

Racist Love illuminates inquiries that resonate with the terms of this year’s conference theme, “Sustainable Publics”: how do we, as Asian Americanist academics, transmit our theoretical work to the broader public, especially during a time of heightened perception around anti-Asian violence unaccompanied by a deeper understanding of Asian American history or studies? In what ways might uncritical models of “positive representation” in the public sphere serve to reify race as ornamental or a commodity for consumption? What possibilities for the politics of representation (particularly beyond the ethnographic imperative) are opened by taking seriously Racist Love’s call to interrogate structures of racial feeling? Thinking alongside Bow’s work in this new book, the invited roundtable participants will each offer 7-9 minutes of prepared, but informal, remarks on the effects and implications of the monograph for the field. In so doing, their remarks will be grounded by animating concepts that have been central to their own scholarly thinking. Bow will then respond before opening to audience Q&A.

Chair:
Michelle N. Huang (Northwestern University)

Participants:
Elizabeth J. Chin (Art Center College of Design)
Anna Storti (Duke University)
Henry E. Chen (University of Michigan)
Christine Mok (University of Rhode Island)
Vivian L. Huang (San Francisco State University)

Respondent: Leslie Bow (University of Wisconsin-Madison)