Making the Human

Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans

By Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

SERIES: Asian American Studies Today

Rutgers University Press

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.

What are the consequences of understanding 'Asian American' as a term wrapped up in carceral warfare, antiblackness, coloniality, and extraction? Positioning the figure of the 'Asian American' within a Civilizational project that imagines, institutionalizes, and enforces Western 'Man,' Making the Human demystifies the de facto liberalism embedded in dominant racial categories—and of 'anti-racism' itself. Dylan Rodríguez, professor in the departments of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Califo

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s book is an expansive, ambitious examination of how Asian/Americans are constructed through racial allegory. In this tour de force, Sugino artfully analyzes the rhetoric of 'Asian/American' as fetish, disease vector, carceral subject, and victimized college applicant across popular discourse, film, and the law to construct 'Western Man'. It’s a must-read for scholars interested in the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetoric, and race. David C. Oh, author of Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture

CORINNE MITSUYE SUGINO is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Love and Intimacy: Race, Exoticism, and ‘Asian Fetish’
Chapter 2: Family and Mothering: Multicultural Redemption and Gendered Racial Logics in Crazy Rich Asians
Chapter 3: Discrimination and Justice: Asian Americans and Anti-Blackness in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
Chapter 4: Person/Nationhood: Anti-Asian Racism Amidst COVID-19
Chapter 5: Carcerality: Entangling Categories of Asian American Racialization
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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