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.

She 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.