Racial Mundane

Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies AssociationAcross the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.

A beautifully written and original discussion of Asian American performance and the politics of the everyday. The Racial Mundaneillustrateshow Asian Americans, whether historically marginalized or celebrated as model minorities, have come into the public eye, and will surely open up important new dialogues on Asian American culture and racial representation., Impressive and compelling,The Racial Mundanedefamiliarizes everyday behaviors in order to expose the racial formation of Asian Americans. In this beautifully rendered, standout book, Ju Yon Kimbreaks new ground, opening the theoretical framework of race and performance in original and exciting ways., Kims methodology throughout reminds us that scholarship is its own practice and the 'theoretical elasticity'demonstrated in these studies highlights the complexity of Asian American cultural works and their unfolding critical praxis.

Ju Yon Kim is an Associate Professor of English at Harvard University.