Biopower, Space, and Race in Asian American Studies

Three recent books explore the interdisciplinary connections between, respectively, spatial politics, biopolitics, and Afro-Asian dynamics in Asian American literature and culture. Xiaojing Zhou explores the poetics and politics of space in Asian American urban literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Rachel Lee interrogates how a biopolitical framework can reorient the ways the field of Asian American studies approaches race, and in turn what Asian American cultural productions can tell us about biopolitics. Crystal Anderson analyzes the outcomes of Afro-Asian cultural interactions within the contemporary moment in fiction and popular culture. All three books are in dialogue with a recent ensemble of Asian American discourses, practices, and cultural productions that tacitly underline how Asian American culture and criticism are about more than recognition, inclusiveness, and representation. This review begins with an assessment of all three books and then segues into a conjoined attempt to apply these interpretive approaches...