Asian, Adjacent: Utopian Longing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco Elysium
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Published:April 2024
Takeo Rivera, 2024. "Asian, Adjacent: Utopian Longing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco Elysium", Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, Christopher B. Patterson, Tara Fickle
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Chapter 3 examines the video game Disco Elysium with respect to “Asian adjacency,” the strategic utilization of tangential Asianness to negotiate political futurity. Principally, this essay focuses attention on the game’s deuteragonist, an Asian diasporic man named Kim Kitsuragi, a figure marked by hypercompetence but aggressively assimilationist in his diasporic outlook. What Kitsuragi provides is less a yellow perilist counterpoint to white interiority and more a semipermeable model minoritarian sounding board on which the player can gauge DuBois’s emotional progress. Moreover, Asian adjacency appears throughout Disco Elysium through other means: the ambiguous racialization of the game’s father of socialism, and the psychedelic presence of the game’s cryptid. Although deeply flawed in its racial politics, Disco Elysium nevertheless presents a racialized dialectic that yearns for a liberatory, postcapitalist futurity to resolve its stark contradictions.