present. In taking this position, I mean to signal to the reader that this book should be understood as openly situated within the tradition of Marxist cultural criticism. A Race So Different conceives of performance in the terms of Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch, who understood the stage as “a paradigmatic institution” in the process of imagining and enacting social change.80 Like the law, dramatic experiences require a decision, not only on the part of the performer but also on the part of the spectator: “They demand that the spectator make decisions, at the very least a decision as to whether he likes the performance as such.”81 Through decision, action is realized, and it is in action that a new politics emerges. Additionally, aesthetic performances have the unique capacity to imagine and give temporary form to otherwise impossible realities. In doing so, the stage becomes a “rehearsal” for dreaming the new and making it a reality: “As soon as the rehearsal for the example is staged the goal is clearly visible, but the stage, being experimental, that is, being a state of anticipation, tries out the ways in which to behave in order to achieve.”82 Performance at its best, by insisting on and demonstrating that something better is possible, verifies that this possibility can in fact become a reality.
If the space between law and aesthetics is one that is constantly traversed, blurred, and breaking down in the making of Asian American subjectivity, this book submits that both quotidian and aesthetic forms of performance can be deployed by Asian Americans as a “rehearsal for the example.” As Dorinne Kondo writes, in theater and performance “Asians and Asian Americans can ‘write our faces,’ mount institutional interventions, enact emergent identities, refigure utopian possibilities, and construct political subjectivities that might enable us to effect political change.”83 In many ways, this is a sentiment that is shared by many of the scholars of Asian American performance who have inspired this book, including Kondo, Shimakawa, Josephine Lee, Esther Kim Lee, Sarita Echavez See, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, and Christine Bacareza Balance.84 Many of the sites studied in A Race So Different are proof of the fact that Asian American performance can create spaces in which we model strategies for critiquing and complicating the racialization and subjection of Asian Americans, while staging otherwise impossible potentialities that push against the limits of the present.
The structure of this book is loosely chronological, tracing the production of exceptional juridical subjectivity for Asian America from the Asian-exclusion era into the GWOT. The first two chapters consider how stage performances can act as legal functionaries in their own right. In chapter 1, I return to a critical text in Asian American studies, Madame Butterfly, with a comparative study of the three original versions of the narrative: John Luther Long’s 1898 novella Madame Butterfly, David Belasco’s 1900 theatrical spectacle adapted from the novella, and Giacomo Puccini’s 1904–7 opera Madama Butterfly. I read the ways in which Madame Butterfly functions as an agent for the dissemination of exclusion-era jurisprudence about Asian racial difference, suggesting that as a work that remains popular for contemporary audiences, it continues to influence the making of legal subjectivity for Asian Americans today. In chapter 2, I study Ping Chong and Company’s 1995 experimental performance piece Chinoiserie, a staged history of Chinese America. If much of the history of Chinese American encounters with the law has been tainted by injustice, Ping Chong and Company use the stage to enact what I describe as “reparative justice.” Chinoiserie engages with the legal history of Chinese America in order to restore erased Chinese American stories to history and to rethink the possibilities for emergent forms of justice for the future.
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the realm of quotidian performance with a study of the Japanese American concentration camps. In chapter 3, I look to everyday performances of patriotism in the camps, attending to the interplay of legal performativity and embodied performance in the manifestation of racial subjectivity in and on the Japanese American body during the war. I consider how performances of patriotism had the potential to reify and sometimes disrupt the state’s claim to incarcerated Japanese Americans. Chapter 4 studies the political performativity of objects, reading a scrapbook of contraband photographs of camp life taken by a Heart Mountain internee. Demonstrating the ways in which the state, and immigration law in particular, deployed a visual logic to compel Asian American subjects to perform for the state’s optic, I argue that the internee’s photographs pose a performative intervention into the visual surveillance and regulation of Japanese America while raising significant questions about the limits of visibility as a strategy for liberation.
The final section of the book turns to the racialization of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans from the period of the Vietnam War to the GWOT. Chapter 5 studies the performance practices of Cambodian/American band Dengue Fever in order to trace the precarious position constructed for Cambodian refugees of the Vietnam War in US law. Studying Dengue Fever’s centralization of the figure of the “illegal immigrant” in its performances, I argue that the band draws attention to and interrupts the vulnerable position of Cambodian immigrants and Cambodian Americans who are subject to new forms of state violence in the era of the GWOT. In conclusion, I offer a brief meditation on racial profiling within the GWOT and on Hasan Elahi’s digital performance project Tracking Transience. Doing so, I offer suggestions for the role that scholarship about Asian American performance might contribute to criticizing, historicizing, and potentially transforming current conditions of racialization in the era of the national security state.
Racial subjection is most successfully realized when the state is able to seduce and compel racialized bodies to perform as raced subjects. That is, when the state inspires the subject to do as Bashir did, when he learned “to love what they did” to him. Studying sites where we can see the point at which law and performance meet in and on the Asian American body, this book documents some of the central technologies by which racialized subjectivity comes into being. It is offered as a contribution to the project of understanding and historicizing the technologies of Asian American racialization in order to critically dismantle them and to bring about greater conditions of social justice. Most importantly, however, by analyzing and documenting a series of Asian American performances, the following pages make up a record of resilience and possibility. For if performance is the means by which racialization comes into being in and on the body, performance can also be a radical practice for rehearsing and realizing the long-deferred promises of justice and emancipation.
1 / “That May Be Japanese Law, but Not in My Country”: Madame Butterfly and the Problem of Law
Tuan Anh Nguyen spent most of his life in the United States. He was born in Vietnam to a US American father and Vietnamese mother in September 1969. His mother abandoned Nguyen and his civilian contractor father, Joseph Boulais, when he was only a few years old. In 1975, Boulais returned to the United States with his six-year-old son, whom he continued to raise. At the age of twenty-two, Nguyen pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault on a minor in a Texas state court. A few years later in 1996, while serving out the terms of his eight-year sentence, Congress passed the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA). IIRAIRA mandates the deportation of aliens convicted of a felony charge. As a result, the Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against Nguyen, and an immigration judge subsequently ordered his deportation to Vietnam. Despite having a citizen father and being raised by this father in the United States, the US government considered him to be an alien and targeted him for deportation to a place he hardly knew.
Nguyen’s legal status was written nearly thirty years before his birth, at the height of the Korean War and the US military’s occupation of Japan. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, heavily revising the section of the US code that regulates immigration and naturalization. As part of the act, the legislature clarified citizenship eligibility for children born abroad to unwed parents when only one parent is a US citizen. While children born to citizen mothers automatically receive citizenship retroactive to birth, children born to citizen fathers must meet three additional requirements for citizenship eligibility. Nguyen appealed his case, arguing that the differential burden violated both fathers’ and sons’ equal protection rights.
