Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy

In Racist Love Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as "racist love," she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children's books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

Author: Leslie Bow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/04/2022
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.82lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.58d
ISBN13: 9781478017851
ISBN10: 1478017856
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Asian American Studies & Pacific

About the Author
Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature.