ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“Thought-provoking and illuminating. Professor Bow’s analysis is both broad ranging and a deep dive into culture, history, psychology, and much more. Her work provides context, vocabulary, and insight—a powerful framework for understanding.”

-- Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“This book comes at a timely juncture—the latest reckoning of anti-Asian violence—and its analysis of the critical interplay of racial affects is deeply welcome. But Leslie Bow also asks much more of the reader in an incisive treatment that is vast in scope yet consistently uncompromising. If it has been possible until now to foster a sense of the inhuman contingencies of Asianness, Racist Love finally disabuses us of intrahuman fantasies of racial feeling and shows us how objects matter.”

-- Mel Y. Chen, author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

"In Racist Love, Leslie Bow deep dives and shows how Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to objects of anxiety and desire in the United States."

-- Casey Cha International Examiner

"After reading this book, one cannot doubt the severe psychic and physical damage that fantasies of Asian American cuteness incur on Asian Americans as well as others. . . . Racist Love is a much-needed, critical analysis of the baneful discourses that have contributed to historical and contemporary anti-Asian violence."

-- Audrey Wu Clark Society for US Intellectual History

"[T]he work is timely and accessible, and makes an excellent selection of case studies with which to support the central argument. It is useful for Asian Americanists based in the disciplines of film and media studies, English and literature, and communications, at the levels of advanced undergraduate or early graduate work."
-- Janna Haider Journal of American Ethnic History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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