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Surface Relations

Surface Relations

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In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient Vivian L. Huang retheorizes the stereotype of inscrutability as a queer aesthetic strategy within contemporary Asian American cultural life. Vivian L. Huang is Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Inscrutable Surfacing  1
1. Invisibility and the Vanishing Point of Asian/American Visuality  25
2. Silence and Parasitic Hospitality in the Works of Yoko Ono, Laurel Nakadate, and Emma Sulkowicz  47
3. Im/penetrability, Trans Figuration, and Unreliable Surfacing  73
4. Flatness, Industriousness, and Laborious Flexibility  105
5. Distance, Negativity, and Slutty Sociality in Tseng Kwong Chi’s Performance Photographs  135
Conclusion: Something Is Missing  165
Notes  187
Bibliography  207
Index  221

“Vivian L. Huang’s Surface Relations is a brilliant contribution to Asian American studies and performance studies scholarship. In dazzlingly original readings of Asian diasporic visual art, literature, and performance, Huang identifies an aesthetics of inscrutability (and other related racialized affects of withholding, distance, obfuscation, flatness, and deferral) which produce modes of relationality and sociality that refuse and refute model minority respectability. Instead these ‘surface aesthetics’ strategically disidentify with stereotypes of the ‘inscrutable Asian’ to provide powerful alternative models of the political. At this moment when anti-Asian racism and yellow peril discourse are more pernicious than ever, this is timely, compelling, and vitally necessary work.”
“An engaging and compelling book, Surface Relations offers a refreshing and critical outlook on the racialization and production of stereotypes of Asian Americans as silent, passive, untrustworthy—inscrutable. Taking on these entrenched representations, Vivian L. Huang convincingly reformulates the discourse of inscrutability as a productive strategic force by intersecting it with feminist, queer, and trans studies.”

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in