Joseph Song

"Race Event (!): Tracing Uncertainty and Racial Triangulation in Contemporary Asian American Cultural Production from 2008 to Present"

Race Event responds to the influx of contemporary Asian American cultural production that characterizes Asian American subjectivity through non-belonging. I coin the term “race event” as a helpful analytic in explaining the proliferation of these feelings of uncertainty. A race event is a discrete moment when there is a clear instance that a character/person is being racialized, such as a hate crime or a heritage night. I argue race, as a socially constructed, historically contingent identity marker, has become conflated with the race event in our current iteration of multiculturalism. The more ambiguous aspects of racial identity that do not conform to the template of the race event are treated as individual experiences rather than legitimated as collective racialization, so I connect the rise of Asian American expressions of uncertainty to a desire to acknowledge aspects of race outside of the context of race events and trauma. To show the ubiquity of the race event, I analyze Asian American memoirs, music, and sitcoms from 2008 to the present to show how Asian American identity is often articulated through race events and anxious comparisons to Black American identity.

Joseph Song is a Ph.D. Candidate in English.