Full Description
Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that "brownness" reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter - from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawai'i, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship - Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword. For Life xiii
Turn: Once More
Introduction. Brown Theory: a storied manifest of our world 1
Turn: Body Art
1. Crossing the Caucasus: Domesticating Histories of Yellow and Brown in the Mongol Empire 35
Turn: Sand
2. Ilocanos on the Run: A Talk-Story 69
Turn: Space
3. Migrant Domestic Workers in the Global City 107
Turn: Foreigner Flight
4. Organic and Inorganic Chinas: Hong Kong and the Question of Chinese Brownness 155
Turn: Projects
5. Brown Crafts: a creative praxis for our present 197
Turn: Shit Mountain
Afterword. After Life 235
(Re)Turn
Notes 247
Bibliography 267
Index 289
