Full Description
Since the late nineteenth century, various agencies of the U.S. government have developed elaborate bureaucratic procedures to manage "suspect" Asian groups. Ju Yon Kim explores the modes of engagement and contestation available to those who are subjected by the state to both relentless documentation and demands to perform—whether as lawful immigrants, obedient colonial subjects, or loyal Americans. Even as paper documentation has been critical to authorizing exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration by the state, it has also enabled performances with paper that have facilitated transnational passage, mobilized resistance to administration, and troubled the logic of racial and national classifications.
Linking histories of Chinese immigration exclusion, the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the internment of Japanese Americans, and FBI surveillance of political groups, Kim brings together studies of paperwork and performance to demonstrate their continued, intertwined impact on Asian American history and culture.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Racial Suspicion's Paper Performances
One. Archival Dramaturgy: Immigration Interrogations and the Scripts of Chinese Exclusion
Two. Distinguishing Marks: Colonial Surveillance, Descriptive Cards, and Other Portraits
Three. How to Do Things with Blank Forms: Suspicious Readers and the Loyalty Questionnaire
Four. Registration Dramas: Theatricality, Antitheatricality, and Bureaucratic Mimesis
Five. The Informant and the Activist: Performing Asian America Through State Surveillance
Epilogue: A Melancholic Attachment to Paper
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
