Threshold

Sophie Chauhan on Narrative Ascent

I. IN-BETWEEN

Edith Eaton published Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian in 1909 under her pen name, Sui Sin Far. ① Sui Sin Far, ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian’, Independent 66 (January 1909): 125–32. The memoir essay recounts shifts in her identity as a North American woman with a Chinese mother and English father. It begins by relaying the pain and confusion inflicted on the author by the racialising gazes of strangers. A white nanny gossips about her family while taking her out in public; an old man inspects the composition of her ‘peculiar’ features; other children taunt her with anti-Chinese slurs. Humiliating scenes perplex the mixed-race child. ‘Why are we what we are?’, she asks of herself and her siblings. In adherence to the coming-of-age arc that now defines the Wasian literary tradition (and, I would argue, the Wasian lived experience), Eaton embarks on a personal mission to restore pride in her non-white ancestry. ‘At eighteen years of age,’ she remarks, ‘what troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority’.

I can’t say which bothered me more when I first read this sentence: its blatant supremacist logic, or the fact that I was probably thinking the same at eighteen. Like Eaton, my earliest sensory memories are of profound unbelonging in a Wasian family; I later made it my mission to retrieve a coherent sense of self by all means necessary. Recuperative identity work often takes this shape; in adolescence, we transform the sources of shame, alienation, pain and debilitation that afflicted us as children into wellsprings of pride, connectivity, joy and capacity. Double exclusion (neither/nor) becomes double access (both/and). In this way, the Wasian passes from exclusion to acceptance by way of exception, by being exceptional. For the sake of salvaging life in the in-between, narratives like Eaton’s answer back to the eugenicist principle of ‘hybrid degeneracy’—according to this logic, the offspring of racially different parents are biologically inferior to both. In its place, the (equally eugenicist) principle of ‘hybrid vigour’ tells us that the opposite is true. Pseudoscience around race and racialisation continues to haunt amid tropes of the extraordinarily intelligent, empathetic and adaptive mixed-race person, the perfectly blended protagonist of the melting-pot ‘post-race’ future. What Eaton tells us in 1909 could very well have been written a hundred years later:

Fundamentally, I muse, all people are the same. My mother’s race is as prejudiced as my father’s. Only when the whole world becomes as one family will human beings be able to see clearly and hear distinctly. I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.

Eaton fulfils her ethical calling when she lends both hands to the project of postracialism: ‘I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant “connecting link”.’ This bridging is how Wasians animate the in-between. When the self is transformed into an instrument of crossing, we assert our indispensable value in an increasingly globalised world (read: an increasingly Asianised West). Imperial ties haul us to the metropole by force of threat and promise, choice and coercion, much of which are indecipherable for their symbiotic functions. In this publication’s own interview series ② ‘Boundless’, Liminal. featuring Asian Australians—mixed-race or otherwise—bridging metaphors abound. One Wasian respondent realised, during a mandatory workplace professional development session, that his entire life pretty much constituted cultural competency training. Much like mixed-race adaptability and cosmopolitanism, what has been considered the Asian work ethic, as well as Asian mass mobility and subservience, have been framed as both menace and gift to empire throughout the course of colonial history. As these hallmark traits converge especially in the Wasian figure, their compounded offering contributes to a becoming towards a neoliberal order that demands its subjects do more and reach further. Fragmentation serves the free flow of capital. There’s no cure for teen angst quite like finding out that your failure to belong is now considered a highly marketable asset.
The first time I learned that my pained subjective incoherence might improve my job prospects was in an undergraduate literature classroom. I doubt Homi Bhabha wrote The Location of Culture with a mixed-race diasporic dyke’s self-actualisation in mind, but he can’t have been far off. Theory tells me that it is aesthetically interesting and politically radical to contain multitudes. People like me are liminal, you see. We inhabit a critical point of view, incisive and necessary. Who can claim to know ‘culture’ better than the insider-outsider? The liminal creative treats tension as her raw material. She refashions the hybrid’s melancholic past to become mimic, avant-garde, cosmopolitan, bridge. The liminal critic is trained from birth to hold complexity, told she embodies complexity herself. Prepositionally, she is outside, beyond and between her objects of inquiry, which is another way of saying that she holds the perfect distance. I have been both of these things for a while now. Yet in taking this interstitiality up as my object, I am less concerned with what it is than with what it does—what the holding of it, the pursuit of it, the valuing of it and the mobilisation of it engenders alongside institutions of power. ③ This line of inquiry is borrowed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Series Q (Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.
When I came across Eaton’s writing in early 2023, I was blown away by its near-perfect resonance with generations of Wasian literature that came after. For instance, in Small Bodies of Water, Aotearoa-raised and London-based writer Nina Mingya Powles seems to pick up exactly where Eaton left off, over a century later. ④ Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water (Canongate Books, 2021). In the title essay, Powles responds to fellow Wasian memoirist Will Harris’ claim that mixed-race identities are ‘shaped around lack’ with this provocation:

Is it that I’ve anchored myself to too many places at once, or nowhere at all? The answer lies somewhere between. Over time, springing up from the in-between space, new shapes form. I am many mountains. I am many bodies of water, strange and shifting.

Motifs of the body submerged course through Powles’ evocative prose as she explores kinship, migration and cultural transmission. Suspension is an apt metaphor for the liminal position. Gravity cannot hold us still; our feet rarely touch the ground. However, like Eaton, who was raised in a respectable, upwardly mobile home and whose education allowed her to travel the world, Powles’ fluid ontology is as much a product of the diasporic imagination as (presumably private) international schooling, expat wealth and the possession of favourable (if not multiple) passports. These elements rear their heads in the text from time to time, but are never explicitly named. I note this as someone who not only shares these advantages, but has felt similarly compelled to relegate them to the sidelines in favour of poetry. After all, the romance of the cosmopolitan becomes deadened when we start counting her travel expenses, with the realisation that the very romance and mobility is only possible with material comfort. But what does this bracketing of the material enable? The kind of Wasian experience that Harris, Powles and I share is only ‘shaped around lack’ when reduced to the search for the individual self, a subjective ‘wholeness’ over questions of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. In other words, Harris and Powles express concern for racial alienation, not oppression. That these concepts are blurred in both authors’ writing allows for false equivocation between them. If we were to place the liquid ethics of Small Bodies of Water in conversation with comparable Black diasporic epistemologies, ⑤ Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015). for instance, it would become starkly clear that the former is disengaged with the structural, embodied afterlives of racialised movement under capitalism.

Disregard for material conditions is by no means essential to Wasian writing, least of all when we account seriously for the legal, racial, ethnic, gendered, sexualised, embodied and classed stratifications of those we crudely capture in this category. The possibilities are apparent in writers like Ocean Vuong, for whom tangible conditions of war, forced displacement, debilitation and poverty foreground his poetic sensibility. Of course, meaningful engagement with the materiality of power is not the exclusive domain of those meted its sharpest edges; we are equally implicated even as we are disproportionately harmed. But perhaps I am being harsh on Powles. Small Bodies of Water is a work of memoir; at no point does she claim to put forth a materialist politics, and if her goal is to write beautifully, then she has certainly achieved as much. It is likely that my critical attention gets jammed in her book because I recognise elements of myself in her work and biography. This recognition troubles me. Academic training has taught me, for better or for worse, to apply a cruel interrogatory lens to mine and other’s writing. Who cares? Or, what makes this particular perspective valuable? And to whom? On the one hand, I do not believe that art must be novel, or militant, or challenging, or beautiful, or anything prescriptive, for that matter. On the other, when I recall that the world of media and publishing is, in fact, not a utopia but an industry, I wonder what purpose is served by the ongoing literary reproduction of liminal (and specifically Wasian) in-betweenness, a standpoint that is neither novel nor at risk. I suppose it is because alienation has a narrative cure—one that we can rehearse and resolve, over and over again. Oppression, by contrast, does not.

2. TRANSITIONAL

To be preoccupied with alienation requires significant departure from anxieties about personal and collective security. While Wasian cultural production is a model offender, diasporic Asians deemed sufficiently rich, light-skinned and ‘cultured’ are engaged in similar work. For W/Asians whose structural advantages make them more likely to benefit from than be punished by racial capitalism, concern with alienation is consistent with broader patterns of uplift in white settler-colonial societies. ‘Asianness’—in all its capacities—is in many ways a product, not a determinant, of intermediary positioning in New World racial orders. We have been indentured ‘coolies’ brought in to replace and subdue enslaved revolutionaries. ⑥ Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016). We have been invasive aggressors, kept at bay to naturalise white occupation of stolen land. ⑦ Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2002). We have been ‘model minorities’, whose (partial and contingent) acquiescence to hegemonic whiteness helps to fracture and rank workforces under racial capitalism. ⑧ Sita Balani, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023). Most recently, we have commenced an asymptotic journey towards civilisational dominance as the equally prosperous and ominous ‘Asian Century’ dawns. Each of these characterisations tells us more about the evolving needs of white-centric racial power systems than ‘Asianness’ itself.

This latest development in the making of ‘Asianness’ is what interests me most, largely because it’s the chapter into which I was born. 1990s London was the home of cosmopolitan culture, and (South) Asians like me were its rising star. Fantasies of a post-racial future, where race and racism disappear arm in arm, proliferated in millennial mixed and Asian literature from the colonial metropole. Colourful lineups in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane heralded a new British protagonist: the third-culture kid. Our grandparents stumbled into the postcolonial metropole at unprecedented scale so that their children might walk, albeit treading lightly. Now, we run. For all their cynicisms about the failed promises of multiculturalism, the comings-of-age that shape these stories are charged with inertia, a persistent optimism, the sense that we are hurtling toward some better, hybrid horizon. I shared a womb with these texts. We multiplied together, filling rifts torn open by racial, cultural and generational divides.

In many ways, Asians like me were carried to term by an election campaign. The New Labour movement delivered Britain from the neoconservative mid-nineties into the neoliberal twenty-tens. Aimed at platforming market-driven social justice over state-secured social equality, the cultural politics of the Blair and Brown years were quite literally hybrid, as it sought out a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism following the dissolution of the USSR. That these governments saw the third-culture kid as an ideal accomplice is telling: the mixed/inter-racial, sexually promiscuous or queer British-born Asian modelled rebellion against the family form in favour of highly-aestheticised individualism. ⑨ Ali Nobil Ahmad, ‘Whose Underground? Asian Cool and the Poverty of Hybridity’, Third Text 15, no. 54 (1 March 2001): 71–84. Art, music, literature and performance produced by, for and about this figure were financed by the government, amounting in ‘Cool Britannia’ and ‘Asian Kool’ not-so-sub-cultures. When I read authors such as Kureishi or Smith, or blast Asian Dub Foundation’s bhangra-ragga beats, or quote Bend it Like Beckham at football training, I feel a welling sense of pride in what people like me have generated. But the veneration of these hybrid texts and their distribution as cultural products—consumer goods—promote a dangerous narrative about the function of racial otherness in white multicultural societies. ⑩ Nicola Spakowski, ‘Asia as Future: The Claims and Rhetoric of an Asian Century’, in Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, ed. Nicola Spakowski and Marc Frey (NUS Press, 2016), 209–36. Incorporation reifies certain aspects of Asianness—work ethic, docility, mobility—as desirable, futuristic, and compatible with whiteness, while others—such as religiosity, traditional kinship structures, and the politicised memory of colonial violence—are devalued and dismissed. Celebrated characteristics also correspond to populations: while upper-caste Indians such as my family have been rewarded with upward mobility, lower-caste, working class and Muslim Asians are still deemed incompatible with the post-2001 neoliberal ideal. Further, mixed-race people with two racialised parents are bridges to nowhere when whiteness cannot pass through them. In turn, the anti-Black imagination erases African and Caribbean hybridity by constructing Blackness as racially loaded and culturally lacking.
My family moved from London to Melbourne in 2006. We left a milieu that exalted households like ours—Wasian and wealthy—only to land amid similar circumstances in Australia, where the push to assert the nation’s place within the ‘Asian region’ was the latest bid to reinvent the self-same settler colony. The ‘Asian Century’ was looming over white settler-colonial nation-states at the time—both threatening and promising, the haunt of a populous continent reduced to its rapid market growth has structured patterns of cultural production as much as trade policy and international relations. ⑪ Ien Ang, ‘Australia, China, and Asian Regionalism: Navigating Distant Proximity’, Amerasia Journal 36, no. 2 (January 2010): 126–40. The ‘Asia literacy’ agenda launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating in the 1990s to turn so-called Australia into ‘a multicultural nation in Asia’ added a soft power component in terms of keeping up with ‘emerging’ Asian superpowers. At our first primary school in Melbourne, a room of disinterested white kids wrestled their way through Mandarin lessons. When I moved into the private system, I was met by a flood of faces like mine, bright Asian girls with big futures; high school excursions included visits to exhibitions that showcase contemporary Asian art. In 1999, the Asian Australian Studies Research Network began theorising what it means to be ‘Asian Australian’, something I began to study as an undergraduate arts student. A fledgling literary scene, featuring authors such as Michelle de Kretser, Brian Castro, Nam Le and Alice Pung, started finding its feet during the early 2000s, peppering the English curriculum. Later, the injection of Asian life writing, criticism, interviews and narrative non-fiction boomed, with the appearance of magazines like Peril in 2006 and Liminal in 2016.

Here was my personal coming-of-age, and naturally, I ate it all up. This was the nourishment I needed in a desert of the self, and it fed me until I finally felt whole. For this reason, I do not mean to disparage the enormous positive impact of the developments that ‘Asianise’ initiatives have enabled. These voices have shaped who I am today. Many people will tell you that they have made our worlds much more liveable. Yet I cannot help but believe that there is something other than our joy at stake in the cultivation of Asian Australian culture, identity and aesthetic sensibilities. The same rings true for the ceaseless quest to make meaning out of mixed-race experience. If the millennial turn is Asian and postracial, then Australia’s prosperity is tied to becoming Asian, and whiteness’s longevity is sustained by becoming less white. These two logics compound: enter Wasian brand ambassador, Wasian science fiction star, Wasian transnational consultant, Wasian creative, Wasian critic. Us third-culture kids are not just a bridge between East and West, but between the present and the future of whiteness.


3. IMPERCEPTIBLE

Pear Nuallak uses the term ‘RepresentAsian mythologies’ to describe the desires of East and Southeast Asian people in the UK to see themselves elevated to positions of hegemonic racial power, such as in media, government and the upper classes. Although ‘the emotion of recognition is potent’, they remark, ‘feeling isn’t everything. The practical stuff—the material—matters.’ ⑫ Pear Nuallak, Pearls from Their Mouth (Hajar Press, 2022), 15. Nuallak goes on to list the kinds of changes that might have actually made life more liveable for their working class Thai migrant family in south London: secure housing, improved tenancy rights, free and consistent English classes, culturally considerate mental health support, and well-resourced community centres, for starters. Here lies the crucial distinction between representational cures for alienation and the radical, structural struggle necessary to overthrow oppression. Material relations—what ties us to the ground on which we stand, the people who surround us, the resources we are able to access and the histories we inherit—are the real conditions of possibility for collective liberation. Lamenting our invisibility in the eyes of the dominant also ignores the ways we are seen by everyone else. If accountability concerns who we answer to, whose recognition we seek, who bears witness to our mistakes and who oversees our transformation, ruling ourselves imperceptible simply because we are not perceived by the powerful forecloses on the possibility of being accountable to one another instead.
While researching for this article, I came across the original introduction that Alice Pung wrote for the anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia, which was published in Peril in 2009 a year after the book came out. ⑬ Alice Pung, ‘The Original Introduction to Growing Up Asian in Australia’, Peril, no. 8 (2009). Pung’s essay begins the story of Asian Australia with the advent of settler-colonial genocide of Indigenous people in 1770 and goes on to detail the conditions of indenture, exploitation, violence, exclusion and erasure that Asian migrants have experienced ever since. This was not, however, the essay that went to print. When a ‘trusted adviser’ informed Pung that ‘this type of heavy introduction’ would put readers off buying the book, she resolved to rewrite it without invoking too much of so-called Australia’s bloody history. In her words: ‘The thing I wanted to accomplish with this book—first and foremost—was to infiltrate our popular culture—our common culture, our everyday culture—with stories about how integral Asian-Australians are to our national identity.’ Pung’s eventual choice to prioritise the empathetic appeal of personal narrative over the political demands raised by historical context is a prime example of Nuallak’s representAsianism. The representAsian agenda uses liminal alienation as what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder term ‘narrative prosthesis’: the arc of each story hinges upon instances of disablement that call for a cure. ⑭ David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2015). In these narratives, the cure only comes into effect after the once-hidden value of W/Asians is finally recognised, not only by the suffering individual, but by the dominant (white) national culture.

With repetition, narrative forms clear and entrench new imaginative pathways. This is vital political work. Yet those narratives that are platformed and proliferated by institutions of racial power make it difficult to conceive of alternative routes, let alone alternative destinations, when it comes to envisioning ideal futures. The path that representAsian politics moulds is easy enough to trace with our eyes; it treads an inherent upward trajectory. Treading it, however, is a far less achievable task. But let’s pretend for a moment that we have cut back the undergrowth that litters this trail and made it possible for all to proceed toward the goal of Asian identitarian elevation. What then? The trouble with the popular slogan ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ is that it fails to ask first what it is we should wish to be, and so need to see, in the fight towards an anti-racist world. New imaginative pathways are foreclosed by this sentiment even before it begins to take root. It is easy enough to say that I do not need to see people like me advocating for border closures, or enabling Israeli genocide against Palestinians, or profiting from a cost-of-living crisis, or anything quite so explicitly and morally evil. It is much, much harder to question whether I really need to see fellow mixed-race people beat childhood alienation and actualise into successful ‘bridges’, or witness fellow Asian migrants overcoming diasporic melancholy to find true multicultural belonging on stolen land. What might become thinkable in the open space cleaved by the death of such ambitions?


4. THRESHOLD

Located at the cusp of an entrance or exit, the role of a threshold is to keep the outside world from leaking into a building. We step over thresholds all the time. Occasionally, we trip. They shape the architecture of our daily lives, active in the closing and opening of every door.

I picture the W/Asian creative/critic crouching in the doorway, playing her part. Her features concoct a mystic surface. I’m obsessed with her genderless smock. Despite the fact that she mostly eludes description, I can say that her aura is beige, cybernetic, inscrutable, that she is every variant of post-. When I spot her in the doorway, she is deep in the throes of liminal being, head and back turned in two directions at once—inward and outward—so that she faces both, neither, perhaps most of all herself. She is neither within nor without, is not removed from dominant institutions; she is the threshold; she is of structural importance. This spectacle of her inherent paradox sets my riddle brain into motion. I search for the question to which she is the answer. Others gather round and join in. Among her growing audience, a consensus congeals gravity from thin air: what is at stake must be what she sees, how she sees, whether she sees more or less than the confines of our singular gazes, and whether she’ll be kind enough to tell us when she’s done looking. What is she even looking for? A state of rapture seizes the crowd. We are, for the most part, too busy with our pondering to register the reason we have stopped to witness her performance; to note the fact of her body, obstructing the doorway.

As a threshold to the structures of whiteness, the liminal figure’s role is to arbitrate who enters and exits its fluctuating fold. Her function is not dissimilar to Eve Sedgwick’s paranoid critic, or Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s critical academic. This figure takes on an oppositional stance from the periphery of an institution, yet depends on the relation of against-ness in order to constitute herself. We might think of her as a constructive critic—one whose oppositionality does not undo the workings of power but rather feeds back to, substantiates, borders and defines that which she opposes. In other words, this against-ness is a renewable resource for building institutional resilience. In her creative capacities, being an insider-outsider qualifies her to bring the outside in and the inside out, to invigorate networks of production and consumption, to expand the reach of the system she skirts. The W/Asian creative/critic—perhaps the liminal figure par excellence—would not be invited to occupy the doorway were she not adept at performing this function, which is of increasing import under neoliberal multiculturalism. Jodi Melamed describes neoliberal multiculturalism as ‘a market ideology turned social philosophy’ that ‘portrays an ethic of multiculturalism to be the spirit of neoliberalism and, conversely, posits neoliberal restructuring across the globe to be the key to a postracist world of freedom and opportunity.’ ⑮ Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, Difference Incorporated (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 138. The driving force of this paradigm is borrowed from an imagined future where racism and racial difference disappear in tandem. Taking this further, Dylan Rodriguez argues that postracial imagining is vital to the ‘anticipatory logics of White Reconstruction’—the process by which whiteness fortifies itself by incorporating select non-white bodies as agents of racial power. ⑯ Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), 100.
National agendas like ‘Asianise Australia’ and ‘Cool Britannia’ exemplify the drive for white (settler) colonial powers to regenerate their racial image without redistributing racial power. As Wasians, our liminal, off-white cultural production is purpose-built to serve this role. We are flexible, fragmented, capacious, individual, mobile, fluid, worldly, progressive, free. The Wasian protagonist at once inhabits and expands the neoliberal multicultural ideal. She ‘enriches’ the systems that welcome her while also enabling them to keep others out. ⑰ Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Taylor & Francis, 2012). By incorporating her creativity and critique, neoliberal multiculturalism and its racial capitalist operations sharpen other, more violent lines of political exclusion. Undesirable traits such as fixity, stasis, tradition, collectivity, alterity and ‘monoculturalism’ are consigned to those racialised as Black, Indigenous, fungible, disposable, refugee or subaltern. In racial capitalist terms, this is the line that divides those who are exploited under neoliberalism and those who are expropriated, whose only value is derived from their death, displacement and debilitation. In literary terms, this is what distinguishes the liminal standpoint from the marginal, the in-between from the ruled-out.

Here I am, then, perfectly liminal, an integral part of the systems I appraise. It is my in-between vantage point that qualifies me to write this piece and be paid for it. Two years ago, in the competition for PhD funding, I detailed my critique of the exceptional Wasian before explaining why I was the only person capable of making such a case. I won. Even—especially?—as I challenge the systems of value that reward my interstitial insight, these same systems continue to pay my rent, grant me opportunities, offer me prestige, get me published, get me seen. They capacitate me and do so at the necessary expense of other others.

Time and again, I have picked up the critical artillery that comes with alienation and found it insufficient in the service of anti-racist, abolitionist and anti-capitalist demands. If we are to take seriously that there can be no liberation for some without liberation for all, the narrative that has carried me up to this point cannot prefigure a liberated future. Personally, I feel ready to leave it behind. But what would it mean to give up on being a threshold? I don’t know where this line of questioning ends, but I think it starts with failure. From without, we can let in a draft; from within, we can permit whispers to leak from under an imperfectly sealed door. We might lower ourselves to let in floodwater, or raise our haunches to trip someone up. Vital to our failure to be thresholds is the task of retraining our attention away from the ways in which we are ‘not-quite’ and toward the things that we are, the power that we already hold, the paths that we follow, the purposes we serve, all with and without our consent. If we are not-quite in and not-quite out, perhaps that means we are ourselves the margin and should answer to the marginalised. The efficacy of this refusal is where meaningful coalition and solidarity are practiced in political spheres. Fred Moten gets to the heart of what these projects demand when he says ‘I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognise that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?’ ⑱ Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013). The W/Asian narrative informs us exactly how much more softly, but tends to forget that this shit is killing us too, truly, and not only in our imaginative lives. But there are notes in the margins to remind us of this. Put your pen down, lucky liminal. It is time to read.


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Works cited 

✷ Ahmad, Ali Nobil. ‘Whose Underground? Asian Cool and the Poverty of Hybridity’. Third Text 15, no. 54 (1 March 2001): 71–84.
✷ Ang, Ien. ‘Australia, China, and Asian Regionalism: Navigating Distant Proximity’. Amerasia Journal 36, no. 2 (January 2010): 126–40.
✷ Balani, Sita. Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race. Verso, 2023.
✷ Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002.
✷ Day, Iyko. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2016.
✷ Far, Sui Sin. ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian’. Independent 66 (January 1909): 125–32.
✷ Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Taylor & Francis, 2012.
✷ Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
✷ Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.
✷ Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Difference Incorporated. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
✷ Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Corporealities: Discourses of Disability. University of Michigan Press, 2015.
✷ Nuallak, Pear. Pearls from Their Mouth. Hajar Press, 2022.
✷ Powles, Nina Mingya. Small Bodies of Water. Canongate Books, 2021.
✷ Pung, Alice. ‘The Original Introduction to Growing Up Asian in Australia’. Peril, no. 8 (2009).
✷ Rodriguez, Dylan. White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press, 2021.
✷ Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You’. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Series Q. Duke University Press, 2003.
✷ Spakowski, Nicola. ‘Asia as Future: The Claims and Rhetoric of an Asian Century’. In Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration. Edited by Nicola Spakowski and Marc Frey. NUS Press, 2016.

 

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm/Melbourne. She is currently working towards a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her first book, Curious Affinities, was published by Hajar Press in 2023. 

 
Leah McIntosh