Overview

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.

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9781503646650

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Reviews

""In equal measures historical, theoretical, and archival, this fascinating book utilizes a rich and meticulous cache of legal documents to highlight how the gap between what is written and what is performed opens up a critical space for the analysis of race and form--that is, for a sustained investigation of the material transactions and discursive effects configuring racial embodiment, suspicion, rights, and punishment for Asian Americans over more than a century."" --David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania ""Paper Performance is a meticulously researched and written book, reflecting Kim's many gifts as a performance theorist. One takes pleasure in the nimble agility with which she interprets materials--whether a close reading of an immigration hearing transcript or fresh analyses of a loyalty questionnaire. I kept drawing breath at the surprising and profound insights contained herein."" --Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University

Author Information

Ju Yon Kim is the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015).

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