Overview

In Torn, Anna M. Moncada Storti searches for the ordinary and obscured impressions of the US empire, theorizing the pervasiveness of its violence through the language and patterns of intimacy. Reading for the intimacy of violence, Storti compiles an inventory of quotidian, psychic, and affective tensions that arise within the bodies of empire’s historical subjects. She raises Asian/white life as the representative case study to examine a familiar narrative of inner strife – that being of two distinct racial histories is to be rendered a body in tension, torn between ancestral lineages. Rather than refute this stance, Storti tracks the duress of fragmentation as a sign of war’s permanent mark on racial and sexual subjection. Traversing an archive of aesthetic, literary, and cultural portrayals of Asian/white racial mixture, Storti observes how Asian Americans refuse, rework, or reify the logics of progress and disavowal that have long fueled the US war machine. Tending to tension, she argues for a sustained confrontation with empire’s ordinary life, a prerequisite for anti-imperial solidarity.

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9781478032885

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Reviews

“Finally! A book on mixed race studies that moves away from identity narratives to situate multiracials within power and violence, empire and war. Storti’s feat is remarkable: meticulous research and pitch-perfect writing look easy while the analysis of Asian white life in the context of racist interracial intimacies is astonishing.”—Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of Asian American Studies, Northwestern University “Storti’s meditation on how imperial domination is transformed into the intimacies of living flesh and psychic life is a critical tour de force. Hard-hitting yet lyrical, Torn probes the mutations that mark the mixed Asian/white subject not as multicultural telos but as persistent reminder of tense and terrifying histories of violence.”—David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

""Finally! A book on mixed race studies that moves away from identity narratives to situate multiracials within power and violence, empire and war. Storti's feat is remarkable: meticulous research and pitch-perfect writing look easy while the analysis of Asian white life in the context of racist interracial intimacies is astonishing.""--Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of Asian American Studies, Northwestern University ""Storti's meditation on how imperial domination is transformed into the intimacies of living flesh and psychic life is a critical tour de force. Hard-hitting yet lyrical, Torn probes the mutations that mark the mixed Asian/white subject not as multicultural telos but as persistent reminder of tense and terrifying histories of violence.""--David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

“Finally! A book on mixed race studies that moves away from identity narratives to situate multiracials within power and violence, empire and war. Storti’s feat is remarkable: meticulous research and pitch-perfect writing look easy while the analysis of Asian white life in the context of racist interracial intimacies is astonishing.”—Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of Asian American Studies, Northwestern University “Storti’s meditation on how imperial domination is transformed into the intimacies of living flesh and psychic life is a critical tour de force. Hard-hitting yet lyrical, Torn probes the mutations that mark the mixed Asian/white subject not as multicultural telos but as persistent reminder of tense and terrifying histories of violence.”—David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Anna M. Moncada Storti is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Asian American Studies at Duke University.

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