Research Focus Group Talk: Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression

In this talk, Wen Liu will argue that Asian Americans are not a coherent racial population, but they are made so through the psychological technologies of “racecraft.” These technologies aim to demonstrate the racial elasticity of the Asian American mind, including cultural essentialism, democratic governmentality, white ascendancy, and unconscious microaggression. They help construct a flexible racial identity that can demonstrate the wide range of cognitive styles, cultural practices, and, most importantly, race elasticity for the postwar USA as it strives to become a multicultural democracy.

Wen Liu is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Interdisciplinary Sinophone Studies Research Focus Group, UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies, and UCSB’s Department of Asian American Studies