Presented By: Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies
Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasure of Fantasy
Leslie Bow
Leslie Bow (English, Wisconsin) will be in conversation with Victor Mendoza about her recent book "Racist Love: Asian Abstraction & the Pleasure of Fantasy".
In "Racist Love", Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence.
Leslie Bow is professor of English and Asian American Studies at UW-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning “Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South" (New York University Press, 2010); "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature" (Princeton University Press, 2001); and "Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy" (Duke University Press, 2022).
Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hjsXfN3NRqKRXimgDWMAZw
In "Racist Love", Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence.
Leslie Bow is professor of English and Asian American Studies at UW-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning “Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South" (New York University Press, 2010); "Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature" (Princeton University Press, 2001); and "Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy" (Duke University Press, 2022).
Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hjsXfN3NRqKRXimgDWMAZw
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