E100: Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (w/ Dr. Corinne M. Sugino)

Today’s episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne’s concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man".

Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human, unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne’s intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne’s nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition.

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press.

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.

Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York University Press.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506

Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics. Utah State Press.

Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts. Univ of California Press.

Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research.

Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.

Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved’: An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17.

Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.

da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. University of Minnesota Press.

An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)