Join the Unit for Criticism and Asian American Studies virtually on March 3, 2022 at 5:30 pm CST for erin Khuê Ninh's (UCSB) lecture, "Passing for Model Minority."
“Passing for Model Minority” is based on an ongoing project taking to task the systems both public and private that together manufacture a particular kind of good, capitalist subject: Get your filial child, your doctor/lawyer, your model minority here. This project that has meant holding Asian American studies accountable for their field’s dogmatic refusal to see the model minority as real, even as it lives and breathes and dies in front of us: in competitive high schools and colleges, disproportionately represented in their student bodies and, further still, in their suicide tallies. Ninh's Passing for Perfect: College Impostors & Other Model Minorities (Temple UP 2021) instead accepts the empirical evidence of that racial identity, and feels for the often invisible costs of its manufacturing process: When you are raised in a box, what hurts? The talk will lean on work by sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, arguing that Asian Americans are measured by their proximity to a tightly defined “success frame”: “earning straight A’s, graduating as the high school valedictorian, earning a degree from an elite university, attaining an advanced degree, and working in one of four high-status professional fields: medicine, law, engineering, or science.” For the children of Asian immigrants, this strict plotline and its orthodox tropes constitute cultural identity, such that to fall short in any particular is to be inauthentically Asian American. The talk will also contend that this success frame be considered an instance of “genre,” as drawn from Lauren Berlant’s work, such that subjects raised to certain plotlines will be made unable to conceive of life as good on any other terms.
This is the second event of the year-long series "In Plain Sight: Reckoning with Anti-Asian Racism," funded by the University of Illinois Chancellor's Call to Action to Address Systemic Racism and Social Injustice Research Programs. Please register for this lecture.