초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper investigates the representational as well as discursive materialities of the putative components of symbolic America, such as democracy, multiculturalism, and capitalism, critically. It analyzes how the “given-to-be-seen” landscape of American modernity has historically worked as a “mimetic realism” to whiten the national identity of America with its truth effect, particularly through the exclusion of Asian Americans, or placing them in a “state of exception.” They are marked as a racial frontier of the US empire so that their ontology is neither wholly “Asian” nor “American.” This study aims to show how the ontological gap of their otherness is regulated or silenced, yet nonetheless disclosed in the making of, on a micro-level, American subjectivity and, on a macro-level, the US empire. To this end, this paper engages a case study that illustrates how a normative citizen-subject is transformed into an exceptional subject who can be killed with impunity, particularly through a case study of the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin whose Asia life and death did not matter in the United States.
