Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation

TL;DRAbstract

This essay offers a political phenomenology of some of the underlying structures of Asian American identity practices. Specifically, I focus on anti-Asian stigmatization and some of the self-evaluative emotions and self-making strategies with which Asian Americans respond in forming or maintaining their identities. I begin by situating Asian American experiences within the wider political framework. U.S. society is configured by a kind of orientalist liberalism in which Asian Americans are marked by a distinctive form of racism and xenophobia while at the same time their civic-cultural practices have been characterized as benignly assimilative and hailed as a model for other racial minorities. In contrast to much public discourse as well as some of the assimilation literature in the social sciences, I examine the problematic racialization of various kinds of self-consciousness among Asian Americans, particularly the self-regard of those who try to deracialize themselves in order to ass

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