Duke University Press Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence

"In Torn, Anna M. Moncada Storti theorizes mixed Asian/white identity as a subjectivity brought into being by a mix of intimacy and imperial violence. Focusing on the post-Vietnam period in the US, Storti traces the lingering effects of this imperial violence on mixed race subjects' lives as small moments that nonetheless crystallize deep historical traumas held both in the body and in the psyche. This exposes the political and affective tensions that surround mixed race identity and interracial desire, focusing on how these tensions travel within the Asian diaspora. In doing so, Storti reveals a pervasive white cultural logic whereby whiteness seeks to fetishistically consume Asian-ness. Torn analyzes a broad range of Asian/white mixed-race subjects-interior designer Joanna Gaines, school shooter Elliot Rodger, performance artist Chanel Matsunami Govreau, amongst others-uncovering the painful and often contradictory cultural fantasies that mixed race people are made to embody"-- Provided by publisher. In Torn, Anna M. Moncada Storti searches for the ordinary and obscured impressions of the US empire, theorizing the pervasiveness of its violence through the language and patterns of intimacy. Reading for the intimacy of violence, Storti compiles an inventory of quotidian, psychic, and affective tensions that arise within the bodies of empire’s historical subjects. She raises Asian/white life as the representative case study to examine a familiar narrative of inner strife—that being of two distinct racial histories is to be rendered a body in tension, torn between ancestral lineages. Rather than refute this stance, Storti tracks the duress of fragmentation as a sign of war’s permanent mark on racial and sexual subjection. Traversing an archive of aesthetic, literary, and cultural portrayals of Asian/white racial mixture, Storti observes how Asian Americans refuse, rework, or reify the logics of progress and disavowal that have long fueled the US war machine. Tending to tension, she argues for a sustained confrontation with empire’s ordinary life, a prerequisite for anti-imperial solidarity. A treatise on Asian/white life, Torn uncovers the tensions that stem from the unrelenting violence of US imperialism—tensions which mixed race people must actively defuse and alter or risk reifying. Autorid: Anna M. Moncada Storti