Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability

“Vivian L. Huang’s Surface Relations is a brilliant contribution to Asian American studies and performance studies scholarship. In dazzlingly original readings of Asian diasporic visual art, literature, and performance, Huang identifies an aesthetics of inscrutability (and other related racialized affects of withholding, distance, obfuscation, flatness, and deferral) which produce modes of relationality and sociality that refuse and refute model minority respectability. Instead these ‘surface aesthetics’ strategically disidentify with stereotypes of the ‘inscrutable Asian’ to provide powerful alternative models of the political. At this moment when anti-Asian racism and yellow peril discourse are more pernicious than ever, this is timely, compelling, and vitally necessary work.”

“An engaging and compelling book, Surface Relations offers a refreshing and critical outlook on the racialization and production of stereotypes of Asian Americans as silent, passive, untrustworthy—inscrutable. Taking on these entrenched representations, Vivian L. Huang convincingly reformulates the discourse of inscrutability as a productive strategic force by intersecting it with feminist, queer, and trans studies.”