Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter

Abstract

The portrayal of Asian Americans as the exemplar of American multiculturalism and the ideal "postracial" futurity has created a body politic easily recruited by neoliberal governmentality to disguise racial inequality. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Black Lives Matter movements based in New York City, this article focuses on the split within Asian American body politics between those for and against the centering of Black lives. Whereas an Asian American body politic risks being co-opted as a form of anti-Black white assimilation, the author also highlights the resistance of Asians for Black Lives activists and their attempt to recuperate Asian American identity for cross-racial solidarity.