Book Review

Shatara Michelle Ford
Book Review #1
09/14/08
Racial Formation in the United States: Orientals

When I noticed that Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture was co-edited by Michael Omi, I immediately knew what I was getting into. This book is a beautiful addition to the Racial Formation Theory discourse. Racial Formation, is a concept coined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, where the antiquated fact that race is determined by one’s biology is rejected; and is replaced with an understanding that race is only a highly complex social construction. The value placed on each race is determined through the social, political, and economic relationship it has with the dominant culture. Like any social construction, race is very fluid and is produced and reinforced through the micro and macro levels of society. The micro, being: the individual’s interaction with other individuals; and the macro, being: ideology and its influence on other social structures, like government, education and the media. However, the social meanings and values attached to race do not exist without its contradictions and these contradictions are the openings into which race can be contested. Within the micro and macro levels of racial formation, those same spaces that race is produced and reinforced also serve as sites for political struggle.
This is where Robert G. Lee comes in. On page 8 he introduces The six faces of the oriental: The pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook, and elaborates by stating:
“From each of these racial paradigms emerges a wide array of specific images. Each of these representations was constructed in a specific historical moment, marked by a shift in class relations accompanied by cultural crisis. At such times American nationality is redefined in terms of class, gender, race and sexuality.”
Lee makes it very clear within the first pages of his book that race is a social construction and that none of the ways in which Asian Americans are racialized is a complete representation. He moves on to prove his claims through recounting the history and development of the Oriental within the macro level mediums of popular culture.
Since no single medium of popular culture is an accurate representation of Asian Americans. Lee gathers his support through those that help “illuminate the social contradictions of its production, the internal complexities of the Oriental representation, and they way in which the Oriental is imbedded in the discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality in America (12),” in that process he manages to dig up songs, films, court cases, plays, skits, magazines, books, and newspapers. The diversity of sources works in Lee’s favor, for we witness the construction of the “Oriental” occur before our eyes.
Lee’s comments on “good” and “bad” stereotypes in the context of the “model minority” were quite interesting, particularly when he makes the claim that “it shifts attention from a critical analysis of race toward a narrow utilitarian calculus in which specific images are measured in terms of their usefulness to strategies of upward mobility (12).” However, he mentioned this in the introduction and failed to elaborate any further.
Overall, this book does not just serve as an addition to the racial formation discourse, but also adds to the contested site of popular culture and is very successful at doing so through Lee’s exposure of the way in which particular mediums are used to produce and reinforce the meanings and values attached to Asian Americans. Lee sets the stage, gives us the background, and then builds these images back up into our memory. That’s what makes Lee’s work so powerful: He gives us what he calls, “political consciousness-the consciousness of the histories of peoples in struggle (230),” and with that we can engage with race in popular culture more critically.