A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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David Belasco’s 1900 theatrical spectacle adapted from the novella, and Giacomo Puccini’s 1904–7 opera Madama Butterfly. I read the ways in which Madame Butterfly functions as an agent for the dissemination of exclusion-era jurisprudence about Asian racial difference, suggesting that as a work that remains popular for contemporary audiences, it continues to influence the making of legal subjectivity for Asian Americans today. In chapter 2, I study Ping Chong and Company’s 1995 experimental performance piece Chinoiserie, a staged history of Chinese America. If much of the history of Chinese American encounters with the law has been tainted by injustice, Ping Chong and Company use the stage to enact what I describe as “reparative justice.” Chinoiserie engages with the legal history of Chinese America in order to restore erased Chinese American stories to history and to rethink the possibilities for emergent forms of justice for the future.
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the realm of quotidian performance with a study of the Japanese American concentration camps. In chapter 3, I look to everyday performances of patriotism in the camps, attending to the interplay of legal performativity and embodied performance in the manifestation of racial subjectivity in and on the Japanese American body during the war. I consider how performances of patriotism had the potential to reify and sometimes disrupt the state’s claim to incarcerated Japanese Americans. Chapter 4 studies the political performativity of objects, reading a scrapbook of contraband photographs of camp life taken by a Heart Mountain internee. Demonstrating the ways in which the state, and immigration law in particular, deployed a visual logic to compel Asian American subjects to perform for the state’s optic, I argue that the internee’s photographs pose a performative intervention into the visual surveillance and regulation of Japanese America while raising significant questions about the limits of visibility as a strategy for liberation.
The final section of the book turns to the racialization of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans from the period of the Vietnam War to the GWOT. Chapter 5 studies the performance practices of Cambodian/American band Dengue Fever in order to trace the precarious position constructed for Cambodian refugees of the Vietnam War in US law. Studying Dengue Fever’s centralization of the figure of the “illegal immigrant” in its performances, I argue that the band draws attention to and interrupts the vulnerable position of Cambodian immigrants and Cambodian Americans who are subject to new forms of state violence in the era of the GWOT. In conclusion, I offer a brief meditation on racial profiling within the GWOT and on Hasan Elahi’s digital performance project Tracking Transience. Doing so, I offer suggestions for the role that scholarship about Asian American performance might contribute to criticizing, historicizing, and potentially transforming current conditions of racialization in the era of the national security state.
Racial subjection is most successfully realized when the state is able to seduce and compel racialized bodies to perform as raced subjects. That is, when the state inspires the subject to do as Bashir did, when he learned “to love what they did” to him. Studying sites where we can see the point at which law and performance meet in and on the Asian American body, this book documents some of the central technologies by which racialized subjectivity comes into being. It is offered as a contribution to the project of understanding and historicizing the technologies of Asian American racialization in order to critically dismantle them and to bring about greater conditions of social justice. Most importantly, however, by analyzing and documenting a series of Asian American performances, the following pages make up a record of resilience and possibility. For if performance is the means by which racialization comes into being in and on the body, performance can also be a radical practice for rehearsing and realizing the long-deferred promises of justice and emancipation.
1 / “That May Be Japanese Law, but Not in My Country”: Madame Butterfly and the Problem of Law
Tuan Anh Nguyen spent most of his life in the United States. He was born in Vietnam to a US American father and Vietnamese mother in September 1969. His mother abandoned Nguyen and his civilian contractor father, Joseph Boulais, when he was only a few years old. In 1975, Boulais returned to the United States with his six-year-old son, whom he continued to raise. At the age of twenty-two, Nguyen pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault on a minor in a Texas state court. A few years later in 1996, while serving out the terms of his eight-year sentence, Congress passed the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA). IIRAIRA mandates the deportation of aliens convicted of a felony charge. As a result, the Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against Nguyen, and an immigration judge subsequently ordered his deportation to Vietnam. Despite having a citizen father and being raised by this father in the United States, the US government considered him to be an alien and targeted him for deportation to a place he hardly knew.
Nguyen’s legal status was written nearly thirty years before his birth, at the height of the Korean War and the US military’s occupation of Japan. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, heavily revising the section of the US code that regulates immigration and naturalization. As part of the act, the legislature clarified citizenship eligibility for children born abroad to unwed parents when only one parent is a US citizen. While children born to citizen mothers automatically receive citizenship retroactive to birth, children born to citizen fathers must meet three additional requirements for citizenship eligibility. Nguyen appealed his case, arguing that the differential burden violated both fathers’ and sons’ equal protection rights. (Unaware of the differential burden, Boulais had not registered his son as a citizen within the statute of limitations.) Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court opinion in Nguyen v. INS affirmed the constitutionality of the law, counterintuitively arguing that the three-part bar—despite the fact that it made it three times easier for fathers (often US servicemen) to escape responsibility for illegitimate children born overseas—forwarded a legitimate government interest in the “facilitation of a relationship between parent [father] and child.”1
In a 2009 New York Times interview, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was among the dissenting Justices) described Nguyen (and a similar case, Miller v. Albright) in terms that directly associated it with the legacy of US imperialism in Asia. In a surprise move, she did so by suggesting that the majority’s ruling was written under the sign of a popular Orientalist opera: “They [the majority] were held back by a way of looking at the world in which a man who wasn’t married simply was not responsible. There must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly in World War II. And for Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who voted in the majority in Nguyen and penned the Miller opinion] that was part of his experience.”2 Ginsburg’s interview implies that the impact of Madame Butterfly extends beyond the proscenium arch, insinuating itself into the high court’s interpretation of the law. At the same time, she evidences the ways in which Western audiences regularly mistake the fiction of Madame Butterfly for a reality. As if the opera were a template for actually occurring incidents, she muses, “there must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly.” Somewhere in the middle of Nguyen and Madame Butterfly, the difference between a legal reality and an onstage theatrical spectacle collapses.
In 1907, Giacomo Puccini premiered Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.3 It is a tragic story of a Japanese bride in nineteenth-century Japan who is married to and ultimately abandoned by her US American husband, ending in the young bride’s suicide. Since its debut, Madama Butterfly has become a centerpiece of most major opera companies’ repertories, and by some accounts it is one of the most produced operas in the world. Due to its iconic and canonical status, Madama Butterfly has contributed significantly to the shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian difference and Asian femininity. As such, the Butterfly narrative is a central critical object for the field of Asian American studies.4 But how is it that Madame Butterfly has come to influence the writing of American law, and in what surprising ways does the narrative itself function as a vessel for the transmission of knowledge produced about Asian racial difference in US law?
This chapter argues that the legal management of Asian and Asian American difference is not simply the historical background against which the various versions of Madame Butterfly were written but that the Butterfly narratives themselves function as