Paper Performance (Paperback)

Ju Yon Kim

ISBN 10: 1503646653 / ISBN 13: 9781503646650

Published by Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2026

About this Item

Paperback. Since the late nineteenth century, various agencies of the U.S. government have developed elaborate bureaucratic procedures to manage "suspect" Asian groups. Ju Yon Kim explores the modes of engagement and contestation available to those who are subjected by the state to both relentless documentation and demands to performwhether as lawful immigrants, obedient colonial subjects, or loyal Americans. Even as paper documentation has been critical to authorizing exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration by the state, it has also enabled performances with paper that have facilitated transnational passage, mobilized resistance to administration, and troubled the logic of racial and national classifications. Linking histories of Chinese immigration exclusion, the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the internment of Japanese Americans, and FBI surveillance of political groups, Kim brings together studies of paperwork and performance to demonstrate their continued, intertwined impact on Asian American history and culture. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781503646650

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Paper Performance (Paperback)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press, Palo Alto
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503646653
• ISBN 13: 9781503646650
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Since the late nineteenth century, various agencies of the U.S. government have developed elaborate bureaucratic procedures to manage "suspect" Asian groups. Ju Yon Kim explores the modes of engagement and contestation available to those who are subjected by the state to both relentless documentation and demands to perform―whether as lawful immigrants, obedient colonial subjects, or loyal Americans. Even as paper documentation has been critical to authorizing exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration by the state, it has also enabled performances with paper that have facilitated transnational passage, mobilized resistance to administration, and troubled the logic of racial and national classifications.

  Linking histories of Chinese immigration exclusion, the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the internment of Japanese Americans, and FBI surveillance of political groups, Kim brings together studies of paperwork and performance to demonstrate their continued, intertwined impact on Asian American history and culture.

About the Author

Ju Yon Kim is the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015).