Paper Performance: Suspicion and Asian American Archives

Since the late nineteenth century, various agencies of the U.S. government have attempted to manage "suspect" immigrants, colonial subjects, and activists of Asian descent through bureaucratic procedures involving extensive paperwork and live examinations. These procedures have given institutional authority and form to suspicion but rarely alleviated or contained it: while insisting that there is something to uncover, they have offered less the satisfaction of suspicion than its expansion. Ju Yon Kim explores the modes of engagement and contestation available to those who are subjected by the state to relentless documentation and demands to perform—whether as lawful immigrants, obedient colonial subjects, or loyal Americans. Paper documentation has been critical to authorizing exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration by the state, yet 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.

Closely examining a range of documents, including immigration interview transcripts, colonial surveillance forms, loyalty questionnaires, and informant reports, Kim argues for a dramaturgical approach to interacting with these archives, one that recognizes suspicion's tendency to render certain bodies theatrical while also countering its inexorable pursuit of evidence. 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.

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).