Racist Love

“Thought-provoking and illuminating. Professor Bow’s analysis is both broad ranging and a deep dive into culture, history, psychology, and much more. Her work provides context, vocabulary, and insight—a powerful framework for understanding.” - Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“This book comes at a timely juncture—the latest reckoning of anti-Asian violence—and its analysis of the critical interplay of racial affects is deeply welcome. But Leslie Bow also asks much more of the reader in an incisive treatment that is vast in scope yet consistently uncompromising. If it has been possible until now to foster a sense of the inhuman contingencies of Asianness, Racist Love finally disabuses us of intrahuman fantasies of racial feeling and shows us how objects matter.” - Mel Y. Chen, author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

"A theoretically sophisticated contribution to the growing body of Asian Americanist scholarship invested in studying racial feelings and emotions. The book brings together insights from affect theory, psychoanalysis and social psychology, and posthumanist discourses on objects and things to examine a wide range of Asianized commodities and cultural phenomena, along with Asian American authored literature and visual culture, in order to elucidate Asian Americans’ ambiguous positioning in the twenty-first-century US racial imaginary." - Martin Joseph Ponce, American Literary History

"In Racist Love, Leslie Bow deep dives and shows how Asians and Asian Americans are reduced to objects of anxiety and desire in the United States." - Casey Cha, International Examiner

"After reading this book, one cannot doubt the severe psychic and physical damage that fantasies of Asian American cuteness incur on Asian Americans as well as others. . . . Racist Love is a much-needed, critical analysis of the baneful discourses that have contributed to historical and contemporary anti-Asian violence." - Audrey Wu Clark, Society for US Intellectual History

"[T]he work is timely and accessible, and makes an excellent selection of case studies with which to support the central argument. It is useful for Asian Americanists based in the disciplines of film and media studies, English and literature, and communications, at the levels of advanced undergraduate or early graduate work." - Janna Haider, Journal of American Ethnic History