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When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

Transracial adoption has recently become a hotly contested subject of contemporary and critical concern, with scholars across the disciplines working to unravel its complex implications. In Claiming Others, Mark C. Jerng traces the practice of adoption to the early nineteenth century, revealing its surprising centrality to American literature, law, and social thought.

Abstract Both Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) use Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to help them theorize reading practices for analyzing the interrelationships between literature and sociopolitical experience. In doing so, both disavow powerful understandings of the “social” produced across race and gender critique in African American and ethnic literary studies. This essay traces a connection backwards from Latour to the sociologist Gabriel Tarde to critiques of sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s understanding of the social and literary dimensions of “environing” critique assumptions embedded in the idea of networks, highlighting crucial experiences of being made not to act as constitutive of the social. The argument turns to brief syntheses of work by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong for models of thinking literary and social experience, suggesting that they need to be brought into these discussions of the normative values and methods of literary study. The essay concludes by reconsidering Winfried Fluck’s examination of these normative values in relation to dominant philosophies of history and questioning his assumptions about conditions of unfreedom.

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named \"racial worldmaking\" because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

What is the relationship between author and textual content for Asian American literature? Since the inception of Asian American Studies, Asian American literature has traditionally relied on authorial markers of Asian ancestry in order to delimit its boundaries.

Several critics notice that Donald Glover and Joe Christmas pose a unique twist to passing: the characters pass as white and pass as black, and ultimately settle, however uneasily, into a black persona.3 Whether or not one decides that Glover and Christmas choose to pass or choose not to pass, pass as white or pass as black, the theme of passing powerfully poses the social construction of race, even as it frames the problem of racial identity in terms of an individual choice.4 Passing privileges racial identity as a problem of being true to oneself, because to pass presumes that one is masquerading as something that one is not. Rathet than exemplifying racial identity as an individual characteristic or even personal choice (passing), Glover and Christmas represent the relational dimensions of racial subjectivity as a negotiation between the other's demand and the self's attempt at integration and individuation.5 Race is usually represented in the logic of categories (the social categories of race, class, gender, etc.) that define persons through distinguishing attributes and specific differences: I am black, not white; I am male, not female, etc.

As political and legal debates around adoption have grown more intense, stories of adoption have proliferated. As Barbara Melosh has shown, a whole set of conventional narratives, often in relation to political debates around adoption, have emerged to codify and express the conflicting issues of adoption. Here, Jerng explores Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life and addresses the problem of representation posed by the emergence of the transracial adoptee.

C. L. R. James puts his finger on the valorization of a different kind of individuality in bothGone with the Windand Frank Yerby’s plantation romances: Yerby is characteristic of something entirely new in fiction sold to the millions. His characters break every accepted rule of society. They are out for what they want and get it how they can. They cheat, lie, scheme, plot, are brutal, cruel, lustful, expressing their free individuality. They are also successful … Yerby’s books are a primitive elemental response to some of the deepest needs of the American people in their reaction against