In Racist Love Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature.

Introduction. Racist Love  1
1. Racial Transitional Objects: Anthropomorphic Animals and Other Asian Americans  25
2. Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii Style, and the Asian Thing  69
3. Asian ● Female ● Robot ● Slave: Techo-Orientalism after #MeToo  108
4. On the Asian Fetish and The Fantasy of Equality  153
Conclusion. Racist Hate, Racial Profiling, Pokémon at Auschwitz  191
Acknowledgments  201
Notes  205
References 237
Index  253