ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 2026 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

CORINNE MITSUYE SUGINO is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

REVIEWS

“Critical and necessary. . . . Making the Human is a clear-eyed assessment of 21st century Asian American racialization that should prove useful for cultural studies, media studies, rhetoric, and critical race and ethnic studies scholars invested in anti-colonial and abolitionist scholarship. . . . An excellent resource for understanding and challenging the way Asian Americans are racialized and gendered in contemporary American public discourse.”

— Cultural Studies

"For scholars in critical media studies, rhetorical studies, Asian American studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and gender studies, Making the Human provides valuable insights into the slippery categorical boundaries of Asian American racialization. . . . Making the Human makes a significant contribution to the field of communication by demonstrating how racial allegories shape the visibility, meaning, and legibility of Asian Americans in public discourse."

— Critical Studies in Media Communication

"Rhetorical scholars have a lot to learn from Sugino's theorization of racial allegory. Making the Human challenges rhetorical scholars to consider the material textures of discursive difference, to question knowledge formation across multiple contexts, and to foreground interconnected ways of thinking. The rhetorical praxis embodied in this book will thus be useful in this discipline and others."

— Quarterly Journal of Speech

"Well written and finely argued, Making the Human makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the multiple and malleable ways that Asian racialization operates in American society today. . . . With its incisive analysis of highly salient contemporary flashpoints, Sugino's text was an enjoyable one with which to think. . . . I, for one, have discussed every key example in Making the Human with students in Asian American studies classes, and at times I have struggled to find the right reading, excerpt, or analysis to prime students for a critically oriented discussion. At last, I need look no further."

— Catalyst

"What are the consequences of understanding 'Asian American' as a term wrapped up in carceral warfare, antiblackness, coloniality, and extraction? Positioning the figure of the 'Asian American' within a Civilizational project that imagines, institutionalizes, and enforces Western 'Man,' Making the Human demystifies the de facto liberalism embedded in dominant racial categories—and of 'anti-racism' itself."— Dylan Rodríguez, professor in the departments of Black Study and Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Califo

"Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s book is an expansive, ambitious examination of how Asian/Americans are constructed through racial allegory. In this tour de force, Sugino artfully analyzes the rhetoric of 'Asian/American' as fetish, disease vector, carceral subject, and victimized college applicant across popular discourse, film, and the law to construct 'Western Man'. It’s a must-read for scholars interested in the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetoric, and race."— David C. Oh, author of Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Crazy Rich Asians

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard