The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation

I am working on a second book that extends my ongoing interest in literature and political economy. Entitled The Asian American Character of Human Capital, Logistics, and Automation, the book reconceives Asian American literature through its Cold War co-evolution with the post-Fordist knowledge economy. It traces how three interrelated keywords—human capital, logistics, and automation—gained conceptual coherence and social force through their intimate yet underexamined relation to a history of Asian racialization, a history that finds its literary counterpart in the formal problem of “Asian American character.” The book asks: What does it mean to read a character as “Asian American”? What conditions govern that recognition? And what kind of work does such recognition perform? Bringing Asian American literature in dialogue with midcentury theories of information, cybernetics, and management, the book shows that “Asian American character” materializes within the tension between individual personhood and capitalist abstraction that human capital, logistics, and automation presuppose but do not themselves theorize. Specifically, it elucidates “Asian American character” as a racial form of value produced by capital’s systematic equivocation surrounding the social determination of labor, doing so across three genres: in Asian American self-help, which recodes the logic of human capital; in the ethnic memoir, whose wartime emergence is shown to be inseparable from transpacific logistics; and in Asian American literary criticism itself, in the ways this genre of academic discourse confronts the contradictions of redundancy that automation has imposed on contemporary intellectual and artistic labor. 

Research from the chapter on human capital—on how Chicago School human capital theory remade the model minority myth—was published in the August 2023 issue of Representations; an excerpt from the chapter on automation will appear in a forthcoming Amerasia Journal special issue on “Marxism and Asian American Studies.”