Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans

By Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1978839707
• ISBN13: 9781978839700
• Release Date: November 2024
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher