By Addie Tsai
Chapter 1: Seduced Whole: Fragmentation, Asian Settler Complicity, and the Cultures of Appropriation
“The mixed race portrait may satisfy a desire to be represented, a reasonable desire for anyone who has not felt seen, but it also, I argue, becomes a prime site to explore the enduring effects of America’s colonial mission and imperial expansion, which are never not present even and especially within cultural objects deemed worthy of praise, purchase, and consumption.” (40)
That the multiracial ancestry of Andrew Cunanan, the Filipine Italian who assassinated Gianni Versace and was the subject of FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “provokes an exploration into the ways racial deception functions as a backdrop to the disavowed, the denied, and the oft-forgotten elements embedded within the cultural politics of American multiracialism at the turn of the century.” (41)
In considering American Crime Story alongside Storti’s analysis and explication of “racial deception,” I can’t help but also turn my attention to the actor who embodied him, Darren Criss, also multiracial (his mother is Filipine, Spanish, and Chinese, and his father was English, German, and Irish) and seen through a lens of “shapeshifting,” whether intentionally or the ways media depicts multiracial Asian people as “chameleons.”
Storti considers the complicated utopic vision of the Eurasian as the “answer for racial conflict,” and how they reveal the colonial project of “racial purity.”
Questions and demands for racial purity and authenticity, particularly toward those considered “hybrid,” abound. How do we see contemporary media contend (or ignore) what lies underneath mixed Asian representation?
Addie Tsai (any/all) is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel, and Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They are the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Addie is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies.