Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic By Hentyle Yapp (review)

Reviewed by: Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic By Hentyle Yapp Ethan Fukuto MINOR CHINA: METHOD, MATERIALISMS, AND THE AESTHETIC. By Hentyle Yapp. ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021; pp. 288. What is the performative force of "China"? As Hentyle Yapp astutely argues in Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, the invocation of China often always calls forth a major, repressive, and authoritarian state, a vision continually stabilized as such in transnational and scholarly discourse [End Page 123] of Chinese art and aesthetics. Chinese artists are framed as resistive political agents whose work is ostensibly and exclusively about exposing Chinese state violence and censorship, "rendering the state as inherently illiberal, behind, and needing to catch up to the West" (2). Yapp diagnoses that these major narratives of Chinese art are codified across area studies and ethnic studies on the one hand and theatre, dance, and performance studies on the other. Minor China opens with a critique of the former fields, tending to the ways that China studies and Asian American studies render "China" as a stable and knowable political entity. As Yapp develops his argument, his critique extends out to reading practices in performance studies, which engage art and performance for their ability to activate the consciousness of the audience and inspire social change against societal ills. Such methods rely on a concept of performativity derived from J. L. Austin's speech act theory, which posits language and art as "active participants" in the social sphere that produce felicitous political effects geared toward change and progress (150). Yet performance falters, speech acts fail, and bodies linger. Counter to this opening diagnosis, Yapp forwards a theory and method of minor China that engages contemporary Chinese art and performance precisely as they fail to enact narratives of resistance, progress, and liberal inclusion. The minor instead invites hesitating and lingering with affective, formal, and materialist concerns that "highlight . . . the epistemological assumptions and ontological conditions that uphold the order of things, the major" (5). Minor China turns toward an infelicitous theory of performativity that orients our reading practices toward failed and fractured moments (173). The infelicitous performative offers a useful entry point into the minor insofar that it describes an ill-fitting, awkward, or bungled act. In the act of failing, the performative makes apprehensible the structures and orders through which such infelicitous acts and subjects are rendered void. The minor engages hesitation and lingering as primary methods to broach the affective dimensions of structure and structuration, sensing out how minor subjects and objects fit or fail to fit within major discourses. The minor asks us to hesitate and consider the major exigences that drive scholarly inquiry and the political legwork we often hope for art to perform. Against hastily applying politically loaded readings, Yapp invites lingering with formal engagements of art in ways that are sensuously attentive to minor details and material analysis. For instance, Yapp minorly engages with Ai Weiwei's work to explore its formal and conceptual elements as opposed to the artist's presumed political orientation. As perhaps the most famous contemporary Chinese artist globally, Ai is predictably framed through the major wherein his time spent living in New York City exposed him to the "extraordinary possibilities of Western liberal democracy" (80). Minor China instead engages Ai's critique of the "dominant presumptions undergirding global inclusion and global formations of race" that run counter to the discourse of Western liberal humanism (79). In Fairytale (2007), 1,001 empty chairs were strewn throughout the documenta arts festival in Kassel, Germany, along with 1,001 Chinese citizens who were funded to visit the festival. Yapp underscores how the Chinese participants were insistently racialized as "all looking the same" and thus deindividualized by German visitors interviewed for Fairytale (72). Against championing the work as inspiring multi-cultural contact and understanding, the minor tends to show the always already plural Chinese subject forces a consideration of how racialized notions of sameness operate within the global structuration of peoples and capital and how we might rethink the relational form of being and becoming beyond frameworks of humanism and individualism. Importantly, Yapp's point is not to replace the...