Racial substitution as Asian American critique in #StarringJohnCho, #SeeAsAmStar, and Superfan

This thesis attempts to theorize racial substitution as a form of Asian American critique which expresses both a desire of seamless representation and the impossibilities of this seamlessness. Contextualizing the definition in seamlessness in terms of Asian American racialization, whiteness, and as a product of digital and textual editing, racial substitution emerges as an expression of the “intermediary position” of Asian Americans in North American racial politics, as defined by Susan Koshy. Racial substitution builds on José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification and Tina Chen’s theory of Asian American impersonation to interrogate how Asian American artists, writers, and critics interact with the performances of popular culture to replace white actors or characters with Asian Americans to advocate for visibility, and how this act also destabilizes the terms of inclusion in these representational regimes. The first chapter analyzes William Yu’s social media campaigns, #StarringJohnCho and #SeeAsAmStar, to explore how he uses digital tools to curate and rework posters and film clips to replace white actors with Asian Americans. Though Yu turns to these software for their editing capabilities to create images and videos as seamless as the original, his substitutions reveal their own seams through juxtaposition, estrangement, and uncanniness, gesturing to the impossibility of seamlessness. The second chapter departs from digital editing to literary, examining how, in Superfan, Jen Sookfong Lee employs literary editing, an aspect of which is her tendency to substitute pieces of popular culture into her own life or her own image into popular culture, in order to disrupt the genre of memoir and autobiography and its traditional convention of constructing a seamless self. Analyzing how racial substitution operates in these projects reveals a limiting preoccupation with whiteness and the complicity of this mode of critique in racial hierarchies, but it also highlights the impossibility of seamless replacement, opening up possibilities to alternate modes of Asian American imagining.