UC San Diego

Through the interpretation of labor department documents, journalism, and state discourses, I historicize the formation of both the construction of black "pathology" and the Asian "model minority" by analyzing the comparative racialization of African Americans and Asian Americans in the United States. Beginning with the Moynihan Report and journalistic reports about Asian Americans as "model minority," Black and Asian men were racialized together, as if "racially magnetized," in an attempt to maintain U.S. liberalism and U.S.-powered globalization. The post-civil rights era names this specific race for U.S. citizenship and class advantage when state selection of Asian immigration and deindustrialization of the Black working class helped usher in a new period of depoliticized class struggle and racial realignment. As the state abandoned social programs at home and expanded imperial projects overseas, the post- civil rights moment was a period of danger and contradiction when Black radicalism and the Asian American Movement challenged the understanding that social equality through civil rights had been achieved. Thus, the discursive and representational containment of an Asian- Black radicalism had maintained a form of racial hierarchy and gender politics that reconstituted white supremacy and gender relations in post-civil rights. Through the concept of racial magnetism, this dissertation examines both dominant and emergent representations of Asian and African American masculinities as mediating figures for the contradictions of race, class, and gender in post-civil rights U.S.A. While some reports pair together Black "pathology" and the Asian "model minority," African American and Asian American counter-discourses of solidarity and identification-in literature, film, music and performance arts-link social movements to cultural production as active critical responses to these reports. Selected works and texts discussed include The Moynihan Report, Aiiieeeee!, No-No Boy, Rush Hour, Romeo Must Die, Yao Ming, Ichiro Suzuki, I Was Born With Two Tongues, and Mountain Brothers