Collect Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans And Miscegenation Engineered By Susan Koshy Depicted In Physical Book

Naturalization examines literary representations of whiteAsian miscegenation to construct a theory that examines the role of sexuality in the racialized construction of nationality.
Like many books of literary criticism, the introduction provides a theoretical framework followed by a series of compelling and distinct readings of novels.


Although Koshy artfully references landscapes and naturalization throughout the introduction, the text deals very little with the “naturalization” process and depictions of nature outside of her evocative chapter on Bulosan.
Koshy adeptly examines international spaces however, and the relationship between national modes of regulating racial and sexual boundaries in an international context.
For example, Asian exclusion laws aimed to keep male laborers in the United States while supporting families outside of the United States.
While Asian males were depicted as threatening to U, S. boundaries of racial and sexual identity in images of Asian male/white woman miscegenation, images of white man/Asian woman miscegenation occurring in portcities were condoned.
We can not ignore cartographies of imperialism when mapping the constructing borders of moralities and identities,

Koshys chapter titles are provocative of the sexual citizenship she theorizes, She entitles her discussion of the colonial context of Filipino sexuality in Bulosans text “Unincorporated Territories of Desire” and her discussion of Mukherjees controversial Jasmine as “Sex Acts as Assimilation Acts.
” In the chapter on Jasmine, Koshy coins the term sexual capital to discuss the distance between Jasmine and representations of Madame Butterfly discussed in the first chapter, “Mimic Modernity” which constructs an argument about how Japanese identity is gendered into acceptable feminine and unacceptable masculine.
Koshy asserts that Asian American womens sexuality “earlier defined as exterritorial because the sexual license it represented had to be excluded from the moral order of the nation and marriage is by the late twentieth century domesticated to mediate a crisis for the white bourgeois sexual order.
” The second chapter looks at Griffiths Broken Blossom contending its representation of miscegenation was not the intense break from Birth of a Nation that critics often assume.
Just as “Mimic Modernity” concerns itself with the multiple incarnations of the Madame Butterfly narrative, “Eugenic Romances of American Nationhood” compare Griffiths Broken Blossom an attack on European aggression and affirmation of the impossibility of miscegenation to the short story it is based on, “The Chink and the Child” which uses the image of the Chinese male to emphasize the

moral and sexual degeneracy of the white working class.

Sexual Naturalization offers compelling new insights into the racialized constitution of American nationality, In the first major interdisciplinary study of Asianwhite miscegenation from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Koshy traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws, and their role in shaping cultural norms.
Not only did these laws foster the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, they were paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas.
Miscegenation laws thus turned sex acts into race acts and engendered new meanings for both,

Koshy argues that the cultural work performed by narratives of whiteAsian miscegenation dramatically transformed the landscape of desire in the United States, inventing new objects and relations of desire that established a powerful hold over U.
S. culture, a capture of imaginative space that was out of all proportion to the actual numbers of Asian residents,

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