East Meets Black

East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and black men an important means to secure class and racial privilege wealth and status in the post-civil rights era. The making of race and masculinity seems quite a moralizing comparison for Asian and black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional. Through this opposition in the U.S. racial hierarchy Chong Chon-Smith argues that Asian and black men are positioned along binary axes - brain/body diligent/lazy nerd/criminal culture/genetics student/convict and technocrat/athlete - what he terms racial magnetism. Via this magnetic concept East Meets Black examines the national conversations that oppose black and Asian masculinities but also the Afro-Asian counterpoints in literature film popular sport hip-hop music performance arts and internet subcultures. Chon-Smith highlights the spectacle and performance of baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki within global multiculturalism and the racially-coded controversy between Yao Ming and Shaquille O'Neal in transnational basketball. Further he assesses the prominence of martial arts buddy films such as Romeo Must Die and Rush Hour that produce Afro-Asian solidarity in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Finally Chon-Smith explores how the Afro-Asian cultural fusions in hip-hop open up possibilities for the creation of alternative subcultures to disrupt myths of black pathology and the Asian model minority.In this first interdisciplinary book on Asian and black masculinities in literature and popular culture Chon-Smith explores the inspiring contradictory hostile resonant and unarticulated ways in which Asian and black racial formation has affected contemporary America.