Rachel C. Lee invites readers to “tango” with The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America (258), and this book certainly requires some complicated legwork, spectacular leaps and various “sideways” movements across a range of discourses and disciplines in ways that may initially seem “jarring” (25–26). The surrealist figure of the exquisite corpse comprising body parts, contingently arranged in “centripetal–centrifugal tension” with more coherent bodies, whether biological, technological, political, theoretical, ideological or aesthetic, provides Lee with not only a topic, but also a style, “structure and mode of inquiry – part argument, part illustration, part deconstruction … part tinkering and reassembling” of Asian American criticism (238–39). Lee queries this criticism's traditional hierarchies, the privileging of the whole over the part, the ideational or discursive over the anatomical or biological, and instead “relish[es] the fragment” (8) and complicates the culture–nature binary opposition (11) consistent with new materialist scholarship that accords matter agency (33). Lee's readings of Asian American cultural productions focussed on body parts also draw on science and technology studies (STS), critical biopolitical studies, critical race studies, performance studies, and postcolonial and femiqueer theories.

A crucial question in The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America is framed as follows: “given that race has been acknowledged not as biological but as a discursive (legal–juridical) construction and as an outgrowth of historically variable political-economic formations, how is it then that Asian American artists, authors, and performers keep scrutinizing their body parts?” (10). The biological figure of “outgrowth” gestures towards an answer, that bodies matter, most forcefully, for those whose bodies are racialized and gendered in ways that render them “bioavailable, biosupplementable, clinically carved up” (212). Lee highlights how “the Asiatic body” has historically served as a biomaterial resource for “the [white] biopolitical elect” to obliterate, exploit and marginalize (217). For her, this arguably “peculiarly” Asian American preoccupation offers race studies and other social-justice discourses new and important insights regarding agency and ethics in an era of rapid and overwhelming biotechnological developments (211–13).

Lee's introduction, first chapter, conclusion and epilogue are mainly given over to theory, although they also include references to Asian American writing, for example Lois Ann Yamanaka's Sunday Night at the Pahala Theater (1993) (introduction) and Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998) (chapter 1). In chapters 2 to 5, Lee discusses Cheng-Chieh Yu's dance theatre, Margaret Cho's stand-up comedy, Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Denise Uyehara's performance art. Transnational Asian American texts are also analysed, for example Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and Lawrence Cohen's work on Indian organ trafficking, as well as writers such as Greg Bear and James Baldwin. These artists’ approaches are biological in a variety of ways, their different bodily preoccupations made most apparent in Lee's list of contents, where in the left-hand margin preceding the chapter titles are body parts of diverse scales, from “CORPSE,” “BLOOD” and “KIDNEY” before the introduction on “Parts/Parturition” to “TISSUE CULTURE” before the epilogue, “Tail Piece” (v). This structure helps to demonstrate the new materialist insight about body parts and agency insofar as these parts “act as the springboard for each of the chapters” (25). Lee's body parts, some of which seem discrete, while others, like blood, tissue, parasites and other microbiological organisms, are less so, serve to undermine or “queer” the human–nonhuman binary opposition and by extension its underlying social hierarchies.

Overall, I would say of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America that one turn of the tango is not enough, nor would I want it to be. As a reading experience goes, I felt I was at times learning in “snatches” (27), but that is hardly surprising for an interdisciplinary and open-ended project such as Lee's, with its “queer” combinations of STS and cultural studies discourses that involve “an unfolding interpretative practice, a contingent and impermanent ethics of doing and undoing” (258). Lee's book offers a thought-provoking combination of discourses with sometimes visceral effects, from toe curling and gut wrenching to laughter. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies will appeal to researchers in race studies and the medical and environmental humanities.