Taking the perspective of longue durée to theorize comparative racialization, Race for Citizenship unpacks select African American and Asian American cultural texts extracted from pre-emancipation to neoliberal America. While the sheer range of this study runs the risk of the argument being labeled too ambitious, it should not be interpreted as in any way disadvantageous to the incisiveness of the author's claims. For contained within is that of which the scholars of comparative ethnic studies are in need: a theoretical framework to identify and interpret comparative racial formations in literature and visual art.

Helen Heran Jun is in search of a conceptual tool that will enable her to examine that which is at the core of the Afro-Asian nexus in literature and culture. According to her, existing scholarship is marred by interpretations that are bifurcated. On the one hand, scholars place more than usual emphasis on compelling moments of cross-racial coalition work among African Americans and Asian Americans to mount resistance to white supremacy. On the other hand, scholars take into consideration failures on the part of these racialized groups to forge solidarity, for they so often reproduce the logic of either anti-Asian racism or anti-black racism.

To exceed this staleness in thought, Jun proposes a new analytical orientation. Her contention relates to the ways in which African Americans and Asian Americans struggle to achieve national inclusion (that is, to overcome the matrices of race, class, gender, and sexuality buttressing American modernity). Jun argues that the way these two groups negotiated – not in isolation from, but rather in relation to, each other – has given rise to certain forms of knowledge due to an existing discourse of citizenship that is too narrow and constrictive. The notion that bears the title of this book captures this imperative on the part of both African Americans and Asian Americans to rework the language of race and substitute their respective distinct racial discourses to demand the promise of full citizenship.

Specifically, two forms of racial discourse that emerge out of the Afro-Asian nexus are called “Black Orientalism” and “Asian uplift.” Examined in chapters 1 and 2, for instance, are the racialized tropes of China, Chinese immigrants, and Chinatowns that appear in the writings of the antebellum black press and Anna Julia Cooper. In this regard, her analysis brings together the contradictory narratives of the alleged “heathenism” of China and Chinatowns and African American affinities toward Chinese immigrants. The manifestation of African Americans’ split response in these writings appears less confounding, she argues, when the field of citizenship sanctioned by the nexus of racist law and culture and reinforced by heteropatriarchy, from which black writers fashioned their own distinct orientalist discourse, is considered. Extending this analytical angle in chapter 5, Jun unpacks the representations of Korean immigrant merchants in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1988) and John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood (1991). What this anti-Asian figuration lays bare, she stresses, is the interlocking structural force of US deindustrialization and globalization since 1965 that has brought Asians and blacks in urban America in close proximity to each other in the first place.

Turning to John Okada's No-No Boy (1958) and Kim Ronyoung's Clay Walls (1986) in chapters 3 and 4 respectively, as well as the works of two Asian American filmmakers, Justin Lin's film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Spencer Nakasako's documentary a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995) in chapter 6, Jun explores a certain epistemic impulse, which she refers to as Asian uplift, which emanates from Asian American cultural texts. Figured in these texts are Asian Americans’ struggles with assimilation that dovetail around the gendered and racialized anxieties of being associated with African Americans’ definite limits to upward social mobility and deviance. Their struggles appear as “Asian American suburban angst,” fueling a neoliberal outlook on life that shapes the discourse of cultural racism which cites African Americans as being culpable for their own poverty.

These instances of cross-racial discrimination, Jun reminds the reader, ultimately risk reinscribing the trappings of orientalism and Asian American model-minority discourse. Rather, they represent “discursive constraints” produced by the racialized and heteropatriarchal institution of American citizenship (48). Yet her theorization appears less paradigmatic and more as a series of presentations on the applications of her analytics, “Black Orientalism” and “Asian uplift.” This weakness is evident in the undertheorized and underutilized notion of race for citizenship. It could have been the very organizing principle with which to sustain the perspective of longue durée so central to Jun's project of explaining “how race survived” myriad instances of the Afro-Asian nexus in US history, to borrow from David Roediger's most recent book.