How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

Representation Matters Art is late capitalism’s wet dream, because it sublimates the immense hunger and desire for wide-ranging racial, sexual, gender, and economic justice into the Pepsi commercial of that justice. Only the art that truly sees us will truly free us, representational politics says, mistaking visibility for liberation. And too many of us buy into the capitalist remix of liberation politics, enough that I’ve been frustrated, time and time again, with how much Asian American (predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class East Asian American and South Asian American) antiracist politics and art rely on the tired narrative of supposed Asian cultural invisibility vs. supposed Black and Latinx hypervisibility—a stymied logic that would purport that the existence of Marvel’s Black Panther somehow softens the edges of the anti-Black carceral state, or that the relative lack of mainstream Asian TV and film narratives as compared to their Black and Latinx counterparts in some way cancels out the fact that despite being the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, Asians rank overall as the highest-earning racial and ethnic group in the country (not minority group—racial and ethnic group; this reality accompanied by the fact that income inequality in the US is greatest among Asians). But Representation Matters Art—and the extractive vision of the world it serves—absolutely relies on us mistaking visibi...