The Race Card. Tara Fickle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 3 and 4 function as the bridge connecting the two parts of the book.56 At issue in both chapters are how Asian Americans and East Asia, respectively, served as ludic models closely associated with games of chance. Chapter 3, “Against the Odds: From Model Minority to Model Majority,” uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as risk-taking opportunities. Gambling served an ideational narrative function, which is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions: to gamble is not just to wager money on an uncertain outcome, but to tell a story to yourself about what could happen (“What would I do if I won the lottery?”), or to explain why something did happen (“It was bad luck,” or conversely, “The game is fixed!”). The model minority myth, from that perspective, was essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.

      In model minority discourse, Asian Americans were held up as heroic gamblers in order to discipline other minorities as well as working-class whites. In the foundational ludic theories examined in chapter 4—namely Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games—Orientalist notions of the mystical East and rational West profoundly structured the way Huizinga conceptualized the relation between “play” and “ordinary life,” and Caillois the taxonomic division of games into the binary of competition (agon) and chance (alea). Chapters 3 and 4 thus both, individually, revise our understanding of the foundational narratives that have become the bedrock of Asian American studies and game studies, respectively. Chapter 3 leverages the theoretical potential of ludo-Orientalism to upend the reigning assumption that the model minority myth involved the banishment of Asian associations with gambling in favor of hard work; and chapter 4, to upend similarly entrenched assumptions about game theories (and games) as inherently disinterested, universal intellectual inquiries having nothing at all to do with race and culture.

      Reorienting our perception of signal moments in modern U.S. race relations, The Race Card develops a new set of critical terms for understanding the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles. The book offers a pointedly new approach to both Asian American racialization and the “gamified” discourses of daily life, going beyond the explicitly visual and textual stereotypes through which people have traditionally challenged the idea of gameplay as racially free as well as exposed the “techno-Orientalist” intersection between Asian and machine.

      In attending to race as it becomes automated and algorithmic rather than visually expressed, The Race Card not only redresses game studies’ traditional focus on visual representations by disaggregating inequality’s on-screen symptoms from the racial ideologies encoded within, but contributes to a broader conversation in social and cultural studies about media as a doubling or “modalization” of the world carried on through the literary formalist approaches of Mark Seltzer’s The Official World and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman.57 At the same time, it offers a corrective to the implicit assumption that the overwhelming amount of data we all produce and consume on a daily basis is somehow, in its “rawness” or virtuality, free from the concrete inequalities and highly stratified social systems through which these streams of zeroes and ones flow. The book thus charts a new course in game scholarship, directing our focus away from games as empowering vehicles that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward how games themselves are used as instruments of “soft power” to advance political agendas and discipline national subjects.

      But what of the reader who does not read the foregoing pages and who will, therefore, remain ignorant of the intricate ludic logic underlying its structure? What will they miss—and what, in turn, is the reward for those who have taken the time to read these pages? The same thing lost or gained by those who know that the opposite sides of a die add up to seven. That knowledge is, from one perspective, meaningless: it has no effect on a player’s ability to roll dice or the dice’s ability to generate random numbers. This is because dice are like the ludic and racial technologies this book looks at as a whole: operating systems that obviate the need (and, in many cases, the ability) for the user to understand the system’s internal workings. That is precisely how such systems are able to function semiautonomously, to “autocorrect” and update, to endure so long as the hardware allows. To be ignorant of a die’s (or this book’s) formal organization is thus, in that sense, simply to allow these systems to perform their disciplinary work as quietly and invisibly as they always have.

      To be aware of a die’s underlying logic, on the other hand, is to be counterintuitively drawn further into the game, seduced by a rationale that seems objective and inevitable: of course that makes sense, we think; the numbers must be arranged that way, otherwise they would not add up to seven. The internal consistency created by the system itself, in other words, comes to signify as evidence of its nonarbitrariness. This is the ludo-Orientalist dynamic we will see repeated throughout this book: in the “obvious” kinship between Asian Americans and Asian nationals; the perception of Occident and Orient as antithetical yet complementary cultures; and, of course, in the way the book itself draws our attention to the overlooked symmetry between seemingly divergent cultural forms. The payoff, then, lies in recognizing all of these as equally arbitrary discursive fictions that nonetheless powerfully shape the way we think about race and games. Even more, they reveal how gamification and racialization work in tandem as mutually constitutive ways of orienting ourselves to and through difference. These are the technologies we use to make things add up, seem equal, and otherwise distribute value across the borders of the magic circle.

      PART I

      Gambling on the American Dream

      The Pitch

      Fair Play

      1

      Evening the Odds through Chinese Exclusion

      Does any one suppose the Geary bill, prohibiting Chinese immigration, would ever have passed into law had the Mongolians taken kindly to poker? It was not fear of the introduction of idolatry by these heathens that impelled the congress of the United States to set up a fence against them. To be sure, that was the alleged reason, but members of congress … afterwards confessed that they had been spurred to action mainly by the assertion of the lobbyists that unless Chinese immigration was speedily checked, “fan-tan” would inevitably supplant our national game.

      And hence the Geary law … stands as a sort of notice to the world that immigration which might retard the growth of our poker industry, is not wanted in this free country.

      —Garret Brown, How to Win at Poker

      The above passage, taken from Garrett Brown’s enormously popular How to Win at Poker (1899), is facetious but not entirely fallacious.1 In the late nineteenth-century United States, Chinese immigrants’ affinity for games of chance rendered them not only alien but an active threat to U.S. identity and destiny. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1882 Exclusion Act—the first in a series of federal laws that barred the immigration СКАЧАТЬ