NOTES ON ASIAN AMERICAN JOY

OR, TOWARD AN AFFIRMATIVE ASIAN AMERICAN POLITICS

American Studies Association, 2023

1. A NOTE ON NOTES

Calling a paper “Notes on X” might indicate that someone doesn’t know what they are doing because they don’t have their shit together. That’s the case here, by condition and choice. The condition is whiteness, which I propose seeks to obliterate Asian American joy. The choice comes from a suspicion that while Asian American joy does not exist, it can be sensed. Rather than trying to know Asian American joy, I set up camp in the realm of not-knowing and invite you in. Let us leave interdisciplinary common sense at the door in order to heed Asian American joy in unexpected forms.

So I am not going to tell you what Asian American joy “is.” Asian American joy disrupts the “is,” or the world designed by whiteness and enforced by racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperial hegemony. In response to this power, whiteness strives to make Asian American joy always already impossible. Even if—or precisely because—Asian American joy does not exist, it can tell us a lot about Asian American life under whiteness and possible directions for politics.

2. A NOTE ON MARIE KONDO

Marie Kondo is a world-famous tidying guru, born and raised in Japan and now living in Los Angeles. She has a lucrative tidying enterprise, which consists of six books, two Netflix shows, an online store, and a global consortium of tidying consultants. She is popularly known for a simple directive: keep only what “sparks joy” and discard everything else. “Spark joy” has circulated widely as a meme, used to critique just about anything, from bad relationships to cruel systems of power.

Kondo has been alternately demeaned and adored through xenophobic, racist, and sexist tropes. Here’s a sampler. Journalist Tanya Snyder writes, “The fact that Marie Kondo places more importance on tidying her things than using them should give you a pretty good sense of how alien her priorities are.” Resonantly, writer Molly Young suggests that Kondo’s animist disposition is “as lovely as it is alien.” This sentiment exemplifies what Leslie Bow calls “racist love,” which denotes how salutary feelings like love, pleasure, and delight can serve as some of racism’s most potent carriers.

Racist love and hate against Kondo may have been sparked by the unexpected proximity of an Asian American woman to joy. If joy belongs in white Western hands alone, then Asian Americans are supposed to be alien to joy, perpetually foreign to it.

3. A NOTE ON ASIAN AMERICAN AFFECT STUDIES

Theorizing Asian American joy departs from the most influential accounts of affect in Asian American studies: David Eng and Shinhee Han’s, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” and Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race. Eng and Han treat melancholia as a structural condition “underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.” Cheng attends to melancholia as an affective structure of racialized subjects; melancholia “conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity.”

My tending to Asian American joy departs from these accounts in two ways. First, it conceptualizes affect not through psychoanalysis but through a line of theory that includes Baruch Spinoza, Brian Massumi, Audre Lorde, and Marie Kondo. Second, it challenges the idea that melancholia is the only or primary affective structure of Asian American life. Instead, let us entertain the counterintuitive possibility that joy may be the structure of Asian American life.

4. A NOTE ON BODILY INTENSITY

“Spark joy” is a partial and somewhat misleading translation of the Japanese “tokimeku,” which means to throb, to palpitate, to flutter. “Spark joy” is a clearly much narrower meaning—one that recruits Kondo into what Sara Ahmed calls the “promise of happiness.”

A different sense of joy denotes bodily intensity rather than a happy psychic state. Kondo alludes to this in her instructions on tidying up. She advises us to hold each item in our hands and to “Pay close attention to how your body responds. When something sparks joy, you should feel a little thrill running through your body, as if your body is somehow slowly rising up to meet the item, embracing it even.” Here, joy is bodily intensity: the thrill of a body leaning toward something worthy of love.

This notion of joy can be developed through the work of Brian Massumi. According to Massumi, joy is neither happiness nor satisfaction. The latter are emotions, or “the psychological capture of affect for the interiority of a supposedly individual subject.” Massumi’s notion of joy comes from Spinoza. It is “the intensity of the affective encounter. The intensity of the encounter in turn refers to an augmentation in powers of existence—capacities to feel, act and perceive.” Joy is not interior or subject-based. It is relational and impersonal, belonging only to the encounter.

I would add that because joy is bodily intensity, it could feel like many different emotions. An increase in capacities to feel, see, and act may feel like excitement, wonder, anxiety, dread, ambivalence. Asian American joy is not liable to feel and seem like happiness or satisfaction, since these, I propose, are framed by whiteness.

5. A NOTE ON AFFECT AND EMOTION

Massumi’s distinction between joy and happiness follows his broader distinction between affect and emotion. Emotion is “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal… It is intensity owned and recognized.” Affect, or intensity, is “a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function.” Emotion can be experienced while affect is a complication to experience. Emotion is recognizable while affect is not. Emotion can be narrated, while affect interrupts narration. We can have endless, cliched stories about happiness but only ever have notes on joy.

Despite these distinctions, whiteness captures affect within emotion supposedly without remainder, so that emotions can appear self-identical and other affects are made improper and illegible. Whiteness is a strange realm, wherein happiness looks and feels like happiness, sadness looks and feels like sadness, and affect looks and feels like emotion. I follow José Muñoz’s observation that “whiteness claims affective normativity and neutrality,” which makes racialized subjects appear to be emotionally excessive or deficient. I would add that whiteness does this by registering certain affects as emotions while leaving others murky or denying them entirely. Whiteness captures affect in a harmony of emotion and description, so that white subjects fit in while others not so much.

While some scholars use affect and emotion interchangeably, such a move might make Asian American joy insensible. Asian American joy might be a copy of white happiness and satisfaction in yellow and brown bodies. It might appear to be simple, transparent, and knowable—as though Asian American joy would exist if we just get rid of what makes us sad or dissatisfied. To find Asian American joy, we need to look elsewhere than happiness and satisfaction. Asian American joy might be present when unexpected, absent when anticipated. Asian American politics might affirm the distinction between affect and emotion—not to free Asian American joy from whiteness but to underscore that Asian American joy is always already free precisely because it does not exist.

6. A NOTE ON ASIAN AMERICAN EMOTIONLESSNESS

As whiteness makes Asian Americans seem to be emotionally lacking, Asian Americans could respond by showing that they are, in fact, emotional. Asian American politics might instead challenge the sociopolitical terms of facticity—terms that are defined by whiteness. It might refuse to satisfy white expectations of emotional performance.

This politics could replicate stereotypes of Asian Americans as inscrutable. Yet, it is supported by Vivian Huang’s and Xine Yao’s retooling of inscrutability and disaffection. I am especially guided by Mila Zuo’s contention that “the inscrutable is not devoid of meaning but rather pregnant with plenitude.” As I conceive it, inscrutability is a political disposition that inhibits whiteness’s capture of affect into emotion. It heeds the irreducibility and plenitude of Asian American affect. We might say that in this inscrutable politics, Asian Americans are emotion-less but affect abundant, unhappy but joy-full.

7. A NOTE ON MINOR FEELINGS

Along these lines, let us refigure Cathy Park Hong’s influential notion of “minor feelings” from an experience to a political strategy. “Minor feelings” denotes the “racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Minor feelings are a defining feature of ordinary life for racialized subjects. They are the result of gaslighting by whiteness, which attacks any tainting of its rosy picture of social existence.

However, minor feelings might not be merely or primarily negative. After all, an absence of minor feelings could indicate assent to white expectations as if they were fair. The existence of minor feelings is distance from whiteness, difference from it, is a visceral commitment to other worlds. Minor feelings embody an unshakeable affirmation of oneself, and so, are a key expression of Asian American joy.

8. A NOTE ON AFFIRMATION

For Spinoza, joy and sadness are produced by encounters. Joy is the feeling of an increase in the capacity to affect and to be affected—or what Massumi calls the capacities to feel, act, and perceive. Sadness is a feeling of decrease. However, joy and sadness are not just opposite directions. Joy makes us want to connect with the source of empowerment, which we embrace as though it were part of us. Sadness, on the other hand, makes us repulse what drags us down. In short, joy and sadness are modes of affirmation and negation.

However, if Asian American joy involves a refusal of whiteness, then affirmation is not only of heightened capacities as Spinoza and Massumi have it. Asian American joy is also an affirmation of diminished capacities. Its telos is an incapacity to be affected by whiteness and to act out the designs of whiteness. Asian American joy develops affect theory on tangent from Spinoza by affirming both increases and decreases in capacities to feel, see, and act.

From here, we can even read racial melancholia as stemming from joy. Because whiteness demands letting go and moving on from loss, it frames racial melancholia as pathological debility. Eng and Han redescribe racial melancholia as political strategy, and I wish to underscore its affirmative dimension. They write, “If the loved object is not going to live out there, the melancholic empathically avers, then it is going to live here inside of me.” Clinging on to a loved object by incorporating it into the foundation of subjectivity is an affirmation. This affirmation diminishes the capacity to be affected by white calls for assimilation and the capacity to affect others in ways that reproduce whiteness. If so, then Asian Americans become racial melancholics when they are motivated by joy.

9. A NOTE ON RETURN

At the outset, I said I don’t know what Asian American joy is and that I didn’t have my shit together. Hopefully it is clearer why. Asian American joy is not a recognizable emotion. It emerges through shifts in capacities to feel, see, and act beyond expectation and comfort. Joy is disorganizing.

Asian American joy cannot be known in advance because it does not exist in advance. It must be made. In this way, Asian American joy has as many forms as the encounters that spark it. But although Asian American joy cannot be known, it can be thought. Thinking is the afterparty of an encounter that solicits deep affirmation. It is an effort to preserve joy—that is, to enable its return by carrying it to another form.

10. A NOTE ON JOY AS A STANDARD

Joy can become a standard for evaluating Asian American life and politics. Audre Lorde leads the way: “Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.” What Lorde calls “the erotic” enables us to see what truly matters: selves that are autonomous; communities in which difference is generative, not divisive; and a world that is life-giving for all. Systems of power that threaten all this do not spark joy and should be discarded. Joy enables Asian America to only ever be otherwise.

11. A NOTE FROM ASIAN AMERICAN JOY

Whiteness posits itself as norm and tries to make Asian American joy impossible. But if we take the perspective of Asian American joy, what does whiteness look like?

Whiteness would appear to be deeply reactionary. It would seem hostile to everything but itself. It would look panicked and scared. Its breadth, depth, and complexity would be signs of weakness, not power. Because whiteness masquerades as universal truth, it is threatened by capacities to feel, see, and act otherwise. Hence, it strives to exterminate the possibility of encounters that would activate those capacities and disable others. The horrors of whiteness are a testament to the power of Asian American joy.

The political question would not be how to end whiteness so that Asian American joy can be possible. It is how whiteness manages to persist given the remarkable power of Asian American joy—a power that can only come from collective encounters, that sprouts from a plenitude of affect, that persists by transforming, and that makes a mess of us every step of the way while getting us to love it all too.