Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era By Esther Kim Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; pp. xiii + 268, 23 illustrations. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Abstract

modern culture in Europe and, in doing so, historicize racializing apparatuses that continue to undergird the injustices of our modern world. Ndiaye’s emphasis on the racist scripts of early modern transnational performance and Chakravarty’s analysis of fictions of consent in the bonds that oppress represent something fundamental about premodern critical race studies. They reach beyond the conventional paradigms of academic research because those paradigms were designed to protect and obscure the very apparatuses this research seeks to dismantle. In this way, their scholarly contributions exemplify the interventions of the RaceB4Race initiative, which seeks to nurture a “community of scholars, students, researchers, theater practitioners, curators, librarians, artists, and activists who are looking to the past to imagine different, more inclusive futures” [https://acmrs.asu.edu/ RaceB4Race/Sustaining-Building-Innovating]. These two books are part of an intellectual revolution committed to racial justice: curation that critiques, historicity that matters, and race work that is antiracist.