Have you ever been sucker-punched by a book? “Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” by Bianca Mabute-Louie, did that to me for good reasons. Like many Asians, I’ve been searching for resources that remind me of who I am and who I’m becoming. As a scholar who studies race, racism, and their impact on society, I don’t see my identity formation as linear, but instead as an ever-expanding and contracting constellation. During an era painted by genocide, COVID-19, and the rise of fascism globally, I’ve been looking for a north star to expand my constellation during this moment of contraction. In this process, I found a meteor.
Mabute-Louie’s new release is that fallen star that was missing; it wants us to come back to earth, reground, and reclaim ourselves as Asian diasporic peoples racialized by both place and placelessness in a country rooted in a mirage of stars and stripes. “Unassimilable” is both here and there — and now.
What Is the Book About?
“Unassimilable” is a memoir-manifesto that turns Mabute-Louie’s life into a mirror of our own lives as Asians in America. She offers herself as a telescope through which we can see ourselves in the larger constellation of Asian American history. Mabute-Louie describes “unassimilability” as “an act of interdependent community … cultivating our own social networks and daring to prosper in America without Whiteness.”
Mabute-Louie is talking about reclaiming ourselves from assimilation, an inherent process that happens to Asians as they are socialized into the United States by way of institutions, policies, culture, and practices.
The “Asian diaspora” term offers a bridge between the United States and wherever we find ourselves placeless. Mabute-Louie says “placeless” because Asians occupy a third space materially and psychologically. She describes diaspora as including “the immigrant, the expatriate, the refugee, the migrant worker, the…
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