There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the model minority. While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists aim to disprove the model minority as myth, author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather than disproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered subjectivities in relation to what Rivera terms model minority masochism. Examining hegemonic masculine Asian American cultural performance across multiple media, from literature and theater to videogames and activist archives, Rivera details two complementary forms of contemporary racial masochism: a self-subjugating masochism which embraces the model minority, and its opposite, a self-flagellating masochism that punishes oneself for having been associated with the model minority at all.

About the Author
Takeo Rivera is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. He is also a playwright whose work has been staged bicoastally in the US.

Reviews
With this brave and moving book, Takeo Rivera takes a deep dive into the affect streams of melancholy that haunt, taunt, push and reproduce racialized masculinities. With brief personal interludes, as well as innovative means to take up such topics as Asian American political indebtedness to the Black radical tradition, the author skillfully tracks the uses and abuses of masochism in Asian American drama, film, and digital arts. Does minority masochism fuel or hinder toxic masculinities, anti-Blackness, anti-Asianness, and misogyny? The author is skilled at teasing out the complexities in this and other questions through his excellent examples. * Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University *
If one were to amass just about everything that has been written about Asian America, especially with regard to theories, criticism, and intimations of the amodel minority,a and add an explosive device, one would achieve less of an effect than Takeo Rivera's Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity. Dazzling, bracing, shocking, and deeply disturbing (in all senses), this is a book to be reckoned with * David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University, author of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back (2021) *
The book elegantly merges Asian American political and cultural history with theories of racial performance, queer performance, and psychoanalysis, expanding the horizon of each discipline it traverses. Model Minority Masochism is an excellent addition to any syllabus with Asian American subjects, as Rivera's focus on Asian American cultural politics after 1982 can serve as a counterpoint to the weight often given to 1968 and its wake in the field. * Kee-Yoon Nahm, Modern Drama *


Awards
Winner of Honorable Mention, 2024 AAAS Book Awards, Media, Performance, and Visual Studies Category.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197557495
Author Takeo Rivera
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 336g
Dimensions(mm) 237mm * 156mm * 12mm