Embryonic Citizenship: Disidentifications of Asian Racialized Settlerhood

Abstract:This essay tracks an allegorical figure termed the "child-citizen" in order to consider how the nonlinear temporality of Asian racialized development illuminates the ambivalent logic of Asian North American citizenship as one premised on a simultaneous identification with and disavowal of settler colonial erasures of Indigenous presence. The primary literary work under consideration is the 2001 novel The Kappa Child by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Informed by the critical lens of new materialism, this essay reads The Kappa Child through and as a feminist and queer reckoning with Darwinian evolutionary theory that provides an asynchronous model of development, which ultimately figures Asian racialized settlerhood as an uneven (dis)identification with the circuits of citizenship.