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<p>Encounters and interactions between Asians and Africans without the visible presence of whiteness have become increasingly common in contemporary visual culture, and yet such representations still seem to be trapped in prevalent racial stereotypes. This paper takes a close look at the cultural phenomena of Afro-Asian transracialism, namely when those racialized as Black embody or become those racialized as Asian and <i>vice versa</i>, and explores how racialized imageries and racist ideas continue to circulate across different visual products and digital realms such as sci-fi stories, social media memes, Nollywood films, and AI-generated clips. Drawing from existing theoretical concepts like techno-Blackness and techno-Orientalism, I propose transracial dissonance as the prominent affect that categorizes the reception of these Afro-Asian images on social media. I argue that this transracial dissonance involves dialectics of pleasure and pain that are counterproductive to empathy and solidarity, as both the pleasure of possessing/embodying the non-white Other and the pain of seeing such possession/embodiment are based on a negative logic of racial stereotyping and cultural separation. To counter such negative <i>modus operandi</i> of racial flows, the paper ends with a hopeful note on resonance between the Chinese idea of <i>tǐ</i> (体) and the African concept of <i>ubuntu</i> as a potential entry point for achieving intersubjective empathy and Afro-Asian solidarity. </p>

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Against the Racial Flow: Afro-Asian Transracialism and Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in Contemporary Visual Culture

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年7月31日

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  • Flair Donglai Shi

摘要

Encounters and interactions between Asians and Africans without the visible presence of whiteness have become increasingly common in contemporary visual culture, and yet such representations still seem to be trapped in prevalent racial stereotypes. This paper takes a close look at the cultural phenomena of Afro-Asian transracialism, namely when those racialized as Black embody or become those racialized as Asian and vice versa, and explores how racialized imageries and racist ideas continue to circulate across different visual products and digital realms such as sci-fi stories, social media memes, Nollywood films, and AI-generated clips. Drawing from existing theoretical concepts like techno-Blackness and techno-Orientalism, I propose transracial dissonance as the prominent affect that categorizes the reception of these Afro-Asian images on social media. I argue that this transracial dissonance involves dialectics of pleasure and pain that are counterproductive to empathy and solidarity, as both the pleasure of possessing/embodying the non-white Other and the pain of seeing such possession/embodiment are based on a negative logic of racial stereotyping and cultural separation. To counter such negative modus operandi of racial flows, the paper ends with a hopeful note on resonance between the Chinese idea of tǐ (体) and the African concept of ubuntu as a potential entry point for achieving intersubjective empathy and Afro-Asian solidarity.