An Aesthetics of Passivity: Gifting, Deference, and Indecipherability in Asian American Performance

ABSTRACT: Passivity is a well-worn Asian stereotype. This article explores the paradoxically political possibilities of passivity. Can we see passivity as a particularly Asian American aesthetic, especially in the face of Western values that privilege action? What is "activism" that is passive? I am interested in how Asian American artists find alternative forms of sovereignty in their work: by being generous instead of extractive, deferential instead of egoistic, indeterminate instead of didactic. I understand these impulses as "passive" not because they do not involve effort, but because they counter conventional notions of the activity artists are supposed to perform. I argue that their deliberate embrace of various kinds of passivity acts as a form of paradoxical avowal. It is an avowal that critiques normative models of political activism, not by forswearing the characteristics that have deemed Asian Americans politically impotent, but by adopting them.