The price of visibility? Asian American representation and aesthetic exclusion

Asian American visibility has increased dramatically in recent decades, yet material violence and systemic exclusion persist alongside—and perhaps because of—this representational ‘progress’. This article theorises this paradox through a critical dialogue among three recent monographs: Esther Kim Lee’s Made-Up Asians (2022), David C. Oh’s Whitewashing the Movies (2021), and Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human (2024). Collectively, they reveal what I term ‘aesthetic exclusion’: the systematic monopolisation of narrative subjectivity, visual focus, and affective structures that together predetermine who is seen, erased, or mourned. Aesthetic exclusion operates at three levels—the material technology of yellowface makeup, the narrative grammar of whitewashing, and the ontological anchoring of racial allegory—constituting a ‘cognitive infrastructure’ of racial governance that persists beyond the repeal of legal exclusion. Yet the three books are not complementary: Sugino’s ontological critique fundamentally challenges Lee and Oh’s methodological premise that a ‘real Asian’ or a ‘stolen story’ exists to be restored. Taking this unresolved tension as its central thread, the article argues that representation is not a reflection of inequality but its cognitive precondition. Anti-racist scholarship must therefore ask not simply who is on screen, but who defines the reality to which representation refers, whose suffering is recognised as real, and which lives are judged worthy of mourning.