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Book Reviews

“Loving and Hating the Cute”: Audrey Wu Clark on Leslie Bow’s *Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy*

Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy is an expertly-written, relevant, post-COVID-19 study that expands what Sianne Ngai has labelled “the cute” regarding ideas that shape aesthetic categories applied to Asian Americans (something to introduce core concept). Ngai defined “the cute” as “an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities” in her Our Aesthetic Categories (2012).[1] Leslie Bow argues that Asian American cuteness, whether in the form of the children’s books or young adult fiction, caricatured commodities, social robotics, or visual art, is Read more