The Race Card

Abstract

This book uncovers popular games’ key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic—in short, the authority—behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference. Drawing from literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, The Race Cardshows how ludo-Orientalism informs a range of historical events and social processes which readers may not even think of as related to play, from Chinese exclusion and the Japanese American internment to Cold War strategies, the model minority myth, and the globalization of Asian labor. Interrogating key moments in the formation of modern U.S. race relations, The Race Cardintroduces a new set of critical terms for engaging the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles.

The Trophy Called “Asian Hands”

“…Tara Fickle, in her deconstructive reading of Roger Caillois and Huizinga, demonstrates how the orientalist imagination acts as "the formal logic" guiding the hegemonic ludic theories. 32 In her reading of Caillois's paidia/Ludus distinction, she explains how "Ludus," or "the taste for gratuitous difficulty," which is ascribed with positive attributes including a "civilizing quality," is ultimately thought of as a Western mode of "disciplining paidia." 33 Caillois explains that the path from paidia to Ludus is not the "only conceivable metamorphosis"; cultures that are not driven by the "spirit of enterprise and need for pro gress" might not develop the same pure and excellent games as Western civilization does but might instead pave a diff er ent destiny for themselves.…”

“…32 In her reading of Caillois's paidia/Ludus distinction, she explains how "Ludus," or "the taste for gratuitous difficulty," which is ascribed with positive attributes including a "civilizing quality," is ultimately thought of as a Western mode of "disciplining paidia." 33 Caillois explains that the path from paidia to Ludus is not the "only conceivable metamorphosis"; cultures that are not driven by the "spirit of enterprise and need for pro gress" might not develop the same pure and excellent games as Western civilization does but might instead pave a diff er ent destiny for themselves. Caillois ends the chapter with a warning that a culture's choice regarding how to channel paidia-toward invention (Western ludus) or toward (idle) contemplation (Chinese wan)-is a fundamental choice that determines the destiny of said culture.…”