Performing the Neoliberal Body: Alienation, Plenitude Fantasies, and the Ethics of the Public in Charles Yu’s <i>Interior Chinatown</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article situates Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020) at the nexus of Asian American literary history and neoliberal cultural critique. Reading the novel through Lacanian psychoanalysis and neoliberal theory, it demonstrates how Yu exposes the disciplinary scripts of adaptability and resilience that convert Asian bodies into fungible units of human capital under neoliberal multiculturalism. By tracing a genealogy from the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts, through the Cold War “model minority” myth, to the twenty-first-century commodification of diversity, the essay shows how Willis Wu’s ascent from “Background Oriental Male” to “Kung Fu Guy” dramatizes the conversion of racial identity into marketable performance. The analysis foregrounds five recurring “plenitude fantasies”—fatherhood, hybridity, familism, ethnic community, and diasporic nostalgia—that promise to cure alienation yet merely reiterate its structural impossibility and rehearse neoliberal multiculturalism’s market logic. Embracing alienation as an ethical resource, the novel gestures toward a public solidarity grounded not in shared identity but in mutual estrangement. In so doing, Yu offers a critical blueprint for resisting the commodification of difference and for reclaiming Asian American literary discourse as a site of political possibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".