Torn : Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence

In Torn, Anna M. Moncada Storti searches for the ordinary and obscured impressions of the US empire, theorizing the pervasiveness of its violence through the language and patterns of intimacy. Reading for the intimacy of violence, Storti compiles an inventory of quotidian, psychic, and affective tensions that arise within the bodies of empire’s historical subjects. She raises Asian/white life as the representative case study to examine a familiar narrative of inner strife—that being of two distinct racial histories is to be rendered a body in tension, torn between ancestral lineages. Rather than refute this stance, Storti tracks the duress of fragmentation as a sign of war’s permanent mark on racial and sexual subjection. Traversing an archive of aesthetic, literary, and cultural portrayals of Asian/white racial mixture, Storti observes how Asian Americans refuse, rework, or reify the logics of progress and disavowal that have long fueled the US war machine. Tending to tension, she argues for a sustained confrontation with empire’s ordinary life, a prerequisite for anti-imperial solidarity.