The Race Card. Tara Fickle
of play due to socially and legally imposed constraints. Games are escapes not because they are more free, but because they are differently constrained: their rules provide a substitute for existing relations of power and systems of valorization, swapping out one set of rules for another. It is, in fact, precisely the fictions about games that we cleave to—the fantasy that games are a liberatory “exodus” from daily life rather than a “more radical simulacrum” of it, to invoke the claims of Edward Castronova and Jean Baudrillard, respectively—and the social contradictions we subsequently use the language of games to resolve that provide some of the most compelling evidence for the necessity of a more capacious definition of the term “game.”26
Such capaciousness counterintuitively offers a means of resolving certain contradictions inherent to game studies, where scholars have for decades struggled to find a precise definition for gaming. As Roger Caillois, one of the founding fathers of game studies, lamented in 1958, “The multitude and infinite variety of games at first causes one to despair of discovering a principle of classification capable of subsuming them under a small number of well-defined categories.”27 The ludic taxonomy he proposed—a four-part matrix of games divided into competition, chance, mimicry, and vertigo, which is discussed in detail in chapter 4—is instructive not only for its content but for what it reveals about the precariousness of the venture itself: for, as Jacques Ehrmann has noted, Caillois consistently falls “victim [to] his own categories” from the very moment he articulates them, forced to gloss over the contradictions and aporias they are founded on.28
The problem is not restricted to the academic study of games, which is distinguished mainly in its recognizing as a problem the broader cultural ease with which we almost as a matter of instinct are able to recognize “games” when we see them, and accordingly invoke the term to describe a dizzying variety of activities, behavioral patterns, and systems ranging from the material to the virtual, the stylistic to the conceptual, the wholesome to the illicit. The definition Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and later Caillois, arrived at was of games as voluntary, rule-bound, undetermined (i.e., with uncertain outcome), economically disinterested activities set apart from “ordinary life.” As useful as this definition continues to be, it does not change the fact that games are, in the end, simply those things that people call games. “Game” itself, from that perspective, is essentially a classification system, a way of categorizing human activities and expressions according to the (equally nebulous) binary of “serious” and “playful.” And, like the equally artificial classification system of race with which it is intertwined—which categorizes human beings, at the broadest level, into the binary of “white” and “nonwhite” (and more specifically, “black”)—such ludic distinctions are neither natural nor neutral. Rather they are, in implicit ways we are often entirely unconscious of, a means of creating hierarchies and differential systems of value, and of disciplining and legitimizing precarious and arbitrary divisions. Asian Americans’ liminality within a black-white binary—their falling, as simultaneous “model minorities” and “honorary whites,” out of bounds of the constructed color line—is, in fact, part of why the ludic has figured so prominently in their characterization.29 And it is also, I suggest, why Asian American writers and literary scholars have repeatedly seized on the critical potential of the ludic to destabilize that larger system and expose its exceptions.30 For the literary representation of Asian American bodies is inextricable from issues of their racial representation in the American body politic as well as in the national imagination—a formal entanglement that mirrors, and is mirrored by, the ludic multiplicity we have been discussing.
The Game of Representation
“Asian American,” like “game,” is a precarious fiction: an “openly catachrestic” category, in Colleen Lye’s words, that not only amalgamates a massive range of ethnic, linguistic, class, and generational differences but is problematically intertwined with externally imposed stereotypes of Asians all looking alike.31 As Frank Chin candidly put the problem, “What if all the whites were to vanish from the American hemisphere, right now? … What do we Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indo-Chinese, and Korean Americans have to hold us together? What is ‘Asian America,’ ‘Chinese America,’ and ‘Japanese America’?”32
Chin’s answer to this question? Aiiieeeee!—not coincidentally, the name of the Asian American literary anthology he co-edited and in which this commentary appears. For Asian American literature has long been the site through which these difficult questions have surfaced and been struggled with: the place, in other words, where “Aiiieeeee!” as a racist media representation of Asian American voices becomes intertwined with the Asian American authorial voice and the representational burdens of “authenticity” and stereotype busting with which these writers are encumbered. It is also where, in an effort to articulate the paradoxes and tensions of strategic essentialism—where “Asian American” becomes a category at once potentially liberating and constraining—we also find the ludic being explicitly invoked.
Take, for example, Mark Chiang’s compelling description of Asian American literary and political identity as moves in what he calls the “game of representation”:33
For Asian Americans, it is not the represented who choose the representatives but the representatives who choose one another and themselves, through a process of mutual recognition and contestation. In other words, anyone can declare himself or herself to be an Asian American and thus a representative, but that person becomes a representative only when recognized as such. This recognition typically takes the form of identifying someone as either an ally or an opponent in the struggle over representative legitimacy, for disputing one’s claim as a representative also implies recognition that one is in the game and must be taken seriously. The indeterminacy of this situation is compounded for those outside the game who lack the means of recognition and are therefore incapable of distinguishing among various claims to representative status.34
Here we have a very different understanding of racialization as itself a game of representation, rather than as the product of in-game representation that video game scholars have tended to see it as.35 Chiang brings Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into the competitive games we play in everyday life for the prize of social and cultural capital in conversation with Louis Althusser’s famous example of interpellation to emphasize how, as Chiang puts it, “the subject is not simply an effect of ideology but (re)produces ideology by playing the game.”36 “Asian American,” in short, functions as both an immaterial form of capital—one inextricable from “real” economic capital—and a form of ideological (re)production, a means of putting race into play.
In other words, if Asian American representation is itself a game, then the ludic here becomes a way of representing the problematics of representation in the first place: that is, by giving it expression in the form of a game. Here, as in so many other places, the term “game” is one we tend to read over or through, as a throwaway metaphor meant merely to connote a sense of conflict, competition, and strategy. Yet, as we will see throughout this book, such a perception limits our ability to recognize the critical potential, as well as the disciplinary perils, of gaming discourse. Indeed, the very fact that we so effortlessly gloss over a phrase like the “game of representation” is itself, like our ability to effortlessly deploy the word “game,” a peculiar and important phenomenon. After all, as anyone who has tried to apply traditional interpretative frameworks to decode a term like the “race card” quickly discovers, it does not, in fact, function very well at all as a metaphor, in the sense that we are stymied when posing queries like “Is race like a joker or a deuce?” or “What does the rest of the deck look like?” And yet, such questions and hence contradictions rarely arise: not because we are “lazy” readers or speakers, but because these ludic idioms make a kind of inherent sense to us. We respond to a phrase like the “race card” as we do to anything we call a game, immediately grasping—or at least thinking we are grasping—the intended meaning. It seems like a “logical” connection.
And it is: but only because games are wholly guided by their self-determined, self-enclosed, absolute logic. Hence their sense cannot be adequately expressed through the language of other logical systems: this is why the “race card” looks like nonsense by the general