Open discussion with Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, author of Making the Human

About

Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans With Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

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About the Book Winner of the 2026 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.

Part of the "'On Violence' Experimental Study Sequence" (pt. 3, Fall 2026) Join us for a sequence of conversations with authors of key texts addressing violence, empire, liberation, solidarity, abolition, and the problem of “Man”/human. These live discussions will be led by students of the “‘On Violence’ Experimental Study Sequence,” taught by Prof. Dylan Rodríguez. Participants will have opportunities to engage with authors during the sessions, to whatever extent time permits. This is an experiment. We hope you will read the authors’ work prior to each study meeting, but as importantly, we aspire to cultivate a sense of intellectual collaboration, curiosity, and activated thought.

Sponsored by The Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream at the UCR Center for Ideas and Society

Schedule of Discussions (3:30-4:50 p.m. PST)

October 13 - Too Black, Rasul A. Mowatt, Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (Routledge, 2024)October 20 - Andy Clarno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran and Haley Volpintesta, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)October 27 - Susila Gurusami, Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition (University of Chicago Press, 2026)November 3 - Annie Paradise, The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley (Northwestern University Press, 2024)November 10 - Rahsaan Mahadeo, Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Perceptive, and Black (Cornell University Press, 2024)November 17 - Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, 2024)November 24 - Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press, 2026)