ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the performance of Asian Americans within the representational context of White supremacy. It focuses on Ken Jeong because he helps to illustrate the two arguments related to the specific representation of Asianness in the photo spread: Asian Americans perform Asianness in ways that conform to normative and racialized White expectations and Asian Americans participate in a relational performance that allows for White supremacy. The chapter argues that whiteness is a discourse and a performance operationalized within a White supremacist cultural context and that it must be performed and reperformed to access, gain, and maintain White racial privilege, access, and power to bolster processes that enable relational inequities with people of color. Jarmo Valkola argues in his book Thoughts on Images: A Philosophical Evaluation that "the juxtaposition of two strong image compositions can create a shock, a collision, and a sensation of optical clash, or contradiction, and a kind of kinetic dynamism".
