An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. In this new study, Christine Kim delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. Kim turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Her insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian allows Kim to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Multiculturalism, Minor Publics, and Social Intimacy 1. National Incompletion: Awkward Multiculturalisms and Denaturalizing Whiteness 2. Transnational Triviality: Print and Digital Asian North American Publics 3. Diasporic Fragility and Brokenness: Korean War Legacies and Structures of Feeling 4. Global Loss: Metaphoric Substitution and the Logic of Human Rights Conclusion: Ephemeral Publics and Roy Kiyooka's StoneDGloves Notes Works Cited Index | "Christine Kim's The Minor Intimacies of Race is a necessary and insightful look into the process of defining race and the experience of prejudice. . . . Kim should be applauded for her nuanced and informative approach to a very important topic."—Ethnic and Racial Studies

"A valuable contribution to the study of Asian Canadian and Asian American literature. Importantly, Kim's compassion for and integrity to the subject is evident and admirable."—English Studies in Canada
"Provides an exceptionally generative paradigm for thinking about those forms of collective identification that do not achieve the solidity of fully-fledged political movements but that nonetheless register in illuminating ways the everyday life of race in Asian North America. A fascinating and timely study."—Daniel Kim, author of Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity
|Christine Kim is an associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University.