Paper Performance

Suspicion and Asian American Archives

By: Ju Yon Kim

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eText | 30 June 2026 | Edition Number 1

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Since the late nineteenth century, various agencies of the U.S. government have developed elaborate bureaucratic procedures to manage "suspect" Asian groups. Ju Yon Kim explores the modes of engagement and contestation available to those who are subjected by the state to both relentless documentation and demands to perform—whether as lawful immigrants, obedient colonial subjects, or loyal Americans. Even as paper documentation has been critical to authorizing exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration by the state, it has also enabled performances with paper that have facilitated transnational passage, mobilized resistance to administration, and troubled the logic of racial and national classifications.

Linking histories of Chinese immigration exclusion, the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the internment of Japanese Americans, and FBI surveillance of political groups, Kim brings together studies of paperwork and performance to demonstrate their continued, intertwined impact on Asian American history and culture.