Visible Solidarities: #Asians4BlackLives and Affective Racial Counterpublics

Deploying visual "Asian-ness" can create racial solidarity - sometimes at the expense of cross-racial solidarity

This article examines how uses of ‘Asian-ness’ as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #Asians4BlackLives/#Justice4AkaiGurley and #SavePeterLiang/#Justice4Liang. Specifically, Rachel Kuo looks at how Asian American racial positioning becomes deployed to produce feelings of solidarity. Approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, she tracks media objects across multiple sites to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. Kuo closely examines how #SavePeterLiang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of Liang’s racial body and how the #Asians4BlackLives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics.