An examination of the interconnectedness of brown-racialized people across multiple identities, told through case studies of television, literature, and writing.
As a Filipinx immigrant to the United States, Sony CorĮŃez Bolton has frequently been mistaken as Mexican. Dos X theorizes such misrecognition. What does it mean to exist in this liminal state, which CorĮŃez Bolton dubs the racial uncanny? What generative possibilities emerge from the presumed interchangeability of Latinx and Filipinx bodies-and from the in-betweenness of brownness as such?
Dos X tracks misrecognition through cultural products like the TV series Undone, Brian Ascalon Roleys American Son, and the nonfiction work of Jose Antonio Vargas. Misrecognition, CorĮŃez Bolton argues, produces moments of uncanniness in which subjects experience dysphoric attachments to identities that arent supposed to be theirs. In the context of racial capitalism, racial dysphoria is a disability because it undermines certainty about what ones body is and therefore what role one is meant to play as a laborer. But racial dysphoria can also be revealing. CorĮŃez Bolton identifies vast potential in this supposed disability, which compels its sufferers to confront their shared position within the social, political, and economic organization of capitals empire, opening new avenues for liberatory solidarity.
