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ABSTRACT. At the intersection of Asian American studies, performance studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this article issues a study of the work of performance artist Wafaa Bilal. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein and, in particular, Klein's theory of projective identification, Homegrown Terror issues a theory of projective identification's role in the process of racialization, and, in particular, the production of the racialized figure of the so-called homegrown terrorist. Bilal's work allows us to see the process through which members of the dominant culture disaggregate their own fear and terror of the Middle Eastern, South and Central Asian American body (apprehended as Muslim or Arab), externalizing these negative affects by projecting them onto and in some cases into the body of the racialized subject.
In the time of another war, things seemed frighteningly familiar to today. During the buildup to World War II, as U.S. American racial paranoia rapidly crystallized around the perceived internal threat of the Japanese American body, the U.S. government issued a proliferation of legislation that was symptomatic of paranoid fantasies of Japanese American disloyalty. The concrete and material effects of this process are well known: the dispossession, displacement, and incarceration of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans on the basis of race. One of the less explored effects of this period of racial panic was the 1944 Denationalization Act, an unprecedented law that allowed citizens to voluntarily renounce citizenship.1 Solely targeting Japanese Americans, the Justice Department ultimately approved just over five thousand successful petitions for denationaliza- tion from Nikkei (Japanese Americans), who claimed a range of reasons for entering the program. This included fears that the government would split up families and disperse them through different camps if participants did not apply. Having never lived in Japan and unaware that their petitions would result in deportation, most of the applicants quickly rescinded their applications, but to no avail. It would take thirteen years in the courts before the majority would see their citizenship restored.
Minoru Kiyota was a self-identified Kibei (born in the United States but sent to Japan by his parents for primary schooling). In his autobiography, Kiyota offers an account that suggests his own internalization and embodiment of the negative affects and disloyalty projected onto his...