Chloé Luu

This dissertation examines Asian diasporas in France and the French-occupied Pacific, interrogating the function of Asian racialization within the logic of racial capitalism and its modes of differentiation. It investigates the Asian antiracist movements that came into being following the killings of Chinese immigrants Zhang Chaolin and Liu Shaoyao in 2016 and 2017, drawing on archives of militantism, as well as literature and cinema by authors who have articulated a discourse of racial difference as ‘French Asians.’ “Des immigrés qui font des vagues” is an attempt to complicate and trace the gaps in the constructed genealogy of French Asian resistance. This project emphasizes how the idealization of the position as ‘bad subjects’ in French Asian formations have contributed to the erasure of historical instances where Asian subjects were instrumentalized against other racialized/colonized groups—the history of the coolie in the ‘French overseas’ being one of these blind spots.