Seduced Whole

Chapter 1 considers the affliction of not feeling whole in one’s identity and explores the lengths one goes to manufacture a sense of wholeness. Through a critique of ethnographic photography, this chapter recounts how wholeness is pursued through the visual image, focusing on Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa (2006), Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (2011), and the FBI’s nationwide manhunt for Andrew Cunanan. A reckoning with the fragmented racial position and the ways racial mixture is folded into the infrastructure of settler colonialism, this chapter inquires into a seemingly banal act of cultural appropriation—biracial Asians and their identification with the term “hapa.” The author interrogates the complicitous tensions of this discursive co-optation as they arise in Fulbeck’s work in particular. Turning to Rekdal, the chapter concludes by highlighting how one may pursue a decolonial recognition of settler complicity and familial legacy.