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The Netflix superhero show Iron Fist (2017-2018) is widely known and critiqued in U.S. mainstream media for its whitewashing controversy and cultural appropriations of Asian culture. Much of the focus has been on the protagonist Danny Rand (played by white actor Finn Jones) and how the show could have been both progressively and critically better if the character had been Asian American. However, little attention has been directed to the Asian actors and actresses of Iron Fist in terms of how they contend with and resist the Orientalist legacy of the show through their performances, and how the show helps to enable their resistance work. This paper argues that Iron Fist as a platform enables Asian Americans to use their performances as a means of negotiating their representation in Hollywood and enacting resistance against Orientalism and stereotyping. Conversely, this paper also argues that these performances and resistances are also being filtered through the Yellow Peril/Orientalist framework of the show, which troubles and complicates the representation work of Asian/Americans. To support these points, I will examine the performances of three Asian actors/actresses who play prominent roles on Iron Fist, how they conduct their resistance work, and how the show influences their resistance. Ultimately, this paper seeks to substantiate resistance work as not necessarily victories nor hopeless cases, but acts that create sites of significant and complex strategy-making, deliberation, compromise, conflict, invention, and rumination.

This dissertation is motivated by the fact that race is understudied in the discipline, despite its historical importance in international politics, its ubiquity in adjacent disciplines, and its importance in the “real” world. It attempts to mitigate this problem by extending the study of race to the hard case of great power politics. The dissertation provides a two-step racial theory of international politics according to which racial prejudices embedded in racial identity can shape patterns of discord and cooperation. In the first step, racial prejudices embedded in different racial identities inflate threat perceptions, while prejudices embedded in shared racial identities deflate them. In the second step, racially shaped threat perceptions generate behavioral dispositions. Inflated threat perceptions predispose racially different agents towards discord, while deflated threat perceptions predispose racially similar agents towards cooperation. The theory works best when states have dominant racial groups, they hold activated threat-relevant racial prejudices, and when threats are ambiguous. Three empirical chapters assess the theory’s strengths and probe its limits. The first shows how racial prejudices regarding fundamental difference and aggressive intentions inflated American threat perceptions of Japan and, with British cooperation, led to the demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1923). The second traces how racial prejudices regarding aggressive intentions and irrationality inflated American threat perceptions of Chinese nuclear proliferation and, with Soviet cooperation, resulted in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. The last one illustrates how racial prejudices of immorality and aggressive intentions inflated American threat perceptions of Japanese foreign direct investment in the 1980s and led to the 1988 Exon-Florio Amendment. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of race and the legitimacy of the liberal international system in the context of rise of the developing world.