Shang-Chi: The Model Minority’s Neoliberal Update

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Shang-Chi; model minority; neoliberal colorblindness; protestant ethnic; racial triangulation

Abstract

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, heralded as the watershed moment in Asian American popular representation and antiracism in the US, not only falls short in authenticity but constitutes the model minority’s neoliberal update—a newfangled normative identity for the neoliberal subject in place of the nonethnic white. The paper discusses three theoretical anchors: neoliberal colorblindness, formulated by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva as a hollow language that undercuts the substance in discussions of racism; the “protestant ethnic,” coined by Rey Chow to denote the investment of transgression and the imperatives of protest and confession in the “ethnic” subject; racial triangulation, first conceived by Claire Jean Kim to describe how Asian Americans are simultaneously valorized to Black/Latino Americans’ disadvantages and ostracized as perpetual foreigners by white supremacist societies. These three modes coalesce into a binary of ethnic and nonethnic—the updated Black/white distinction—and counterintuitively valorizes the Asian American outsider position due to the reassurance of neoliberal globalization. This paper points to Shang-Chi’s ironic scenes of racist stereotypes, humor, microaggression, translation, and the fictional common inhuman enemy, historicizing them in their sociopolitical contexts, to explicate the specific workings of this updated model minority, crystallizing in the form of an Asian American superhero.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Shanyi Yang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Shang-Chi: The Model Minority’s Neoliberal Update
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 62
EP  - 72
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_7
ID  - Yang2026
ER  -