All Capitalism is Racial Capitalism, their inability to recognize this implicates the ability for the alt to overcome the racialization of South Asians as an infinitely mutable personification of labor, that means that even if the alt can solve for capitalism it cant undo the colonial conceptions of South Asianess that create the impetus for anti south asian violence.

In Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, Chinese American protagonist Candace Chen quickly distinguishes the “fevered” from a “typical” zombie as imagined by pop culture: “They don’t attack us or try to eat us. They don’t do anything to us. If anything, we do more harm to them” (Ma 29). The fevered are literal creatures of habit, stuck in loops repeating the same activity–such as folding clothes or changing TV channels–while their bodies degenerate, dying a slow and inevitable death. Their ailment is caused by Shen Fever, so named for its origins in Shenzen, China. The fever spreads rapidly across oceans through trade networks, quickly emptying Midtown Manhattan save military-contracted security guards and Candace herself, who has moved into her downtown office to work until her contract expires, apocalypse notwithstanding. Despite Candace’s insistence that the fevered are not zombies, the metaphor retains powerful valences through which the novel’s treatment of race, gender, and postcolonial late capitalism can be understood. The novel moves between timelines, tracking Candace’s time in New York City in the years leading up to the outbreak alongside her post-outbreak journey to Chicago with a band of survivors, a quasi-cult led by a former IT worker named Bob. The story spans many genres, from the urgency that marks an “outbreak narrative” (Wald 58) or a zombie apocalypse to the mundanity that characterizes workplace novels and “capitalist realism” (Fan 679). In its brief indulgence of Candace’s parents’ 1988 immigration from Fuzhou, China to Salt Lake City, Utah, Severance also displays a tenderness uncommon in the narrative forces that often dictate post-apocalyptic storytelling. As much immigration story as it is a post-apocalyptic confirmation that we’d sooner believe the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Severance points us to the ways in which Asian American racialization has always been contingent on the needs of capital. For Candace, an Asian American office worker, to be the novel’s protagonist moves us to question the durability of capital in end times. Moreover, the moments in the novel in which the fevered and Candace herself trouble capital’s structuring forces across time and space, suggest an imagined otherwise to the end of days. This essay considers both Candace’s protagonist role and these moments of spatiotemporal rupture. In this essay, I trace the overlaps of Asian American racialization with the conventions of the zombie genre to suggest that, in Ma’s novel, Orientalism and capitalism converge at the site of the fevered. I argue that the fevered and Candace’s moments of divergence from capitalism’s linear narrativity acknowledge but do not reproduce its colonial logics and provide us with a way of understanding an Asian American humanity that does not rely on labor categories or spatiotemporal constraints. The history of Asian American racialization shares many of the conventions that characterize a zombie narrative. In her book Alien Capital, Iyko Day traces how Asian subjects in North America personify “abstract processes of value formation anchored by labor” (Day 8). That is to say, Asian people give the abstract processes of capitalism material form, since they themselves are as mutable in the eyes of white settlers as is the value of their labor. Constantly resignifiable, the Asian American body echoes the flexibility of capital, constructed as cheap or efficient labor in concert with the needs of the settler nation. Similarly, zombies are subject to multiple kinds of signification under the flexibility of late capitalism’s global processes. In the novel, Bob quite literally refers to the zombies as “an abstract force” (Ma 29). While the origins of the zombie are rooted in the Haitian Revolution that began as a slave revolt (Lauro and Embry), the monster has alternatively stood in for “the alienation of capitalist extraction of surplus value,” both in its role as an endless consumer as well its expendability from the body politic mirroring the expendability of human labor to global capital (Vint 172). In her work on the intersections of zombie narrative and racial capitalism, Camille Fojas explains that the zombie narrative contains our “outrage, fear, and anxiety about capitalism in crisis” (Fojas 61) by giving the abstract processes of capitalism material form, analogous to the function of the Asian American body. Notably, the fevered in Severance do not affect others through infection or consumption, as Shen Fever is spread through fungal spores. Instead, the fevered are incorporated into the rhizomatic structure of Shen Fever’s global dispersal, which is a reminder that the decisions made under global capitalism to expel migrant laborers and outsource production to inhumane working conditions in the Global South, has already “made monsters of us all” (Vint 173). In the novel, it is both Candace and the fevered who give capitalism its material form. While the cause of Shen Fever is never explicitly confirmed, the reigning theory is that the new strain of fungal spores that caused the infection “had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals” (Ma 210). Candace works in the Bibles division at a book publishing company named Spectra that contracts labor in China’s SEZs. Characterized by their reproducibility across space and time, what Candace refers to as the purest form of product packaging, the Bibles prove to be an ideal commodity to consider Asian American racialization as a malleable labor force, as well as its zombified corollaries. In a passage predating the outbreak of Shen Fever (Ma 23-25), Candace tries to explain to a client that the Shenzen manufacturer hired to produce gemstones for the Gemstone Bible cannot complete the job, as workers are inhaling glass from grinding down the gemstones. The manufacturer has shut down their plant to avoid a lawsuit. The client proceeds to convey a perfunctory sadness at this health concern, then shifts to demand that Candace merely find another contractor willing to take the job. Spectra is alienation from labor made manifest. Elsewhere, Candace describes how the Bibles she oversees are made and explains the routes of travel that they take through various economic ports. She visits manufacturers in Shenzen, speaking in fragmented Mandarin with the contractors who remark on her Chinese name, though it does not appear in the text. The Bibles’ hidden abstract value is personified through racialized Asian people: the glass-inhaling workers, the liminal contractors, Candace’s own journey across oceans. Candace’s concern for the workers, albeit immediately discounted, and her extended explanation of the Bibles’ circulation as commodity, forces the reader to gaze upon the concrete dimensions of the commodity’s hidden abstract value, and resultingly, upon the racialized Asian people that personify the Bibles themselves. Yet, like names unspoken and workers ignored, absences and incongruencies emerge in attempting to concretize the rapidly shifting metaphor of abstract labor. The response to the outbreak also reveals the historical legacies of racialized exclusion and imperial border management that underpin the abstraction of Asian Americans as a constantly resignifiable labor force. The fever spreads quickly via shipping ports, revealing the United States’ own dependence on differentiated labor on a global scale and the rapidity with which commodity flows in and out of the settler nation daily. In response to the Shen Fever outbreak, US Congress passes a travel ban to “prevent citizens of Asian countries from visiting the United States. A list of banned countries was provided. China was at the top of the list” (Ma 210). Despite the fact that Shen Fever is spread through a fungus, not through human contact, it is Asian peoples that are barred from entry. Candace continues working at the publishing company well into the days following the initial outbreaks, but when operations finally shut down, it is not due to a fear of Chinese commodities at ports of entry, but the lack of labor capital: Overseas manufacturers rapidly close as their employees succumb to Shen Fever. Ma demands that we look at capital’s racial ruin, an end-of-the-world paranoia that seems to coalesce around the Rise of China as an economic empire. It is, as Arif Dirlik appropriately puts it, a “Yellow Fever-Infected” notion of the end of the world (Dirlik 539).