Trust Exercise: The Form of Race in the American Post-Identity Novel.

This article analyzes Susan Choi's 2019 novel *Trust Exercise*, focusing on its complex engagement with race, sexual abuse, and narrative form. The novel, set in a performing arts school from the 1980s onward, explores abuses of power against female students and employs metafictional techniques that question the reliability of storytelling, especially regarding sexual assault. Central to the analysis is the novel's strategic racial withholding and ironic stereotyping, particularly through the character Manuel, a "Hispanic" composite figure symbolizing abused students, and the deliberate exclusion of Asian American characters. This exclusion is interpreted as a formal representation of Asian American racial ambiguity in contemporary U.S. society, positioning *Trust Exercise* as a post-identity or postrace Asian American novel that critiques multiculturalism's limitations and the complexities of racial representation. The article situates Choi's work within broader literary and cultural debates about race as a social form, emphasizing how absence and evasion in the novel challenge conventional expectations of ethnic representation.