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Emily Chao

Bio: Emily Chao is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Reflexivity & Marxist philosophy. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 231 citations.

Papers
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Journal Article
TL;DR: Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives.
Abstract: Other Modernities: tendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 330 pp. Lisa Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives. Drawing on factory floor discussions, interviews, and personal conversations, Rofel focuses on the constitution of gendered identities as a means of probing aspects of modernity inflected with power. The result is a theoretically sophisticated yet broadly accessible account which combines an analysis of narrative based on cultural and historical specificities, and on the politics of representation, with a reflexive interrogation of western representations of Chinese women and China, beginning with views formerly held by Rofel herself. Rofel begins by problematizing modernity as something imagined, a discourse that the west subscribes to as opposed to an essence or a state of being. She challenges western assumptions of modernity as a monolithic category-sort of an endpoint in a teleological tale in which the United States and Europe are exemplary models. Non-western constructions of modernity are neither simply part of a universal phenomenon (that is, essentially the same beast as western modernity), nor can they be explained as an entirely different animal, a phenomenon unique to its cultural or local context. Rofel criticizes the former view as omitting culture and the latter as omitting power. Her alternative framing pluralizes modernity and then anchors "modernities" in particular historical moments. For Rofel, modernity is a process that when scrutinized reveals how local and global configurations of power have been "knit together." Divergent constructions of modernity shape the gendered identities of the three cohorts who are the subjects of this book. These cohorts are comprised of women who came of age roughly during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution, and the postMao era. The women in the oldest cohort construct identity in terms of their work performance and portray themselves as having been liberated by the revolution which enabled them to work. Prior to the revolution the cultural arena was characterized by a gendered distinction between "inside" and "outside." China scholars have long identified "inside" activities with femaleness and the family, and "outside" activities with maleness and the public domain. Due to this spatial designation working class women employed as factory laborers were suspected of having questionable morality, not on account of their actions but because of the "outside" location of their labor. Rofel points out that it was largely working women, formerly tainted by the inside/outside distinction, who found the new socialist state's framings a meaningful medium for crafting new gender identities through "labor" and for representing pasts that were once culturally problematic. This form of agency was shaped by Chinese Marxist discourse, which held that "work" meant activities in the public domain outside of the home. However, she argues that this framing resulted in an erasure of other forms of agency. For urban entrepreneurial families the "inside" was actually a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with male kin and engaged in labor. Thus, after the revolution women who had worked in household silk weaving workshops during the pre-revolutionary era were denied histories as workers, while women who had labored in factories could re-cast themselves as incipient feminists and revolutionaries. Rofel argues that these erasures and forms of agency were given credence by Marxist and international feminist binaries that erroneously identified women who were confined to "inside" activities with feudalism/tradition and those engaged in "outside" activities with productive labor/liberation. She accuses such binaries of replacing history with teleology and of assuming "women workers" could constitute a homogeneous subject as opposed to several situated positionalities differentially shaped by power. …

236 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The phantom-like nature of value has been explored in the context of a global restructuring of capitalism, where certain things that formerly seemed to have so much value are now deemed to be what society (or something called that) can no longer afford as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The phantom-like nature of value—what could be a more compelling topic in the wake of the bursting of the 1990s economic bubble, when the value of the new economy seemed suddenly to dissipate overnight? Where did value go? And how can it be that, in the midst of a global restructuring of capitalism, certain things that formerly seemed to have so much value are now deemed to be what society (or something called that) can no longer afford? The topic of value is particularly compelling in light of the momentous social transformations taking place in China during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the movement from a planned to a market economy, the representation of value has undergone a reorganization in the realm of the biopolitical in which human life becomes a new frontier for capital accumulation. This changing rela-

529 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilized within supply chains, and to point to the importance of tropes of management, consumption, and entrepreneurship in workers' understandings of supply chain labor.
Abstract: This article theorizes supply chain capitalism as a model for understanding both the continent-crossing scale and the constitutive diversity of contemporary global capitalism. In contrast with theories of growing capitalist homogeneity, the analysis points to the structural role of difference in the mobilization of capital, labor, and resources. Here labor mobilization in supply chains is the focus, as it depends on the performance of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and citizenship status. The article uses the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilized within supply chains, and to point to the importance of tropes of management, consumption, and entrepreneurship in workers’ understandings of supply chain labor. These tropes make supply chains possible by bringing together self-exploitation and superexploitation. Diversity is thus structurally central to global capitalism, and not decoration on a common core.

466 citations

BookDOI
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Escobar et al. as discussed by the authors discuss the role of gender, race, and gender identity in the development of a concept of "colonization of being" in Latin American modernity.
Abstract: 1. Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking Walter D. Mignolo I The Emergence of An-Other-Paradigm 2. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality Anibal Quijano 3. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program Arturo Escobar 4. The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms Ramon Grosfoguel 5. Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes Catherine Walsh II (De)Colonization of Knowledges and of Beings 6. On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept Nelson Maldonado-Torres 7. Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity: Gender, Race, and Binary Thinking Freya Schiwy III The Colonial Nation-States and the Imperial Racial Matrix 8. The Nation: An Imagined Community? Javier Sanjines 9. Decolonial Moves: Trans-locating African Diaspora Spaces Agustin Lao-Montes 10. Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste: Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, Martinez's 'Parrot in the Oven', and Roy's 'The God of Small Things' Jose David Saldivar IV (De)Coloniality at Large 11. The Eastern Margins of Empire: Coloniality in 19th Century Romania Manuela Boatca 12. (In)edible Nature: New World Food and Coloniality Zilkia Janer 13. The Imperial-Colonial Chronotype: Istanbul-Baku-Khurramabad Madina Tlostanova V On Empires and Colonial/Imperial Differences 14. The Missing Chapter of Empire: Postmodern Reorganization of Coloniality and Post-Fordist Capitalism Santiago Castro-Gomez 15. Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality Walter D. Mignolo 16. The Coloniality of Gender Maria Lugones 17. Afterword Arturo Escobar

242 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors put into conversation two different but convergent intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg's "radically contextualist cultural studies" and "political ontology" and argue that the parallels and the divergences between these projects contain the promise for a fruitful conversation resting on the understanding that the possibilities for multiple modernities may well rest on the recognition of the non-modern on its own terms.
Abstract: In this article I seek to put into conversation two different but convergent intellectual/political projects, Lawrence Grossberg's ‘radically contextualist cultural studies’ and ‘political ontology’, an emergent analytical framework being developed by a loosely connected network of scholars. Central to both projects is the question of modernity, but while Grossberg's cultural studies focuses on the possibilities for multiple modernities immanent to the present conjuncture, the political ontology project focuses on the status of the non-modern. I argue that the parallels and the divergences between these projects contain the promise for a fruitful conversation resting on the understanding that the possibilities for multiple modernities may well rest on the recognition of the non-modern on its own terms. For this we need to do away with the concept of ‘cultures’ as the key category to think about differences.

242 citations

Book
15 Nov 2013
TL;DR: Yeh et al. as mentioned in this paper presented a survey of the state of the art in the field of map-based data visualization, including maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index.
Abstract: Emily T. Yeh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii and 324 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5155-3).So...

185 citations