Book•
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
01 Jan 1996-
TL;DR: The authors examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans and argues that distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity.
Abstract: In "Immigrant Acts", Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialised economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the 'foreigner-within'. In "Immigrant Acts", she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant - at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation - displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a 'failed' integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, "Immigrant Acts" will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and trans-nationalism.
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01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: The Methodology of the Oppressed as mentioned in this paper is an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression in the U.S. Third World Feminism.
Abstract: In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.
1,266 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the role of the state and the social imaginary in gendering transnational processes and experiences is examined and highlighted, and a discussion of how a gendered analysis of transnational migration can help bridge this particular research to other gendered processes under study that do not privilege migration is initiated.
Abstract: This article aims to bring gender into an even tighter transnational migration focus by broadening and deepening our original framework of “gendered geographies of power,” linking it more directly to existing and emerging scholarship. We examine and highlight previously neglected areas such as the role of the state and the social imaginary in gendering transnational processes and experiences. We identify topics that remain under-appreciated, under-researched, and/or under-theorized. Finally, we initiate a discussion of how a gendered analysis of transnational migration can help bridge this particular research to other gendered transnational processes under study that do not privilege migration.
707 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the long and often arduous history of these scholars' efforts, arguing that though gender is now less rarely treated merely as a variable in social science writing on migration, it is still not viewed by most researchers in the field as a key constitutive element of migrations.
Abstract: Ethnographers from anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines have been at the forefront of efforts to bring gender into scholarship on international and transnational migration. This article traces the long and often arduous history of these scholars’ efforts, arguing that though gender is now less rarely treated merely as a variable in social science writing on migration, it is still not viewed by most researchers in the field as a key constitutive element of migrations. The article highlights critical advances in the labor to engender migration studies, identifies under-researched topics, and argues that there have been opportunities when, had gender been construed as a critical force shaping migrations, the course of research likely would have shifted. The main example developed is the inattention paid to how gendered recruitment practices structure migrations – the fact that gender sways recruiters’ conceptions of appropriate employment niches for men versus women.
552 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: Martin Alcoff as mentioned in this paper proposes a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon, and provides a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are.
Abstract: In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martin Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martin Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.
535 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2006
407 citations