Politics

About: Politics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 263762 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5388913 citations.

Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making

Abstract: CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 37, Number 5, December 1996 CI 1996 by The Wenne1-Gren Foundation for Anthropologi~l Research. All rights reserved OOI1-3204/96/370~:-OOO2S3.00 Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States' by Aihwa Ong This paper views cultural citizenship as a process of self-making and being-made in relation to nation-states and transnational pro­ cesses. Whereas some scholars claim that racism has been re­ placed by cultural fundamentalism in defining who belongs or does not belong in Western democracies, this essay argues that hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference intersect in a complex, contingent way to locate minorities of color from dif­ ferent class backgrounds. Comparing the experiences of rich and poor Asian immigrants to the United States, I discuss institu­ tional practices whereby nonwhite immigrants in the First World are simultaneously, though unevenly, subjected to twO processes of normalization: an ideological whitening or blackening that re­ flects dominant racial oppositions and an assessment of cultural competence based on imputed human capital and consumer power in the minority subject. Immigrants from Asia or poorer countries must daily negotiate the lines of difference established by state agencies as well as groups in civil society. A subsidiary point is that, increasingly, such modalities of citizen-making are influenced by transnational capitalism. Depending on their loca­ tions in the global economy, some immigrants of color have greater access than others to key institutions in state and civil society. Global citizenship thus-eonfers citizenship privileges in Western democracies to a degree that may help the immigrant to scale racial and cultwal heights but not to circumvent Status hi­ erarchy based on racial dUference. AIHWA ONG is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Uni­ versity of California, Berkeley IBerkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. I. She has conducted ethnographic research in Malaysia, South China, and California and is currently working on citizenship, economic restructuring and uansnational publics. She is the au­ thor of Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Facrory Women in Malaysia IAlbany: State University of New York Press, 19871 and the coeditor, with Michael G. Peletz, of Be­ witchmg Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in South­ east Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19951 and, with Don NOnioi, of Edges of Empire: Culture and Identity in Modern Chinese TransnaUonalism INew York: Routledge, in pressl. The present paper was submitted n 1 96 and accepted 18 1 96; the final version reached the Editor's office 4 1II 96. In the fall of r970, I left Malaysia and arrived as a fresh­ man in New York City. I was immediately swept up in the antiwar movement. President Nixon had just begun his secret bombing of Cambodia. Joining crowds of angry students marching down Broadway, I paIticipated in the takeover of the East Asian Institute building on the Columbia University campus. As I stood there confronting policemen in riot gear, I thought about what Southeast Asia meant to the United States. Were South­ east Asians simply an anonymous mass of people in black pajamas? Southeast Asia was a faI-off place where America was conducting a savage war against commu­ nism. American lives were being lost, and so were those of countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others. This rite of passage into American society was to shape my attitude towaId citizenship. As a for­ eign student I was at a disadvantage, ineligible for most loans, fellowships, and jobs. My sister, a naturalized American, could have sponsored me for a green card, but the bombing of Cambodia, symptomatic of widet disregard for my part of the world, made American citi­ zenship a difficult mo,.l issue for me. Much writing on citizenship has ignored such subjec­ tive and contradictory experiences, focusing instead on its broad legal-political aspects. For instance, Thomas Marshall (r9501 defines citizenship as a question of mo­ dernity, but he identifies it primarily in terms of the evolution of civil society and the working out of the tensions between the sovereign subject and solidarity in a nation-state. Other scholars have pointed to the con­ tradiction between democratic citizenship and capital­ ism-the opposition between abstract, universalistic rights and the inequalities engendered by market com­ petition, race, and immigration (Hall and Held r989, Potles and Rumbaut r 9901. But these approaches seldom examine how the universalistic criteria of democratic citizenship variously regulate different categories of sub­ jects or how these subjects' locatio!U>'ithin the nation­ state and within the global economy conditions the con­ struction of their citizenship. Indeed, even studies of citizenship that take into account the effects on it of capital accumulation and consumption have been con­ cerned with potential sltategies for political change to remake civil society (Yudice t995). Seldom is attention focused on the everyday processes whereby people, espe­ cially immigrants, aIe made into subjects of a particulaI nation-state. If Citizenship as Subjectification Taking an ethnographic approach, I consider Clllzen­ ship a cultural process of subject-ification,1I in the Fou­ caldian sense of self-making and being-made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration (Foucault t989, 199tl. Thus formulated, my concept of cultural cilizenship can be applied to various global con­ texts (see Ong r993, Ong and Nonini t996), but in this papel I will discu'ss the making of cultural citizens in 1. I received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Gender Roles Pro­ gram for research on Cambodian refugees and cultural citizenship. I thank Brackette Williams and Katharyn Poethig for their com­ ments on earlier drafts of the paper and Kathleen Erwin for proof­ readinR the flnal version.

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism

Abstract: During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies held their breath, waiting to see how their fates would be decided. President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for "a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims," giving equal weight would be given to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations now paying close attention to Wilson's words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of four disparate non-Western societies-Egypt, India, China, and Korea. That spring, Wilson's words would help ignite political upheavals in all four of these countries. This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader "Wilsonian moment" that challenged the existing international order. Using primary source material from America, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements - Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others - were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time. The importance of the Paris Peace Conference and Wilson's influence on international affairs far from the battlefields of Europe cannot be underestimated. Now, for the first time, we can clearly see just how the events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonating globally today.

Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone

Abstract: The last four years have seen a remarkable resurgence of democracy in the Southern Cone of the Americas. Military regimes have been replaced in Argentina (1983), Uruguay (1985), and Brazil (1985). Despite great interest in these new democracies, the role of the military in the process of transition has been under-theorized and under-researched. Alfred Stepan, one of the best-known analysts of the military in politics, examines some of the reasons for this neglect and takes a new look at themes raised in his earlier work on the state, the breakdown of democracy, and the military. The reader of this book will gain a fresh understanding of new democracies and democratic movements throughout the world and their attempts to understand and control the military. An earlier version of this book has been a controversial best seller in Brazil. To examine the Brazilian case, the author uses a variety of new archival material and interviews, with comparative data from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Spain. Brazilian military leaders had consolidated their hold on governmental power by strengthening the military-crafted intelligence services, but they eventually found these same intelligence systems to be a formidable threat. Professor Stepan explains how redemocratization occurred as the military reached into the civil sector for allies in its struggle against the growing influence of the intelligence community. He also explores dissension within the military and the continuing conflicts between the military and the civilian government.

The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract: Manuel Castells - one of the world's pre-eminent social scientists - has drawn together a stellar group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity. The book analyzes the technological, cultural and institutional transformation of societies around the world in terms of the critical role of electronic communication networks in business, everyday life, public services, social interaction and politics. The contributors demonstrate that the network society is the new form of social organization in the Information age, replacing the Industrial society. The book analyzes processes of technological transformation in interaction with social culture in different cultural and institutional contexts: the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Finland, Russia, China, India, Canada, and Catalonia. The topics examined include business productivity, global financial markets, cultural identity, the uses of the Internet in education and health, the anti-globalization movement, political processes, media and identity, and public policies to guide technological development. Taken together these studies show that the network society adopts very different forms, depending on the cultural and institutional environments in which it evolves. The Network Society is an outstanding and original volume of direct interest in academia - particularly in the fields of social sciences, communication studies, and business schools - as well as for policymakers engaged in technological policy and economic development. Business and management experts will also discover much of value to them within this book.

War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability

Abstract: We seek to answer the question, What effect does international war participation have on the ability of political leaders to survive in office? We develop a model of political reliability and derive seven related hypotheses from it that anticipate variation in the time a national political leader will survive in office after the onset of a war. Drawing upon a broadly based data set on state involvement in international war between 1816 and 1975, our expectations are tested through censored Weibull regression. Four of the hypotheses are tested, and all are supported by the analysis. We find that those leaders who engage their nation in war subject themselves to a domestic political hazard that threatens the very essence of the office-holding homo politicus, the retention of political power. The hazard is mitigated by longstanding experience for authoritarian elites, an effect that is muted for democratic leaders, while the hazard is militated by defeat and high costs from war for all types of leaders. Additionally, we find that authoritarian leaders are inclined to war longer after they come to power than democratic leaders. Further, democratic leaders select wars with a lower risk of defeat than do their authoritarian counterparts.