3,567 research outputs found
Beyond Ethnicity: Toward a Critique of the Hegemonic Discipline E. San Juan, Jr.
With the current vogue of multiculturalism and cultural diversity requirements as panacea for systemic problems, scholars and teachers of Ethnic Studies need to reassess the principles and goals of their discipline. Los Angeles 1992, among other developments, has exposed the serious inadequacies of old paradigms. A review of the racialized history of Asians in U.S. society, a narrative of oppression and opposition now mystified by the model minority myth, allows us to grasp the flaws of the liberal pluralist focus on culture divorced from the political and economic contexts of unequal power relations. Ultimately, for whom is Ethnic Studies designed? By historicizing identity politics and validating the genealogy of resistance, we in the field of Ethnic Studies can refuse to be mere apologists for the status quo and revitalize the critical and emancipatory thrust of Ethnic Studies, a thrust inseparable from the struggle of people of color against white supremacy
From Chinatown to Gunga Din Highway: Notes on Frank Chin\u27s Writing Strategy
Exploring Frank Chin\u27s work, particularly in his latest novel Gunga Din Highway, the essay endeavors to re-situate ethnic writing in the historical specificity of its inscription in the United States as a racial polity. This cognitive remapping of the literary field as reconfigured by multiculturalist liberalism may be accomplished by examining Chin\u27s cultural politics. Chin\u27s mode of strategic writing interrogates the modelminority myth and the premises of cultural nationalism. While it rejects the pluralist resolution of the traditional conflicts in the Chinese diaspora, Chin\u27s satiric impulse proposes a defamiliarization of Asian American common sense adequate to provoke a revaluation of the presumed conjunction of ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities in the current counter-terrorist milieu
From Genealogy To Inventory: The Situation Of Asian American Studies In The Age Of The Crisis Of Global Finance Capital
The onset of global capitalism's crisis has exposed the fragile theoretical
underpinnings of Asian American Studies as an academic discipline. Spellbound
by deconstructive, rhetorical assumptions, all symptomatic of commodityfetishism and alienation, mainstream Asian American critics continue to validate
neoliberal pluralism while claiming to value difference and singularity. While
rejecting American Exceptionalism, they ignore historical specificities and
endorse individualist norms, affects, genealogical plurality, and performative
discourses uncritical of free-market reification
Philippine Writing in English: Postcolonial Syncretism Versus a Textual Practice of National Liberation
From Race to Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory
The misconstrual of class as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, especially in global market operations where immigrant female labor plays a decisive role. This Essay uses the example of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specific historical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumulation. CRT can be renewed by adopting class struggle as the means of resolving racial injustice through radical structural transformation
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