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

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

Migracije, etničnost, rasizam: narativne strategije u književnim djelima azijskih Amerikanaca

The entry of Asian bodies into the United States continent is part of the worldwide labor migration that began in the sixteenth century and culminated in the U.S. imperial domination of the Philippines with the Spanish-American War of 1898. To symbolize the traumatic experience of uprooting and racist violence suffered by Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino migrants in the United States, ethnic artists from these diverse communities deploy several strategies: postmodernist affirmation of heterogeneity (in Frank Chin and Jeffery Chan), counter-identification and dis-identification (in Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Hisaya Yamamoto), and prophetic figuration (Carlos Bulosan). These strategies articulate some of the ways in which Asian Americans attempt through ideological critique to overcome racism, exclusion, marginalization, and cooptation. In this process, the "Orientalized" or exoticized subject, grounded in the vicissitudes of U.S. capital accumulation (Depression, Cold War, and global commodification), can be appreciated as an appositional, emancipatory force with its own viable if limited historical agency. The goal of this ethnic art is the transcendence of racial oppression and liberation from the bondage of transnational capital.Ulazak azijskih masa na američki kontinent dio je svjetskih migracija koje su započele u 16. stoljeću, a vrhunac dosegle nakon španjolsko-američkog rata 1898. godine, kada su Filipini potpali pod imperijalnu dominaciju SAD-a. Kako bi simbolički prikazali traumatsko iskustvo iskorijenjenosti i rasističko nasilje kojima su izloženi kineski, japanski i filipinski migranti u Sjedinjenim Državama, etnički umjetnici ovih zajednica razvijaju nekoliko strategija: postmodernističku afirmaciju heterogenosti (Frank Chin i Jeffery Chan), kontra-identifikaciju i deidentifikaciju (Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Hisaya Yamamoto) i proročko oblikovanje (Carlos Bulosan). Te strategije izražavaju neke načine kojima azijski Amerikanci pokušavaju prevladati rasizam, isključivanje, marginalizaciju i kooptiranje pomoću ideološke kritike. U tom procesu "orijentalizirana" ili egzotična tema, utemeljena na sudbini akumulacije kapitala u SAD-u (depresija, hladni rat i širenje potrošačkog društva), može se smatrati oporbenom, emancipirajućom snagom sa svojim vlastitim životnim, premda ograničenim, povijesnim djelovanjem. Cilj je ove etničke umjetnosti transcendentnost rasnog ugnjetavanja i oslobođenje iz ropstva transnacionalnoga kapitala