Locating Race , livre ebook

256

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English

Ebooks

2009

Écrit par
Malini Johar Schueller

Publié par
State University of New York Press

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256

pages

English

Ebooks

2009

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

08 janvier 2009

EAN13

9780791477151

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

5 Mo

Locating Race provides a powerful critique of theories and fictions of globalization that privilege migration, transnationalism, and flows. Malini Johar Schueller argues that in order to resist racism and imperialism in the United States we need to focus on local understandings of how different racial groups are specifically constructed and oppressed by the nation-state and imperial relations. In the writings of Black Nationalists, Native American activists, and groups like Partido Nacional La Raza Unida, the author finds an imagined identity of post-colonial citizenship based on a race- and place-based activism that forms solidarities with oppressed groups worldwide and suggests possibilities for a radical globalism.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Theorizing Race, Postcoloniality, and Globalization

Part 1. RACIAL ERASURE IN GLOBAL THEORY

2. Expunging the Politics of Location: Articulations of African Americanism in Bhabha, Appadurai, and Spivak

3. Border Crossing, Analogy, and Universalism in (White) Feminist Theory: The Color of the Cyborg Body

Part 2. FROM THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL TO THE POST-COLONIAL

4. Globalization and Orientalism: Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu, Alexander’s Fault Lines and Mukherjee’s Jasmine

5. Claiming National Space and Postcolonial Critique: The Asian American Performances of Tseng Kwong Chi

Part 3. POSSIBILITIES FOR POST-COLONIAL CITIZENSHIP

6. Black Nationalism and Anti-Imperial Resistance in Assata Shakur’s Autobiography

7. Recognition and Decolonization in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Conclusion. Rethinking Keywords and Notes on Located Resistances Today

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Voir

Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

08 janvier 2009

EAN13

9780791477151

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

5 Mo

Locating Race

SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Citizenship

Emmanuel C. Eze, editor

Locating Race

Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship

Malini Johar Schueller

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Schueller, Malini Johar, 1957– Locating race : global sites of post-colonial citizenship / Malini Johar Schueller. p. cm. — (SUNY series, explorations in postcolonial studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7681-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7914-7682-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Globalization in literature. 5. Postcolonialism in literature. 6. Postcolonialism—United States. 7. Race— Philosophy. 8. Globalization—Philosophy. 9. United States—Race relations. I. Title. PS153.A84S36 2009 810.9'895—dc22 2008005662

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Contents

1. Theorizing Race, Postcoloniality, and Globalization

Part 1. RACIAL ERASURE IN GLOBAL THEORY 2. Expunging the Politics of Location: Articulations of African Americanism in Bhabha, Appadurai, and Spivak 3. Border Crossing, Analogy, and Universalism in (White) Feminist Theory: The Color of the Cyborg Body

Part 2. FROM THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL TO THE POST-COLONIAL 4. Globalization and Orientalism: Iyer’sVideo Night in Kathmandu, Alexander’sFault Linesand Mukherjee’sJasmine 5. Claiming National Space and Postcolonial Critique: The Asian American Performances of Tseng Kwong Chi

Part 3. POSSIBILITIES FOR POST-COLONIAL CITIZENSHIP 6. Black Nationalism and Anti-Imperial Resistance in Assata Shakur’sAutobiography 7. Recognition and Decolonization in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead Conclusion. Rethinking Keywords and Notes on Located Resistances Today

Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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183 221 241

Illustrations

Fig. 5.1. Photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, “Hollywood, California,” 1979

Fig. 5.2. Photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi “Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, California,” 1979

Fig. 5.3. Photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, “Statue of Liberty, New York, New York,” 1979

Fig. 5.4. Photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi, “Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.,” 1982

Fig C.1. Editorial Cartoon fromThe Diamondback

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Acknowledgments

Writing a book is an intellectual journey that is always, to an extent, col-laborative and one of the pleasures of completing a book is being able to acknowledge one’s interlocutors. My greatest debts are to Michael Omi and Howard Winant for their pivotal work,Racial Formation in the United States, Edward Said for his persistent focus on imperialism, and to the particularist analyses of subaltern studies scholars. I would not have been able to formulate my arguments without the invigorating conversa-tions and critiques of numerous colleagues and scholars. Ashley Dawson and Lee Quinby have served as sounding boards for many ideas in this book. Special thanks to Lee Quinby for the many theory discussions we’ve had, for helping me structure the book at its inception, for offering useful critiques of the introduction and the chapter on feminist theory, and for brainstorming with me on the title. I am grateful to Ashley Daw-son for reading the introduction, pointing me to many sources, and for our collaboration onExceptional Statewhich helped me sharpen my ideas in this book. My collaboration with Edward Watts onMessy Be-ginningswas enormously useful in helping me think about race and post-coloniality and this project. Many other colleagues have helped me rethink and refine my ideas. I would like to thank Leslie Bow, Marsha Bryant, Pamela Gilbert, David Leverenz, Paul Lyons, Bill Mullen, and Amy Ongiri for reading and com-menting on different chapters and the book proposal. While writing this book, I’ve participated in lively reading groups with different colleagues, and the ideas generated during those discussions have been invaluable in thinking about this book. I would like to thank Apollo Amoko, Pamela Gilbert, Leah Rosenberg, and Matthew Watson for the enjoyable discus-sions we’ve had. This book has also benefitted from the debates of my graduate students in my classes on Postcolonial Theory and American Studies and Nineteenth Century Racial Formations. No small thanks to

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Acknowledgments

John Leavey, then department chair, who helped negotiate part of the leave that made it possible for me to complete the book. Finally, I owe a special gratitude to Larin McLaughlin for taking on this project and mov-ing it efficiently along to publication. My children Divik, Maya, and Neena make my work enjoyable more than they realize. Without their hugs, laughter, and yes, arguments, life would be dull. I am proud of all of them and thrive in the love and affection they surround me with. Writing would be no fun without them periodically bursting through my study door. I cannot begin to thank my husband, John, for his patience, love, and understanding. He’s never been too busy to solve my computer problems or listen to my distress stories along the way. Even though they live halfway around the world, my mother, Usha Johar, and my sister, Kavita Nayar, have been wonderfully supportive. A version of chapter two was published inCultural Critique55 (2003) 35–62; parts of chapter three appeared inSigns31 i (2005), 63–92; and a version of chapter five was published inAsian North American Subjec-tivities: Beyond the Hyphen, eds. Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 170–85.

CHAPTER ONE

Theorizing Race, Postcoloniality, and Globalization

n late August 2005, hurricane Katrina, a category-four storm, hit the I predominantly African American city of New Orleans, flooding the homes of the city’s residents, killing hundreds, and destroying water and power supplies. In the aftermath of the storm, with no emergency relief in sight, poor people wandered the streets in search of food, and over twenty thousand sought refuge in the New Orleans Superdome. Within days of Katrina’s landfall, the hurricane had foregrounded the systemic racism at the heart of the country. Eerily recalling post-Reconstruction representations of dangerous and degenerate African Americans threat-ening the social order—popularly commemorated in works like D. W. Griffiths’Birth of a Nation—media reports inundated television and newspapers with coverage of African American looters engaged in a wild orgy of stealing, shooting, and raping. Rapper Kanye West’s comments at a benefit concert four days after the tragedy, captured what was glaringly evident to most Americans: “You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re loot-1 ing.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’” Never-theless, unverified (and later discredited) stories about the rampant violence and disorder at the Superdome continued to be churned for days; predictably, gun sales in the nearby whiter city of Baton Rouge skyrock-eted, as citizens strove to “protect” themselves from an influx of unde-sirable African Americans from New Orleans. An event like Katrina questions the rhetoric of globalization theories with their emphasis on hybridity, fluidity, migration, postnationalism, and transnationalism and seems to demand, instead, the engaged partic-ularity of critical race studies. But if globalization theories, most of which see the local and race as atavisms, fail to provide an analytic for reading Katrina, this does not mean that Katrina’s racial politics are limited to the

Locating Race

workings of the nation-state alone. Simultaneous with representations of African American degradation were scores of references to Katrina as similar to the third world; fighting in Iraq and battling in Katrina seemed 2 eerily alike as Katrina was declared a “war zone”; most ominously, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco pegged New Orleans as enemy ter-ritory, a city needing colonial occupation, when she said, “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and 3 under my orders to restore order in the streets.” In Blanco’s vision, citi-zens in need became irascible law-and-order problems, just like unruly denizens of a colony. Such hostile representations of New Orleans demonstrate not postnationalism because the nation-state was (and is) alive and well, if only as a disciplinary force rather than for public good; neither do they illustrate simply transnational linkages of corporate power. Rather, they attest to a violent synergy of imperialism and racism as New Orleans, the colony within, is literally subdued by armies con-trolling the reaches of empire in occupied Iraq, a suggestion decisively made by Spike Lee when he posed before a ravaged New Orleans house tagged “Baghdad” during the shooting ofWhen the Levees Broke 4 (2006). The symbiosis of structural racism and imperialism in the re-sponses to Katrina point, in part, to the object of this book: practically, to link the project of race with that of anti-imperial resistance and, theoret-ically, to suggests tactical ways in which postcolonial theory and critical race studies can come together. The chapters in this book demonstrate how race is both the site of par-ticular, located oppression and of postcolonial resistance; understanding race demands specific historical knowledge at the same time as opposition to systemic racism produces powerful forms of local, translocal, and transnational resistance. The theoretical premise underlying the analysis of race is that of particularism, a position in philosophy that contends that al-most every moral reason is capable of being reversed by changes in con-5 text. Thus, the larger concepts at play in thinking race—oppression, resistance, Othering, color, rights—need to be constantly rethought, rede-fined, indeed reformulated, through different contexts. This does not mean that analysis becomes simply descriptive, but rather that, in order precisely to be theoretical, analysis must incorporate a reflection of its own immedi-6 ate conditions, the singular forces that shape it in a particular context. I therefore use the terms “local” and “locatedness” in two ways: first, as syn-onyms for context in relation to race because systemic racism is necessarily tied to the juridical apparatuses of the nation-state that legislatede jureand affectde factoracism for particular raced groups; racial categories do not travel similarly across or even within nations, and might, as in the case of Hawai’ians and Puerto Ricans, also be affected by the specificities of place;

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