The strategic basis of Asian American identity in the current context of its contradictory academic reproduction—contradictory in that the recognition of its theoretical impossibility is coupled with the pressure of its curricular expansion—has tended to encourage certain political modes of thematizing Asian American identity as the only conceivable route to its consolidation. It has tended to discourage historical and formal kinds of inquiry into the constitution of Asian American identity, inquiry that might illuminate the precarious conditions of Asian American predication or the doubtful reasons for its ideological production. We might say further that the recognition of Asian American “heterogeneity” has even required the accompanying concept of Asian American “hybridity,” or the notion of minority culture as a counterhegemonic formation.
In this respect, little has changed since the days of the Aiiieeeee! anthology when its editors sought to distinguish “Asian American literature” from literature that only happens to have been written by Asians in America according to the yardstick of resistance to Orientalist stereotyping. Though Asian American identity is now considered intersectionally feminist and queer in a way that breaks with that first generation of critics, Asian American culture is still understood as a reaction-formation to American racism. If the 1970s identified Asian American oppositionality with cultural nationalist pride, the 1990s identified it with postnationalist savvy. The shift may have reversed the content of what would count as good politics, but it repeated the original characterization of the Asian American by a culture of resistance. More recently, such political romanticization of Asian American culture has come into question by scholars such as Koshy and Viet Nguyen, who have pointed to the ways in which Asian American legal plaintiffs participated in dominant discourses of whiteness or how Asian American authors at times deployed ideologically dubious strategies to ad- vance their literary careers. But whether Asian American subjects are thought to be complicit or subversive, the problem of theorizing “Asian American literature” remains one of how to move beyond a dualistic conceptualization of American and Asian American cultures, American and Asian American politics, American and Asian American subjects. To this extent, Asian American cultural studies can be said to have not yet moved beyond Orientalism—not so much in the sense that as Asian Americanists we are bound to reproduce Orientalist discourse, although this is a serious possibility, but that we have not found a way to exceed its critique.
Colleen Lye, “Introduction: In Dialogue with Asian American Studies,” Representations, Vol.99, No.1 (Summer 2007), pg.5-6
(via bemusedbibliophile)
“‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies—I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
(via warsanshires)
Yes, we. That towering inferno of universalism. That monstrous display of self-infatuation. That master stroke of white-woman-speech. Voices warn me away from the danger. Hit backspace. Rephrase. Take comfort in grammar’s singularity. But how can I not want this tantalizing hallucination? Or more to the point, why must I ignore its pulsing heat when identity knowledges are nothing without the haunting specter and affective traction of we? If the protocols of critical speech have taught us to avoid the risk, it is just as true to say that identity knowledges rarely take political or critical aim without some measure of hope that we will struggle into existence – partial and contingent to be sure, but resonant and agential. In the taut space between the we that must be disciplined and the we that is desired, I presents itself as the desiring subject’s safest bet. But how safe is any I – indeed, how safe am I? – when the descriptive content no less than the protocols in which I come to speech are bound to histories and scripts that are given credit for knowing me at the start?
My strategy in the paces that follow is to inhabit the error, not to avoid it, and certainly not to take refuge in the small cave of the I, even as I mobilize it in order to help specify the tense and longed-for transformations that mark the distance I am trying to travel from me to you – the preamble to whatever can be made to stand for we. I anticipate your resistance, but here’s the truth: I am not legible to myself without it. In this state of constitutive dependency, where the contingencies of grammar refract the identitarian dilemmas on which identity knowledges are staked, Object Lessons engages not only how and why we has been so harshly condemned but the hope that our struggle with it reveals. What, after all, fuels the fierceness of our objection to we: the wish it reveals or the fact that the wish has yet to come true?Robyn Wiegman, “Introduction: How to Read This Book,” Object Lessons, pg.13 (x)
“This is not a phenomenon unique to the Muslim American community. For the past few years, cultural commentators have heralded a “transgender moment.” Suddenly, transgender people were showing up in TV and film and magazine covers. And yet, 2016 was reportedly one of the deadliest years to date for transgender people in the U.S., with 27 of them killed, the majority of them women of color.
Representation is not justice and is a poor substitution for it.”
(via breadow)
“Broad swaths of the left and liberal-leaning U.S. public newly dedicated themselves to political activity in the wake of Trump’s ascension to the White House and the GOP’s control of the Senate and the House. Amidst the awakening of a liberal grassroots, a new enemy crystallized: the white woman voter. She emerged as the victim of a kind of false consciousness forged not in the factory, but in the college classroom and suburban mall. In dominant media narratives, her ubiquity came as a shock. The stats are repeated as incantation: 53% of white women voted for Trump a mere four weeks after video emerged of Trump bragging about sexual assault. 63% of white women voted for Roy Moore in December’s Alabama Senate special election, despite mounds of credible evidence of Moore’s molestation of young teen girls. Why, the narrative muses, would white women betray their own interests? And why are black women—98% of whom voted for Moore’s opponent Doug Jones—seemingly immune to electoral self-sabotage?
I wish to suggest a frame that has not emerged in the mountain of copy addressing the problem of white women. Feminists have generated many useful analyses – white women’s investment in patriarchy, the class structure, the racial status quo—underlining the material benefits conservative politics offer white women. There is a deeper, more structural reason why white women vote for misogynist, white supremacist candidates despite a century and a half of feminist organizing, however. Simply put: sex difference is itself a racial structure.
Sexual difference, as a concept, emerged as a function of race. This is particularly salient in the nineteenth century, the era in which modern notions of race and sex difference solidified. […] A wide variety of scientists, writers, and reformers articulated full sexual differentiation as the unique achievement of the civilized. The binary entities of man and woman were newly understood as thoroughly distinct in terms of mental, physiological, emotional, and psychological capacity. Sex difference was presented as the singular attainment of a teleological evolution moving toward ever greater specialization. The primitive races, by contrast, were cast as unsexed, as insufficiently evolved in both anatomy and character. The category of womanhood emerged in modern times as a unique quality of civilization. Its ramifications are still visible in electoral politics across the country.”
–Kyla Schuller, “The Trouble with White Women”
(via formschon)
thesaddestbitchinallofspectrum:
“It is not a question of that ready-made characteristic of sincere people, ‘sincerity’, on the one hand, and that of ‘lying’ (planned and plotted by ‘liars’) on the other. In everyday life or in the full glare of the theatre footlights, human beings always behave like mystifiers, who manage to ‘play a role’ precisely by exaggerating their own importance. Sometimes the acting is crude, sometimes subtle; and moreover the actor becomes committed, compromised; it is a serious business. The parts must be acted out until the end; they are not pure roles, which an actor can give up when he is tired or when he feels he is acting badly. They extend reality, and are equally as real; acting explores what is possible; in the abstract, play-acting does not exclude sincerity, on the contrary, it implies it, while at the same time adding something extra real: the knowledge of a situation, an action, a result to be obtained. It is precisely in this way that everyday life resembles theatre- and that theatre is able to resume, condense and ‘represent’ life for real spectators.”— Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (via thesaddestbitchinallofspectrum)