De-centering ethnicity : the situation of Asian Americans in contemporary global capitalism
Part of : Γράμμα : περιοδικό θεωρίας και κριτικής ; Vol.6, No.1, 1998, pages 135-150
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135-150
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Despite the rapid socioeconomic and demographic changes in the last two decades, the “ Asian ” presence in the United States persists as a racialized (not ethnic) Other. Against this socially constructed figure, the American national identity is defined. One reason for this persistence is the immigrant paradigm subtending mainstream accounts and accompanying juridical and popular discourses. Attempts to conceptualize citizenship or civic agency through culture, counterposing in the process a heterogeneous civil society to a homogenizing state, only replicates a bourgeois metaphysics that under writes both identity politics and its postmodernist refusals. Neither panethnicity nor transmigrant/postcolonial hybridity can resolve the crisis of a liberal commodified polity based on white supremacy either implied or covert. Ideologies of difference and subjectivity need to be critically regrounded in the realities of political economy and the changing structures of institutional and disciplinary power. Ultimately the problem of global capitalis needs to be addressed in elucidating and containing the varieties of racism toward Asian and other people of color in the United States.
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