Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Tran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197587909
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.

Author: Iyko Day
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374528
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities.

Author: Jay Caspian Kang
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0525576231
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231124218
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
A diverse set of texts from Foucault, Weber, Derrida and others are examined in this reconceptualization of the way ethnicity functions in capitalist society.

Author: Lisa Lowe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822318644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Author: Jonathan Tran
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0567181626
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate "the church as politics" within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy.

Author: Jennifer M. Wei
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1461633729
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Jennifer M. Wei argues that construction and perceptions of language and identity parallel sociopolitical transformations, and language and identity crises arise during power transitions. Under these premises, language and identity are never well-defined or well-bounded. Instead, they are best viewed as political symbols subject to manipulation and exploitation during socio-historical upheavals. A choice of language—from phonological shibboleth, Mandarin, or Taiwanese, to choice of official language—cuts to the heart of contested cultural notions of self and other, with profound implications for nationalism, national unity and ethno-linguistic purism. Wei further argues that because of the Chinese Diaspora and Taiwan's connections to China and the United States, arguments and sentiments over language choice and identity have consequences for Taiwan's international and transnational status. They are symbolic acts of imagining Taiwan's past as she looks forward to the future.

Author: Benedict J. Kerkvliet
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9781865080963
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A comprehensive analysis of the economic changes that China and Vietnam have experienced in recent years, outlining both similarities and significant differences between the two countries.

Author: Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813549337
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
Asian American Studies Now truly represents the enormous changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world, changes that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.

Author: Rajini Srikanth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316368459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 757

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature presents a comprehensive history of the field, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of Asian American writing that help readers to understand how authors have sought to make their experiences meaningful. Covering subjects from autobiography and Japanese American internment literature to contemporary drama and social protest performance, this History traces the development of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to Asian American literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come.