Gayatri Gopinath ends the first chapter of Impossible Desires with a disclaimer of sorts regarding the cultural texts through which she analyzes queerness and diaspora: these “objects of inquiry,” she writes, “appear to be excessive, tangential, or marginal to recognized traditions” (28).  She focuses on the margins because, she goes on to write, it is precisely at those margins where representations and ideologies of sexuality and diaspora are created and negotiated.  Yet these marginal, tangential objects are often, she argues, parts of largue, more traditional texts–music, films, and novels (to name a few cultural forms) that represent and thus work to sustain “conventional gender, sexual, and nationalist ideologies” (28).  Impossible Desires is indebted to the diasporic cultural studies work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, and in keeping with this strain of cultural studies, Gopinath bases her analysis of queerness and diaspora on mainstream cultural objects and activities.

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M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred is a collection of essays, each of which in some way addresses–as primary critical focus or as implicit methodology–one or several aspects of transnational feminism.  Alexander writes on subjects as varied as the criminalization of gay sex in the Bahamas; the neocolonial marketing of white gay tourism; the relationship between the academy and the political mobilization of female factory workers; the connection between fiscal and curricular conservatism in the academy; the connection between colonialism, neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism and the way each is configured according to a logic of heteropatriarchy; the benefits of memory as a means of fighting the effects of domination; and the role of the Sacred as a politically efficacious model for rethinking the self outside frameworks such as secular postmodern alienation.  (Read the article)

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Abstract: “Extraordinary Asian American educational achievement has often been credited to a common cultural influence of Confucianism that emphasizes education, family honor, discipline, and respect for authority. In this article, Min Zhou and Susan Kim argue that immigration selectivity, higher than average levels of premigration and postmigration socioeconomic status, and ethnic social structures interact to create unique patterns of adaptation and social environments conducive to educational achievement. This article seeks to unpack the ethnic effect through a comparative analysis of the ethnic system of supplementary education that has developed in two immigrant communities–Chinese and Korean–in the United States. The study suggests that the cultural attributes of a group interact substantially with structural factors, particularly tangible ethnic social structures on which community forces are sustained and social capital is formed. The authors conclude that ‘culture’ is not static and requires structural support to constantly adapt to new situations.”

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At large, this study traces the changing aspects, practices, and effects of literacy in the 20th century United States through the analysis of more than 80 case histories ranging from 1895 to 1985. The chapter annotated here is concerned with the different challenges and techniques in literacy sponsorship encountered by African Americans due to issues of class and institutionalized racism.

Brandt’s overarching thesis is that “in twentieth-century America, literacy became increasingly reliant on economic sponsorship and grew increasingly vulnerable to the lack of it” (106). Her investigation in this chapter reveals that the history of African American literacy in the twentieth century both supports and complicates this thesis. (Read the article)

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Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism” articulates the authors’ dissatisfaction with religious fundamentalism and argues that British multiculturalism—frequently seen as a liberal and progressive project—is ill-equipped to mediate the inequalities facing minority groups both within their cultures and within British society at large. Using the examples of their involvement in the feminist organizations Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) and Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Connolly and Patel describe their personal participation in the struggle against racism and gender oppression, using these narratives to then analyze and critique multiculturalism. Their focus on gender, racism, fundamentalism, and multiculturalism leads them to frequently note the way these issues yoke together in complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory ways. For instance, Patel becomes involved in SBS in order to join “struggles against forced arranged marriage that many women faced within the family, and the struggles against racism […] where other non-Asian children and teachers reminded us of our marginal positions within British society” (376). While thus beginning the essay with a critique of fundamentalism, Connolly and Patel explain that fundamentalism’s negative effects are exacerbated and even institutionalized in a multiculturalist British society that endorses an ostensible “mutual tolerance of difference” between majority and minority groups, and which is loathe to intercede on the behalf of those oppressed (i.e. women) within those groups (388). In fact, this so-called “celebration of diversity” silences the subjugation of women within fundamentalist-dominated minority groups while simultaneously maintaining an us/them racist mentality: multicultural policies assume the minority group is internally cohesive. The policies are therefore “ultimately based on essentialist constructions of culture/religion that tend to homogenize both minority and majority communities” (392). Both communities are fixed, through multiculturalism, in an unequal relation to one another, so that “far from being tolerant, the modern British state in fact practices a form of secularism that is intolerant of minority communities even where it appears to permit and maintain their cultural autonomy” (392). The state’s offered democracy is as unsatisfactory to women as the fundamentalist communities of which they are subjugated members. (Read the article)

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In this article Champagne addresses the concerns of American Indian studies scholars who believe that only Indians are qualified to study Indian life, history and culture. As a counter to these critics’ claims, Champagne writes that, “To say that only Indians can study Indians goes too far toward excluding American Indian culture and history from the rest of human history and culture…Indian nations are human groups, part of the broad history of all humanity, and therefore can be compared with other groups in technology, cultural world views, history and adaptation to global markets and expanding state systems, etc. One does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way” (77). (Read the article)

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In this article Connolly examines the arguments surrounding the use of Native American-Related nicknames and mascots at three U.S. Universities: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the “Fighting Illini”), Miami University in Ohio (the “Redskins”) and Eastern Michigan University (the “Hurons”). After reviewing the history behind these nicknames and examining the controversies surrounding them, Connoly concludes that the attitudes many universities adopt towards Native American nicknames reflects a kind of institutional racism that must be dealt with not just by changing the university’s mascot but by implementing fundamental changes in school policy and attitudes. (Read the article)

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In this article West announces the emergence of a new kind of cultural politics, marking “a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists” (11). West argues that previous forms of criticism can no longer account for the ethnic, gender and sexual diversity of late twentieth-century society. The new cultural politics that West promotes seeks to “trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in the light of the concrete, specific, and particular; to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (11). The new cultural critic, West argues, must work to form alliances with disempowered or disenfranchised groups to enable social action and must learn to critique their immediate work contexts (the academy, museum or gallery) from within (11-12). (Read the article)

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“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii). (Read the article)

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