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Archive for August, 2005

August 18, 2005

Lee, Rachel C., and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds. Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and the Internet, Asian American

A book of collected essays, Asian America.Net seeks to address the question of how cybertechnologies complicate the tenuous space occupied by Asian Americans on issues of identity, transnationalism, and gender/sexual politics. If it is a truism, write Lee and Wong, that there was no such concept as “Asian American” prior to ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s – the entire label being a construct – then the additional layer of technological virtuality only intensifies contestation of what it means to be Asian American. (Read the article)

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Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Hennessy’s objective is to converse with and argue for a materialist feminism that is rooted in rigorous theoretical inquiry and that also addresses the material inequality necessitating feminist movements. She chooses the term “materialist feminism” instead of “Marxist feminism” because the latter ignores the sexual division of labor. Hennessy explains “materialism” to mean “material life in the form of human activity” (37), and she correspondingly expands her definition of “feminism” to include the ways this material life is played out along the “multiple axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (xv). Wary of the conservative strain she detects in some postmodern critique and multiculturalism in the academy, Hennessy argues for a Gramscian-informed, post-Althusserian “Global Analytic” and an understanding of discourse as an ideology that can be counterhegemonically mobilized for a feminist politics. (Read the article)

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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

A compilation edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism is comprised of essays generated by the 1983 international academic conference on “Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives.” The primary issues addressed in the collection include the troubling representation of a monolithic “Third World Woman” by Western feminists, the tension between cultural specificity and political alliance across cultures, and the role of activism and “real” women’s experiences in academic discourse. Organized into four parts, “Power, Representation, and Feminist Critique,” “Public Policy, the State, and Ideologies of Gender,” “National Liberation and Sexual Politics,” and “Race, Identity, and Feminist Struggles,” the book includes essays from fifteen authors who differ in their opinions about but who each address feminism in terms of multiple oppressions and identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It is only by acknowledging each individual’s or each individual culture’s specific multiple and often contradictory identities that feminism can theorize effectively and succeed politically. The book as a whole, then, levies a critique of a more traditional, gender-based Western feminism. At the level of the academy, a revision of feminism would demand greater attention to the multiplicity of voices; more of an experiential, activist approach to academic work; and, implicitly, a rethinking of teaching practices along these more inclusive and rigorously critiqued feminist lines. (Read the article)

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August 17, 2005

Valencia, Richard R., Martha Menchaca and Rubén Donato, “Segregation, desegregation, and integration of Chicano students: old and new realities”, Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R. Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 70-113.

August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In the third chapter of Valencia’s book, Valencia, Menchaca and Donato explore the issue of the segregation of Chicanos in public schools. They begin by providing an overview of the history of Chicano segregation, beginning with the post-1848 decades following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In addition, they paint a picture of Chicano school segregation today and offer several practical solutions. (Read the article)

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Valencia, Richard R. Chicano School Failure and Success. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002.

August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American

This book is a compilation of the most recent research being done on the historical, political and social factors contributing to what Valencia describes as “the persistently, pervasively, and disproportionately, low academic achievement” of Chicano students (4). In his introductory chapter Valencia provides an historical background of Mexican Americans as a conquered people who have always been subject to language suppression and cultural exclusion (7). He then outlines the main factors contributing to Chicano school failure today, which include: (Read the article)

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August 15, 2005

Kao, Grace and Marta Tienda, “Educational Aspirations of Minority Youth,” American Journal of Education, 106.3 (1998): 349-384.

August 15th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, African American

Kao and Tienda use the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1998 (NELS:88) to analyze how educational aspirations are formed and maintained from eighth to twelfth grades. They find that family socioeconomic status (SES) is the single most important factor, not only in establishing high aspirations in the eighth grade but also in maintaining these aspirations throughout high school. Kao and Tienda conclude that “because black and Hispanic students are less likely to maintain their high aspirations throughout high school, owing to their lower family SES background…their early aspirations are less concrete than those of white and especially of Asian students” (349). Kao and Tienda supplement their quantitative analysis with focus-group discussions with students. In these discussions Kao and Tienda discover that Hispanic and black students tend to be less informed about funding options for college and have less concrete occupational goals than their Asian and white counterparts. (Read the article)

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August 13, 2005

Barrish, Phillip. “The Secret Joys of Antiracist Pedagogy: Huckleberry Finn in the Classroom.” American Imago 59.2 (2002): 117-39.

August 13th 2005 Posted to The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Whiteness Studies

In this essay, Barrish analyzes the pleasures inherent in being a liberal white antiracist professor. These educators face an “unavoidable paradox” when they attempt to address racism: while the purported aim of such an antiracist pedagogy is to move beyond the influence of a racist past, citing this past leads white educators into a performative reiteration of the past and of racism itself (117). For his primary example, Barrish deconstructs the rhetoric underlying prohibitions of the word “n-word,” showing that the prohibitions themselves tend to repeat the word again and again, placing the white antiracist uttering the word in a double bind or, in more psychoanalytic terms, an aporia. Barrish turns to the Lacanian psychoanalytic term “jouissance” to explain the horrifying pleasure-pain of being caught in this double bind, but notes that because jouissance demands the dissolution of the individual’s psyche, it is “quickly repackaged” into a “more readily consumable masochistic scene of fantasized white male suffering” (122). (Read the article)

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 242-61.

August 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Spivak’s concern in this essay is the extension of nineteenth-century British imperialism into present-day feminist criticism. It should not be forgotten, she begins, that literature had a vital role in the “production of cultural representation of England to the English”—and was thus implicated in the project of imperialism itself (262). Her readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein model a kind of critical reading that is conscious of and that works against the “worlding” tendency underlying literary studies at their most imperialistic. The exoticization of the Third World’s “rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularlized in English translation” is itself a process of “worlding” not unlike the expansion of an empire (262). Rather than focusing on Third World literatures, Spivak seeks to uncover and deconstruct the production of “The Third World” by beginning with the literature of the home empire. (Read the article)

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Kaufman, Debra Renee. “Rethinking, Reflecting, Rewriting: Teaching Feminist Methodology.” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 18.2 (1996): 165-74.

August 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

“Part of feminist methodology,” writes Kaufman, “is to make clear that race, gender, and class mark not only particular positions within society, but are also markers of unequal relationships,” and the feminist classroom “is a point of departure to explore relations of privilege and power at the heart of both learning and researching” (173). Kaufman’s feminism calls for a “pedagogical revolution” in which borders are not only crossed, but dissolved (166). She begins her article with a description of her own education in the sixties, lending an experiential weight to her pedagogical views. Kaufman dedicates her classroom to “the relationship between the personal and the public; between the classroom and the community; between the academic and the popular; between the student and the teacher” (167). (Read the article)

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Cohen, Jody. “Constructing Race at an Urban High School: In Their Minds, Their Mouths, Their Hearts.” Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. Ed. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. 289-308.

August 13th 2005 Posted to Uncategorized

Endorsing an experientially based multicultural education, Cohen argues that students are “authorities on their own experiences,” and also “bring critical insight to the complexities of race/ethnicity,” suggesting that “schools go beyond transmitting knowledge about cultural groups to study race, gender, and class as dynamic, interacting social constructs” (306). Cohen’s study began, as she writes, from research, “becoming pedagogy only in the process” (291). The strategies she suggests are “practice-based” and stem from individual conversations held outside the mainstream classroom (306). A multicultural education, Cohen writes, would ideally involve “planning teams” comprised of staff, parents, students, and community members, and the curriculum would be comprised of “experientially based discourses of identity, difference, and racism” (306). (Read the article)

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