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Archive for August, 2006

August 9, 2006

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion interrogates the ways that emotions work on and through us socially–to the point where “we” become social and individual beings precisely through this work.  Using a model of the “sociality” of emotions,” Ahmed shows that “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10).  A detailed analysis of emotions is therefore central to a proper understanding of individuals as well as collective groups–and, in fact, such an analysis reveals the way in which individuals and groups form each other. (Read the article)

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Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

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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Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Perverse Modernities Ser. Ed. Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

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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August 1, 2006

Zhou, Min and Susan S. Kim. “Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities,”Harvard Educational Review. 76.1(2006), 1-26.

August 01st 2006 Posted to Asian American

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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