Ong and De Genova

This week's readings are revealing on multiple levels; they at once unveil the power dynamics of transnational cultural capital and simultaneously, at times, fall into the traps they are seeking to avoid. For example, Ong tries to dispel the notion of a static "Chineseness" (111) that is employed even in academic discourses that try to dismantle orientalist rhetoric. However, earlier in her piece, she refers to the way that "Americans" react to the Chinese influx in Northern California. She says that the Chinese quest for social capital "destablizes the sense of political security for American residents" (Ong 97). Is it possible to talk about these issues without falling into the traps of the issues? Is she not, unconsciously, and most likely unwillingly, conflating whiteness with Americanness here? Even while she seeks to explore a new, transnational, globalized American identity, to uncover the layers of power hierarchy that are embedded within racial and place-based identities in America, she is pointing to a normalized, static "Americanness" that is interchangable with whiteness.

The article, for the most part, however, is very illuminating. Ong discusses multiple strategies of accumulation of cultural capital, offering insights into the ways that actions such as philanthropic donations convert into "social distinction" (93). On page 112, she defines flexible citizenship, pointing to specific tiers of the job industry that Chinese immigrants occupy and employ as a means to work their way up the (mythical?) cultural ladder in America. Similarly, De Genova talks about how "Mexican Chicago" refers to the way that Mexican-Americans interact with their own sense of "Mexican-ness" in relationship to the way that "Mexican-ness" is placed on them by the state and mainstream America's racialization of them (96). He, like Ong, addresses what "Americanness" has come to mean, and includes the concept that "Americanness" involves linguistic homogeneity, which immediately excludes many people from embodying America. While he specifically is referring to Chicano folks who speak two (or more) languages, his argument can be applied to Ong's assessment of the "Hong Kong money elite" as well.

Golden Gulag/Prison Town USA

Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book Golden Gulag and the documentary "Prison Town, USA" compliment each other well. Both serve to expose the reality of the Prison Industrial Complex and its impacts on the American people. Although Gilmore opens up with an anecdote about people riding on a bus to Sacramento to petition the government, the rest of the book gets into more of the technicalities of how the PIC operates, specifically in California. What I appreciated about the documentary is the human face it puts with both the experience of being incarcerated in America, and being forced to buy into the system on the other end--by becoming a prison guard.

It is always painful for me, a California-born, to read about the prison system in California, when we spend so much money per year on prisons and so little on education. People are literally fast-tracked into prison. When my friends and I would cut school, if we were caught, we would be taken by the truancy police to a truancy depot, rather than returned to school. This shows how young people are very actively being sent the message that one step out of line (or three strikes) will get you locked up, rather than cared for or looked after by the state system. As Gilmore focuses on the capitalistic benefits for certain people of the expansion and privatization of prisons, she also points to the ways that labor and welfare become inextricably linked to warfare. She says that the new state renovated "its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state" (85). One main theme that comes out in this statement, and also throughout her masterpiece, is the idea of dependency. This connects back to the film because we see the ways that the people living in these prison towns become utterly dependent on the prisons, and how that fuels and feeds this growth of monstrous prisons. The ways that the larger powers, i.e. the state and private companies, benefit from the expansion of prisons is masked by the ways that working class white folks are pitted against working class people of color, when the former are exploited as prison workers and the latter are criminalized and locked up as prison inmates.

Guantanamo and U.S. Imperialism

This week's readings, Amy Kaplan's "Where is Guantanamo?" and Giorgio Agamben's "What Is a Camp?" both point to questions of nationhood, exceptionalism, sovereignty, and imperialism. I did not know the full history of Guantanamo, so reading about how the Platt Amendment set the groundwork for the United States to maintain authority over this land, without applying American constitutional limits to the practices that the U.S. employs there. That the U.S. was still sending checks of about 4 thousand dollars (which the Cuban government refused to cash) is so telling of the formalities that the American government recognizes as proof of our right to the globe. As Kaplan so wonderfully puts it, there is an intense "hierarchy between recognition and consent, rendering Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay contingent on the acknowledgment of the United States, in exchange for which Cuba agrees to cede sovereignty over part of the territory it never controlled" (Kaplan 863). The idea of Guantanamo as a "launching pad" for military interventionism signals the ways that Cuba and other Latin American countries have been subjugated by treaties couched in international diplomacy, when in actuality they are codifying American global imperialism.

Agamben's essay "What Is a Camp?" references his work on the State of Exception. We can read Guantanamo exactly in the context of the camp that Agamben describes: "the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live" (Agamben 38.8). He says, "The camp is the space that opens up whe nthe state of exception starts to become the rule" (38.9). We see this in Kaplan's article, when the courts rule repeatedly that the territory of Guantanamo is exempt from constitutional boundaries, or when the courts refuse to officially name where in the world Guantanamo lies. In addition, the racializing of bodies and the racializing of non-citizens that takes place in Guantanamo only serve to further establish the permanence of the camp that Agamben names. I came out of this wonder, are we in "a period of permanent crisis," as Agamben might suggest (42.3)?


I did some research because I wanted to know what happened to the detainees from Guantanamo who, according to Obama, are supposed to be released by now.
I stumbled upon this article, written today, that concludes with a statement from the Obama administration recognizing that their projected deadline for shutting down the camp will most likely not be met. Though Obama made it clear that one of his first intentions in office was to shut down this camp and end these unlawful, undefined, unregulated, and unsituated practices, the "camp" at Guantanamo Bay remains today:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/15/content_12458768.htm

Native Americans and EJ

This week's readings directly connect to many of the issues that Julie Sze discusses in "Noxious New York," but in the specific context of Native American experiences with the state apparatus and the environment's wellbeing.

Thomas Biolsi spends a significant amount of his article "The Birth of the Reservation" talking about the modes in which dominant and colonial gazes function to undermine Native American autonomy and agency. Through an examination of the state policies regarding the Lakota Nation, he analyzes the ways that the individual and individual property ownership was cultivated by the government, how the nuclear family and institutional marriages/unions were forced upon the Lakota people, and how the idea of progress became associated with marrying with white people and diluting native bloodlines. He says, "Lakota people internalized blood quantum as part of the way they saw themselves in the world or that they perceived full-bloods and mixed-bloods as being different, even mutually antagonistic, social groups" (Biolsi 42). The internalization of the ideas of incompotence and blood quantum that was produced by the American government, he concludes, is ultimately the most powerful weapon in furthering the subjugation of native peoples in this country.

Andrea Smith takes on the issue of Native people in America and land largely in terms of ecofeminism. She discusses the "greening of hate" as the pointing of blame towards people in the global south (especially women) for overpopulation that leads to environmental ills. This is problematic because it does not address--in fact it completely obliterates--the ways that women of color suffer through environmental injustice that often hurts their reproductive health. She talks about depleted uranium as an extreme example of the detrimental conditions that some people are living in and she explores the idea that is put out by some people that there are certain populations and groups of people in the world who are inherently "dirty."

The most interesting part of both articules to me was the discussion of mainstream environmental activism and its disconnect/hurtful stance towards Native American EJ issues. I would like to discuss this further and see if there are any mainstream organizations that are doing a good job of effectively showing solidarity with the struggles of Native Americans.

Noxious New York

In a time of ever-increasing awareness about the ways that the earth is in trouble (and man/woman's responsibility to attend to this problem), it boggles my mind how blind the dominant discourse is to the ways that different groups are impacted differently. "Environmental (in)justice" is not a word that everyone in America understands, sad as that may be. Julie Sze's book Noxious New York is an attempt to expose and discuss how lower-income communities of color are disproportionately impacted by bad environmental conditions. From Sunset Park to Williamsburg to West Harlem to the South Bronx, her book is a journal through the environmental justice struggles of New York City.

The chapter on Garbage really held my attention, since I grew up thinking about garbage. My dad is the recycling director for the county I was raised in, and every time we would pass a landfill or a dump he would slow down and look--he was always talking about the ways that different regions handled their trash. The dangers of the privatization of garbage and globalizing garbage are very real and Sze's discussion of them, as funny as it may initially sound to write a chapter on Garbage, is so important. As she points out, "the changing nature of urban garbage, and the fate of marginalized communities in the cities, is intimately linked to rural impoverished populations through class and race" (122).

This book is so important for all Americans to read,not just those interested in EJ work. I am very interested in what Sze's book would look like if she spent a whole book exploring how the EJ conditions have (or have not) shifted in Williamsburg since the influx of gentrifiers and developments.

Barrio Dreams

The rapidly increasing situation of gentrification in East Harlem (and Harlem in general) is something that I have recently become very exposed to. Interning uptown in East Harlem with an organization that tackles this issue (among many others), reading Davila's book was something like an intellectualized version of a Monday afternoon at my job. (One of her picture inserts even includes a photo of my coworker's mom!) The issues that she talks about, from naming to self-naming to "marketable ethnicity"to the production of belief and adherence to certain ideals of capitalism are all, in my mind, on-point with what is occurring today. Her analysis of "slumlords" and the problems they produce for residents in the Barrio is also very accurate. I think that the idea of "slumlords" has become romanticized and fictionalized in the white spatial imaginary, so it's important that an intellectual piece like this, clearly intended for higher-educated people, speaks to the presentness of this reality.

The notion of "upward mobility" was one that I found especially interesting. Davila explains in her intro the ways that upward mobility is consumed as an ideology by people in the Barrio, and how that internalization of this ideal actually helps to destroy their neighborhood. She claims that oftentimes it is because the people are afforded a false sense of autonomy and mobility within larger structures that are designed to prevent such movement, and while I do think her point is very valid, I can't help but feel that this rhetoric strips the people in East Harlem of their agency, to a certain degree. It is important to point out the ways that people become duped by "the system," but I have found increasingly in my studies that it seems to be a challenge for most scholars to talk about victimization without making the victims sound completely powerless. She later remedies this by including testimonials and channeling the voices of multiple Puerto Rican activists in the community.

I found her analysis of culture and space especially powerful. Chapter 2, linked with some comments in the introduction, talk about how "ethnic" cultures are often detached from their histories in order to be prepared for and consumed by the mainstream. She says, "simply put, cultural enthusiasts were asking themselves about the price of recognition from general audiences, fully aware that it could potentially transform and 'mainstream' them along with the audiences they serve," (89), and references "cultural gentrification" (90). It is a fetishization, then, of Puerto Rican/Nuyorican culture that plays such a strong role in the cultural sale of El Barrio. Bringing it back home, I can clearly see the ways that this neighborhood is changing through the lens of her book. On my three block walk up Lexington from the 103rd St. station to 106th St, for example, there is a coffeeshop that is new, beautiful, funky, frequented by young white folks, but whose name promises authenticity: "El Barrio Cafe" is the name, I believe. On the other hand, I hear an acquaintance, born and raised in East Harlem, say that he enjoys the new, nice lounges in the neighborhood, because young adults from the community never really had a nightlife infrastructure before now. Does this make him complicit in gentrification, in the mainstream consumption and cultural selling of El Barrio? I think not, but perhaps Davila would think otherwise?

Japanese and Black in America

The two articles for this week through into tension the realities of Japanese Americans and African Americans, exploring the points of similarity, difference, and potentials for solidarity work. Yamamoto's piece, "A Fire in Fontana," mentions her process of politicization and how she came to understand the black American struggle as implicated in her own struggle. She says, "sometimes I see it as my inward self being burnt black in a certain fire" (Yamamoto 150). What makes this statement so interesting, powerful, and controversial is the ways that she proceeds to explain how she basically passes as white in many cases in her life. She uses the "white" bathroom at rest stops in the South, she lives in a white neighborhood, she bears the responsibility of being assumed to be a "white" thinker and receiving racist comments that are believed to be shared by her. Sometimes she mentions challenging these people, but other times she talks about her inner frustration, while she sits and does not do much. Ultimately, her conlcusion that the Watts riots symbolized the fire in Fontana and the fire in her leaves me wondering how exactly racial solidarity work plays out in her life. I understand how her emotions around African Americans and Japanese Americans inform this link, but I do not see a clear, tangible action coming out of this.

Grace Hong calls Yamamoto out on exactly this point. Much of Hong's article explores Harris' idea of whiteness as property, then talks about how Japanese Americans, through measures like the Alien Land Act, have been denied property rights, and thus excluded from white America (like blacks in America). If we use this framework, we begin to see how black and Japanese people in America do not have a same history, but do have a shared denial of access to whiteness and property in America. However, this still does not change the fact that Yamamoto describes access that seems to include "passing" as a white person. Hong speaks about the lack of resolution in Yamamoto's work, which is exactly what frustrated me. I wonder if Yamamoto and Hong ever engaged in a dialogue about this work? I would love to hear/read a conversation between the two of them discussing the issue of cross-racial solidarity work.