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José Esteban Muñoz once described the problem of minoritarian knowledge and cultural production within a majoritarian sphere thus: Within majoritarian institutions the production of minoritarian knowledge is a project set up to fail. Mechanisms ensure that the production of such knowledge misfires insofar as it is misheard, misunderstood, and devalued. Politics are only possible when we acknowledge that dynamic.
This book presents data supporting the existence of a gap–along racial, economic, ethnic, and education lines–between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not.
The Digital Divide refers to the perceived gap between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not. If we are indeed in an Information Age, then not having access to this information is an economic and social handicap. Some people consider the Digital Divide to be a national crisis, while others consider it an over-hyped nonissue. This book presents data supporting the existence of such a divide in the 1990s along racial, economic, ethnic, and education lines. But it also presents evidence that by 2000 the gaps are rapidly closing without substantive public policy initiatives and spending. Together, the contributions serve as a sourcebook on this controversial issue.
Proust’s famous madeleine captures the power of food to evoke some of our deepest memories. Why does food hold such power? What does the growing commodification and globalization of food mean for our capacity to store the past in our meals – in the smell of olive oil or the taste of a fresh-cut fig? This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. Sutton challenges and expands anthropology’s current focus on issues of embodiment, memory and material culture, especially in relation to transnational migration and the flow of culture across borders and boundaries. The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where Islanders claim to remember meals long past – both humble and spectacular – provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Despite the growing interest in anthropological accounts of food and in the cultural construction of memory, the intersection of food with memory has not been accorded sustained examination. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in speciality cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the ‘anthropology of the senses’. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations.
Yellowface minstrelsy is an analytic tool I have devised to examine the plethora of Asian martial arts images in American film, television, magazines and newspapers since the early seventies. Yellowface minstrelsy describes the use by non-ethnic Asians in the United States of Asian martial arts, artists and artifacts for fun and profit. Yellowface minstrelsy is meant to reference blackface minstrelsy, in particular Eric Lott's analysis of its antebellum variant, and indicates my contention that the 19th-century blackface minstrels and the yellowface minstrels of today bear fruitful comparison when comprehended as raced and gendered carriers of ideological meaning. The dissertation's chapters analyze a range of key examples. The adoption of Asian martial arts training and garb by U.S. politicians is on the surface a positive gesture in its evocation of Asian discipline, efficiency and strength; it masks, however, the history of exploitation and violence directed against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, much of it by the government. The spectacle of minstrelsy enables cultural amnesia, aptly described by Michael Rogin. The evocation of Japanese sumo wrestling in American popular culture reflects both valorization and derision. The sumo wrestler's bulky power is often parodied to exaggerate pathologies of over-consumption; religious ritual becomes primitivized spectacle; hairless nudity is seen as infantile asexuality. American media coverage of the caning of Ohio teenager Michael Fay in Singapore (1994) reflects both the idealization and demonization of Asian martial arts. Here Asian martial arts came to be identified with a blatant patriarchal assertion of power, at first condemned for its physical violence and dominance toward an Anglo-American by an Asian, but subsequently not only accepted but valorized as an appropriate manifestation of discipline in a law-and-order society. Chuck Norris' Walker: Texas Ranger fuses Asian martial arts attributes of violence and discipline with the role of the Westerner, patriarchal enforcer of civilized values and Christ-like arbiter of good and evil. While valorizing Asian martial arts in the large, there is still a place for viewers to construe excessive violence as alien and Asian.
In this 1998 book, Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between post-colonial and feminist criticism, focusing on the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. She examines the veil as a site of fantasy and of nationalist ideologies and discourses of gender identity, analyzing travel literature, anthropological and literary texts to reveal the hegemonic, colonial identity of the desire to penetrate the veiled surface of 'otherness'. Representations of cultural difference and sexual difference are shown to be inextricably linked, and the figure of the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity.
It occurred to me some time ago that among many of my art and academic friends, the success and viability of one's work is now measured in proportion to the accumulation of frequent flyer miles. The more we travel for work, the more we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and the world with our presence and services; the more we give into the logic of nomadism, one could say, as pressured by a mobilized capitalist economy, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated, and relevant. It seems our very sense of self-worth is predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traversing through elsewheres. Whether we enjoy it or not, we are culturally and economically rewarded for enduring the “wrong” place. It seems we're out of place all too often.
This paper provides a detailed description of the pattern of occupational adjustment of the Vietnamese refugees to the United States and compares their experiences with other recent refugee and immigrant groups, such as the refugees from Nazism, the Hungarian refugees, the Cuban refugees, two immigrant groups, one to Canada and one to the United States.
THE DEBATE ABOUT GLOBALIZATION AS A WORLD PROCESS, AND its consequences, has been going on now in a variety of different fields of intellectual work for some time. What I am going to try and do here is to map some of the shifting configurations of this question, of the local and the global, particularly in relation to culture and in relation to cultural politics. I am going to try to discover what is emerging and how different subject positions are being transformed or produced in the course of the unfolding of the new dialectics of global culture. I will sketch in this aspect towards the end of this first talk and develop it in the second when I shall address the question of new and old identities. The question of ethnicity spans the two talks.
The thunder of unmuffled engines, a streak of metal at the finish line, nights hot and southern: It's stock car heaven at East Lincoln Motor Speedway in North Carolina, a shrine to down-home racing.