Announcements

1. Announcements • Last day to submit extra credit papers! • Potential courses next quarter: • ASIAN 300 • ASIAN 459 • Final Exam: Tues 12/17, 10:30 to 12:30am in this classroom • Bring BLANK blue book for exchange • questions?

2. Making Home & Identity Self-Making & Positionality

3. Who’s American? Defining what it means to be American & Asian is a powerful social, historical, political & economic process Whiteness Masculinity Civilization Progress Brown-ness Emasculation Savagery Backwardness • nation  race  gender & sexuality • cultural representation = power

4. DOMINANCE FEMININE MASCULINE SUBMISSIVENESS

5. Re-Definitions • However, counter-definitions of what it means to be Asian can be just as powerful and divisive. • Example 1: The Good Filipina • Philippines/Filipinas are NOT (sexually) available • Example 2: Internalized Racism • Filipinos can & should be “American” • Example 3: The Rigidity of Radicalism • All Filipinos MUST practice the same type of politics

6. The Process of Identity • “Cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.” (Stuart Hall) • Identity as process AND struggle • Identity as representational/cultural AND political/consequential Who is Asian? Who is American? Who gets to define/identify it? Who gets to be at home and who is made homeless?

7. Becoming Filipino • “The multiple subject positions of second-generation Filipino Americans remind us that identities are not fixed or singular, but multiple, overlapping, and simultaneous and that they reflect events both in the United States as well as in the ‘home country.’ Filipino immigrant children thus live with paradoxes” (204) • Identity itself is a paradox • never fully Filipino, never fully American • always arriving, never arrived • resisting, creating, acting

8. Identity & Action • How we negotiate identity affects and is affected by the values we embrace and the actions we take • Identity Politics  you act because of who you are (assumed to be) • Politics of Identity  you define yourself through your actions • Situational Political Mobilization  a group defines itself through its cooperative action that is called for by a situation

9. Immigrant Identities • “immigration and citizenship restrictions – enacted to regulate the membership of the national community – send a powerful message that the US conceives of itself as singular, predominantly Euro-American, English-speaking culture” (209) • “Because Filipino and other Asian Americans are discursively produced as foreign, they carry a figurative border within them” (211) • Immigrant identities & homemaking reveal the failures of US rhetoric & citizenship

10. The Border is Everywhere • “the border is everywhere. These borders within – bolstered by political and cultural mechanisms designed to restrict the membership in the national community – set clear but imaginary boundaries between who is defined as a citizen and who is not” (211) • What divides? What keeps a person from counting fully as human? What renders a person “homeless”? • race/ethnicity? • class? • gender? • sexuality? • nationality? • religion?

11. Self-Making “Cultural identities, then, are not an essence but a positioning: ‘the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by,and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.’… identities are unstable formations constituted within webs of power relations structured along the lines of gender, race, nationality, subculture, and dominant culture” (215) • How will we position ourselves? How will we act? How will we define our identities? How will we make home for ourselves and for others?