Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays analyzing the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or strange affinities, afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations.
Trade Review“The contributors’ . . . many pieces convey both an astonishing range of insights and a tone that takes differences within difference as salutary, if not always comfortable.” - David Roediger,
American Quarterly“[T]hese essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis.” - Anna Pegler-Gordon,
Journal of American Studies“In a world reorganized by neoliberal globalization, the stark inequalities of new class and racial formations require newly sharpened analytic and political tools. The essays collected in Grace Kyungwon Hong’s and Roderick A. Ferguson’s
Strange Affinities address these realities, stretching our too static concepts and methods, and challenging our political visions. Drawing on women of color feminism and queer of color critique, this indispensable volume suggests new modes of analysis for ethnic studies and feminist and queer theory, and it provides new ways of thinking the intertwined histories of race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality for the twenty-first century.”—
Lisa Duggan, author of
Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity“This ambitious and theoretically compelling volume lays the groundwork for a ‘new ethnic studies’ by centering gender and sexuality within comparative race projects. In a globally integrated economy, with older forms of colonialism and the nation-state giving way to new modes of neocolonial exploitation and domination under the shadow of global capitalism, the need for a new ethnic studies that can unpack the political and cultural implications of these evolving social relations in various contexts and locations is ever more urgent.”—
David L. Eng, author of
The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy“[T]hese essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis.” -- Anna Pegler-Gordon * Journal of American Studies *
“The contributors’ . . . many pieces convey both an astonishing range of insights and a tone that takes differences within difference as salutary, if not always comfortable.” -- David Roediger * American Quarterly *
"By deploying alternative comparisons across minoritized differences, the essays in
Strange Affinities provide original analyses of racialization that unravel or unsettle existing categories of race and ethnicity (such as Black, Latina/o, and Asian)—or cut across them—to better articulate how racialized subjects and their relations are always already constituted by gender and sexual differences." -- Yu-Fang Cho * National Political Science Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction / Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson 1
I. Alternative Identifications
1. Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead / Lisa Marie Cacho 25
2. I = Another: Digital Identity Politics / Kara Keeling 53
3. Reading Tehran in
Lolita: Making Racialized and Gendered Difference Work for Neoliberal Multiculturalism / Jodi Melamed 76
2. Undisciplined Knowledges
4. The Lateral Moves of African American Studies in a Period of Migration / Roderick A. Ferguson 113
5. Volumes of Transnational Vengeance: Fixing Race and Feminism on the Way to
Kill Bill / Ruby Tapia 131
6. Time for Rights?
Loving, Gay Marriage, and the Limits of Comparative Legal Justice / Chandan Reddy 148
7. Romance with a Message: W. E. B. Du Bois's
Dark Princess and the Problem of the Color Line / Sanda Mayzaw Lwin 175
3. Unincorporated Territories, Interrupted Times
8. "In the Middle": The Miseducation of a Refugee / Victor Bascara 195
9. Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Mestizaje through the Chinese Presence in Mexico / Martha Chew Sánchez 215
10. Fun with Death and Dismemberment: Irony, Farce, and the Limits of Nationalism in Oscar Zeta Acosta's
The Revolt of the Cockroach People and Ana Castillo's
So Far from God / Grace Kyungwon Hong 241
11. Becoming Chingón/a: A Gendered and Racialized Critique of the Global Economy / M. Bianet Castellanos 270
12. Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship / Helen H. Jun 293
13. "A Deep Sense of No Longer Belonging": Ambiguous Sties of Empire in Ana Lydia Vega's
Miss Florence's Trunk / Cynthia Tolentino 316
References 337
Contributors 359
Index 363
