Week 11 – Labor Without Borders

This week’s readings bring up questions concerning the organization of new forms of labor in the age of global capital. How does the circulation of goods, ideas, and people encourage the emergence and new kinds of labors? Rather, how can we think about the subsumption of activities once surrounding ideas of “work,” and their implications in constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality? How do these new labors construct a new kind of “work,” but also a new kind of subject as well? All of this week’s readings explore how and why such labors emerge and the ways they become organized and governed.  In Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, Rhacel Parreñas and Eileen Boris the relationship between care and economy bring up issues and inequalities between gender, race, class and other power relations in global flows of capital, people and goods. In Maurizio Lazzarato’s 1996 essay, “Immaterial Labor”, intellectual and other immaterial activities have become subsumed under post-Fordist production. Both forms of labor speak to the global transformation of labor – from unproductive to productive, waged and unwaged, material and immaterial.  Both immaterial and intimate labors “produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself” (Lazzarato, 138).

In “Immaterial Labor,” the form of labor under post-Fordist production has fundamentally shifted into information-based production or one that is essentially “immaterial.” Lazzarato distinguishes two types of content that are tied to commodity production. The first is the informational content of the commodity, which refers to the skills and labors involved in the production of the material product, such as software and other technological products. The second aspect of the commodity under post-Fordist production is the cultural content. This includes the “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 135).  In economies of immaterial production, then, what becomes central is the production of knowledge in all processes. Put differently, work includes or subsumes activities outside of normally recognized work, such as intellectual production.

What also distinguishes immaterial labor from former conception of labor is that it redefines what constitutes as “work.”  Compared to the traditional characterization of “work” as a solely material production of commodities, immaterial labor concerns the social relations and activities of commodity production. With the expansion of “work,” into activities outside of “work,” immaterial labor also subsumes the space and time of the activities outside of work. Figuring into a picture of the “social factory,” productive labor pervades all aspects of life. What links Lazzarato’s theory of immaterial labor to other kinds of labor not normally considered “work,” such as those discussed in Intimate Labors, is the socialization of labor. However, where Lazzarato is interested in the subsumption of immaterial qualities in post-Fordist production, Intimate Labors explores the new kind of gendered and racialized labor that has entered global capitalism. If all activities fall into productive capabilities, then Intimate Labors takes it one step further by looking at the subsumption of daily personal activities such as intimacy. Intimate Labors argues that this daily experience becomes increasingly commodified in late capitalism. What makes Intimate Labors so productive is that the analytic framework that it provides allows for a look at the immaterial and material labors, both within and outside of the labor market, that mostly women engage in. The framework of intimate labors situates the expansion of “work” into both waged and unwaged spaces -- public and private. As Intimate Labors argues, the subsumption of the private space into systems of labor engenders and maintains economic and societal inequalities that affect ideological views on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. When intimate labor enters the marketplace, this labor represents the working conditions as well as the value of the worker themselves. If then, the work of intimate labor is considered to be a non-market activity such as domestic care, personal care, and sex work, which it assigns as a low economic value that should be done by lower classes or outsiders, the stigmatization of both the work and those that perform it constructs social hierarchies. Because Intimate Labors situates these labors within the global labor market, the ideological constructs surrounding the status of these labors. What is also at work in Intimate Labors is the governance and administration of life that intimate labors participates in on a daily basis. The caring of life, which is in itself performing a governance of life, falls outside of the productive and skilled labor in global capitalism.  Rhacel Parreñas argues that the status of the care often fall to “men and women of color and/or recent immigrant” (Intimate Labors, 11).

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paulo Virno argues that it is the full realization of labor-power that late capitalism strives to achieve. Virno cites Marx in his definition of labor power as, "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being" (Capital, Volume l: 270). Life becomes the center of politics as the living body “becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really matters” (Virno, 84). What Intimate Labors questions are the labors and people engaged in the caring of life, even as they become stigmatized and marginalized.  Through the constant drive of capitalism for new markets, both on the side of consumers as well as producers of cheap labor, the emergence of new labors also relies on the incorporation of geopolitical regions, which have been formed outside capitalist mode of production. The issue of labor becomes particularly important to this course’s overall project because as many of these authors have argues, the systems of labor maintain and reflect the sociopolitical status as well as condition of the laborer. These readings not only look at the implications of new immaterial labor, but also how and in what ways this new laborer emerges. 

Week 14? – Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects

(Don't remember what we said about where this should go.)

In Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, the emergence of illegal immigration as the central problem of American immigration policy constructed a new figure in immigration discourse – the “illegal alien.”  Beginning with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, Ngai traces immigration policy and the lines of illegal and legal status that have come to define not only immigration law, but also the development of twentieth-century American ideas and practices surrounding nationality, citizenship, and race. The implementation of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924 is especially important to Ngai’s thesis in that it marks a shift from a previous era of open immigration from Europe to an era of immigration restriction. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act set numerical quotas for immigrants entering the United States based on national origin, the first of its kind.  The restriction limitations that the law put in place also established a quota system that classified the world’s population (and immigrants) according to nationality and race. Ngai argues that although not fully explicit, the law essentially created a ranking of these populations “into a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States” (Ngai, 17). The use of numerical restrictions as well as the basis of these restrictions on nationality marked a shift in immigration policy from a previous policy of “regulation.”  The new immigration policy of “restriction” thus characterized a new comprehensive immigration law provided grounds for a legal racialization of certain immigrant groups, as discrimination against ethnic groups of certain nationalities were subject to greater levels of restriction. Two groups that were particularly affected by high levels of discrimination and restriction were Asian and Latino immigrant communities, which Ngai argues, were figured as “foreign and unassimilable” in American discourse (Ngai 8). Assimilation, a traditional tenet for liberal democratic society, became an impossibility for many of these marginalized communities, as they remained “alien” in the eyes of the “American identity”, regardless of legal citizenship. Going further, even as America increasingly defined itself based on the myth of “immigrant America,” immigrant populations of certain countries or racialization, existed outside of formal membership and belonging. Assimilation, which was posed as impossible for racialized immigrant groups would increasingly become an impossibility to “assimilate” to white society. Rather, American society was increasingly constructed around a racial identity of whiteness that defined lines of inclusion and exclusion based on race. Immigration policy, thus, became tied to a broader and more comprehensive “race policy” that no longer saw distinctions along black and white, but rather the inclusion of Mexicans from the south after World War I. The 1920s marked a shift not only in the “regulation” of immigrant populations, but also emergence of race and racial desirability as a factor in immigration policy. Ngai further writes, “modern racial ideology depended increasingly on the idea of complex cultural, national, and physical difference more than on simply biological hierarchy” (Ngai, 8).

            The role of difference, which became constructed not only along racial lines, but also cultural and national lines is important to my thesis not only in terms of its emergence and institutionalization in racial ideology, but also in terms of how it has become increasingly called upon for regulation in immigration policy.  The deployment of quota restrictions, for example, performs a similar organization of the immigrant into a statistical category. Once the immigrant is turned into a numerical figure, then the limits placed on these populations reduced to statistics becomes engaged in technologies of regulation.  What this quota system also produced was a system of visa controls and the subsequent documentation of legal status. Proper documentation, for example, visa, became the means for entrance. Because visas were taken as the means of entry, the allotment of quotas based on nation origin and arguably, racial desirability implicated technologies of tracking and documentation into a similar racial ideology. With the emergence of the “illegal alien,” the new policy of restriction demanded multiple technologies for its tracking and enforcement. These technologies included the tracking of quotas and the surveillance of border entry points. Because immigrant populations were increasingly restricted, the border as a site was coupled with the management of the immigrant in the interior, producing a comprehensive immigrant policy on a national scale.

Furthermore, with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the creation of the Border Patrol happened within the same decade, functioning as “a scouting organization and a pursuit organization” (Ngai, 56). This kind of regulation and border enforcement would form what would become the policy of “apprehension.” The focus on the interior rather than at the site of borders, which would come to define modern border enforcement and immigration policy, was evident in the area that the Border Patrol occupied. Ngai notes that the Border Patrol “did not operate ‘on the border line’ but as far as one hundred mile ‘back of the line’”(Ngai, 56). However, the area of enforcement that was given to Border patrol constituted the points of entry along the border, but also the interior space of the nation-state, collapsing the two into an indistinguishable space of management. The point of exclusion that the border as a physical space represented became indistinguishable from the space of inclusion that the interior of the United States represented. This becomes important to both sites of management, as they have evolved into contemporary exclusionary and inclusionary immigration policies.  Furthermore, as Ngai notes, “the processes of defining and patrolling the border both encoded and generated racial ideas and practices which, in turn, produced different racialized spaces internal to the nation” ( 63-4). 

The comparative model of border enforcement that Ngai offers is productive in terms of mapping the technologies that have come to regulate and organize the border and those who cross, both legally and socially. The new immigration policy based on one of restriction fundamentally defined how the nation would be racially and spatially managed. For as much as the racial hierarchy of immigrants was present, the increase in territoriality of the United States along its border became of equal importance during this shift. This remapping marked an increased awareness and as a result, surveillance of the state’s land borders. What became important in these shifts, which speaks to the future militarization of the border are the consequences that the new regime of restriction produced. First, it “remapped the ethno-racial contours of the nation,” constructing American identity around whiteness. Secondly, the regime of restriction also “generated illegal immigration as the central problem in immigration law” (Ngai, 17). Thirdly, the policy of restriction called upon new technologies of governmentality that would be preoccupied with the management of the state at the level of population control.

A second line of inquiry that Ngai pursues in Impossible Subjects is based on a question that she poses in the beginning of her text:

 “What is it about the violation of the nation’s sovereign space that produces a different kind of illegal alien and a different valuation of the claims that he or she can make on society?”  (2).

In the real and imagined category of the illegal alien, the question of rights and what kinds of claims that are afforded to this new figure become paramount in current debates surrounding immigration policy. Whereas the spatial organization and management of the illegal alien was paramount in the policy of restriction, Ngai argues that perhaps the outmost point of exclusion from national membership can be found in the juridical boundary that faced the illegal alien. Even if the illegal alien crosses the territorial boundary in the United States, the rights and national membership that are/are not afforded to the illegal alien brings up the relationship between citizenship and rights in American immigration discourse. For example, the current debate surrounding the protection of non-citizens under Fourteenth Amendment has been particularly important in reading the discourse surrounding immigration. The Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law, protects both citizens and non-citizens in civil society. Other than matters of admission and expulsions, or outside of the immigration domain, the law protects the civil rights non-citizens. However, the call to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment by members of the Republican party, especially Tea Party members becomes especially revealing toward the attitudes toward the rights of illegal immigrants. Ngai argues that the increasing centrality of sovereignty in immigration policy has allowed Congress to create, “as even the Supreme Court described, ‘rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens’” (Ngai, 12). Here the relationship between the social and legal status of the illegal alien becomes particularly complex. The civil rights of the illegal alien, although protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, still become marginalized and limited under other measures and protections created by Congress suggesting that the actual recognition and protection of the rights of non-citizens create a subject that not only exists outside of citizenship, but who is also without rights.  

Week Ten - Journalism and the Border

This week’s readings take up the question of “reporting” in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Both texts come from academic institutions, although with very different approaches. The first text, Human Rights Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, focuses on the human rights violations, especially against women that have been implicitly promoted by US border enforcement and trade policy. The text takes up an analysis of the discourse that surround and frame discussions surrounding US border enforcement policy.  The second text, a cross-cultural project between two university journalism programs, takes up the issues surrounding the border through production, opening up multiple avenues of discussion through networked journalistic production. What this project also does is critically engage with the modes of reportage that characterize areas of crisis and conflict. The driving questions that frame this week’s reading concern the ways that the immigrant is figured in non-state discourse. The first text can be seen as performing a humanitarian intervention through an emphasis on the lack of such recognition on behalf of state actors. The second text can be seen as an intervention in the sense that it uses narrative devices as a means of bringing figures of humanity into political discussion and recognition. These two projects both engage in interventions at the level of humanity, by different means and with different implications. This week’s issues are fundamental to current conflicts surrounding U.S. border enforcement and the recognition of human rights along the border.

In Human Rights Along the U.S. Mexico Border, Kathleen Staudt et al. looks at the issue of gendered violence and exploitation as a means of opening up issues formerly unrecognized in nationalist rhetoric and politics. First, the text approaches the issue of violence against women in terms of statistical and testimonial evidence of “everyday violence.” Secondly, at the level of U.S.- Mexico policy, Staudt et al. look at the ways such policies have in fact promotes patriarchal oppressive institutions to the point of hyper-masculine political structures. Staudt further argues that the language surrounding the border is one of “security” and “invasion,” both terms marking a nationalist rhetoric that cover over issues of human rights to both citizens and immigrants. What is so productive about this work is that the authors are particularly concerning with how these discourses of “border threat” and “border security” are not only narrowly confined problems, but more importantly, these discourses rely on the criminalization of the immigrant through crime statistics. Because U.S. border enforcement policy uses crime statistics as the main defense of their policies, the problem of border security become one with equally very narrow set of solutions. Going further, Staudt sees the underlying motives behind such discourses as tied more toward economic interests, rather than criminality:

“’Border Security’ has become the watchword phrase of fear and of bureaucratic and bipartisan political campaign sloganeering, with a private industrial and commercial sector eagerly seeking contracts to work in public-private partnerships to ‘control’ the border” (2).

Because the narrowed problem of the border only allows for an equally narrow set of solutions, to approach the issue of human rights, especially in terms of gendered violence, require a broader framework.  For Staudt, the issue of gendered violence is something that does not even fit or count for “official” acts of human rights violations, let only enter into public discourse. To approach human rights violations along the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of women opens up not only the militarization of the border, but also the militarization of everyday life. Put differently, Staudt argues that the absence of discourse surrounding gendered violence is a result of militarized governance of everyday life along the border. In Human Rights Along the U.S. – Mexico Border, the tone of the book is in the style of investigative journalism, which transforms into a policy paper full of recommendations of border enforcement and human rights recognition from state actors. The book, then, can be seen as an intervention in discourse, as it speaks to the issues that border policy disavows through rhetorics of security.

            What makes the text’s argument so compelling is the voice that it carries throughout the first half of the book. Through an engagement with the construction of border policy debate as framed by the state, Staudt et al. analyze the dangerous implications of these current framing. By looking at the techniques of discourse, which Staudt et al. take up in the first half of the book, the work takes up issue of reportage as a central problematic. Through the creation or broadening of frameworks through which policy-makers and enforcement discuss border issues, the creation of new discourses allows new sites of discourses to surface, including that of gendered violence and the recognition of dignity to immigrants. This kind of engagement is what the 2010 “Beyond the Border” project takes up. Beyond the Border” is a cross-cultural collaboration between the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism and New York University’s Journalism Institute. The project brings NYU graduate students to the Arizona-Sonora border to report on a variety of issues surround the US-Mexico border including detention, violence, environmental degradation, and racial and ethnic conflicts. In an effort to open the debate on border policy and enforcement to a greater audience with a different perspective that those who live and report within or alongside the border, the project presents itself as one that is focused on the training of  “future journalists by giving students tools to report in cross-cultural settings, as well as to teach them how to create journalism that puts issues and events in historical, economic, social, and cultural contexts.”

I have chosen to focus on the “Beyond the Borders” project as a way to think through some of the questions concerning methodologies of reporting, which heavily use the form of narrative as a way of connecting policy norms to the ways they play out in the everyday live of men and women living along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This can be said of the project of journalism more generally. The narrative strategies that journalistic texts mobilize serve both as a device for compelling texts, but also because these texts are concerned with the “everyday” or the way of life for individuals. Journalism “objective” stance coupled with the reliance on narrative as a mode of reporting sets it apart from the kind of writing that humanitarian intervention often becomes involved with. The “human element” that journalism instead mobilizes through its use of narrative can be seen as a different kind of intervention at the level of humanity.  This mode of reporting uses the narratives of individuals as a means of entering their positions within a larger narrative whether it be detention centers, border enforcement, etc. What makes this project so textual rich, however, is the emphasis on the mode of pedagogy that the project hopes to produce. Because these modes of reporting take place within an academic framework, methodology is key. The focus of the project is just as much about the student’s experience as it is about what they report. “Beyond the Border” not only collects the stories created by journalism students, but also hopes to produce an educational video that speaks to the methodological approach of reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. The projects directors, Professors Latty and González de Bustamante documented students during their reporting experience, which will result in a first-of-its-kind video for journalism educators who teach reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. Looking at the process of these journalists, their positions enter into a complex relationship between representation and “bearing witness.” Because many of the stories varied in terms of subjects and story angles, there were no elemental approaches that ran across every text.  What the project more clearly relied on was the collaboration between students unfamiliar with border politics and University of Arizona journalism students who are more knowledgeable. While the potential difficulties of reporting “as an outsider” are present, the networked collaboration and production among the students of different academic institutions is something that is new and helps us to rethink modes of reporting. The desire for a new approach or “angle” that the NYU students arguably gathered as they reported on the situation, is in dialogue with the mode of persistence and endurance that journalism students at UA can been seen as being engaged in. The multivalent issues that were reported on as well as the collaborative approach between the two schools seem to produce a mode of reporting as a networked production. 

Theoretical Trauma?

In Agamben’s analysis, he heavily uses the Schmitian theory of the state of exception, which is the suspension of law which the sovereign is within the law, but that simultaneously exists outside of it. The state of exception, according to Schmidt and later Agamben, is that the exception defines the rule. In Homo Sacer,  Agamben heavily relies on the Schmidtian theory of the political as well as Arent’s analysis of the status of the human in the modern nation-state. I was talking to a respected Africana studies professor earlier this semester and after mentioning the ways in which Arendt has been taken up in contemporary theory, I proceeded to mention the ways in which Schmidt had been taken up by writers like Agamben, particularly concerning the state of exception.  This professor responded in way that refused to acknowledge the productive ways that Schmidt could be used, based on Schmidt’s historical appropriation to Nazism and how it became an ideology that supported the mass extermination of people. Thinking of the ways in which Arendt has been reappropriated in contemporary theory, what is at stake in the reappropriation of Schmidt and to a certain extent Heidegger? This is perhaps a somewhat simple question and one that has come up in relation to Heidegger, but what are the stakes of Schmidt’s reappropriation and does it remain completely unproblematic. It would seem that the importance of Agamben’s discussion of Schmidt’s theory on the state of exception lies in the stakes that it has for those whom the state of exception most affects – marginalized people of the State. Although I understand the history of Schmidt’s theoretical application in the Nazi regime, it would seem that Agamben is pushing Schmidt’s argument as far as it can go and by doing so, showing the ultimate and most dire implications and effects that such a state can have. However, one must consider the level of historical trauma that such theories are tied to.   When theory becomes tied to a certain trauma like the Holocaust, what are the terms through which it is appropriated and how can such an appropriation still be responsible? Since Agamben makes great use of it, what are the implications for the claims that he makes? I do think that Agamben’s use of Schmidt and the references to the biopolitical techniques deployed by are productive when thinking about the dangerous stakes that such formations have. However, when such examples are tied to such heavy levels of trauma and taboo, what does it mean to compare the modern Nation-State to such examples? Does it lose some of its effectiveness or become easy to write off? 

I will (hopefully) be able to post my project proposal on Saturday. This weeks reading has compelled me to rethink some of my ideas slightly. 

Humankind and Humaneness

In the chapter “Heart of Humaneness: The Moral Economy of Humanitarian Intervention,” from Contemporary States of Emergency, Didier Fassin writes about the two aspects of humanitarian government – humanitarian reason and emotion. Humanitarian reason, Fassin writes, is “the principle according to which humans share a condition that inspires solidarity with one another,” while humanitarian emotion is “the affect by virtue of which human beings feel personally concerned by the situation of others” (271). These two aspects, Fassin argues are what produce solidarity and compassion in humanitarian intervention. These elements serve a two point categorical imperative for humanitarianism that on the one hand, presents such shared experiences as an identification with humankind, with an affective relationship toward others, through sympathy or emotion, or what Fassin terms humaneness.  These identifications, with humankind and humaneness through affect are what provide the basis for a contemporary moral economy that stands alongside a political economy, forming what Fassin theorizes as the politics of life. This is what is so compelling in Didier Fassin’s work and what insights he offers most, particularly in the ways that such economies (moral and political) become standardized and regulated. Humanitarianism, then for Fassin, is what is most at stake in the relationship and apparent separation between the humanitarianism and politics. Drawing from Agamben, such separation between the two also represents the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In Fassin’s earlier work, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Fassin argues that the world falls into two camps: politics, which sacrifices or has the authority to choose between life and death, and humanitarianism, whose imperative is to save as many lives as possible.

            What interests me in this discussion are the implications for the relationship of human aid and human rights within such a formation. Put differently, if humanitarian intervention rests on identification with humankind and the affective relationship toward others through humaneness, then how are individuals figured when there are clear human rights violations without the aide of humanitarian intervention? What can we say about these terms of humankind and humaneness if the vulnerabilities of certain groups are not recognized by such military humanitarian interventions? On the one hand, what does it say about whom is constituted as vulnerable enough to receive humanitarian intervention? Conversely, how does the lack of such intervention articulate such groups as non-human and/or disposable – as living outside humankind of do not qualified for humaneness?

Fassin writes,

 “The fundamental value that forms the basis for humanitarian government is human life. The highest justification of humanitarian government’s intervention in this context is saving life. It is in this framework that the military can call its intervention ‘humanitarian’” (275).

Returning to the point made by Agamben – the separation between humanitarianism and politics as the separation between the rights of man and the rights of citizen, what else is at stake for those who live in the interstices of humanitarianism and politics? On the one hand, how can we think of these groups as dwelling in the interstices between government and humanitarianism and what are the stakes of such a position in terms of the biopolitics of humanitarian intervention, when it becomes a matter of to live and let die? Secondly, what does it say in terms of how such groups are articulated, if such humanitarian interventions are absent? Are they at the level of bare life? Another level of (non)life? How are they constituted as (non)humans? Perhaps the week of Zones of Abandonment will further discuss these issues, but this is an issue that I would like to further discuss. 

A Look at La Frontera

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera, Anzaldúa mixes autobiography, poetry, mythology, historical documentation and theoretical propositions as she draws upon issues of race, sexuality, gender and the nation. In Borderlands, the concept of mestizaje, a term originating from post-revolutionary Mexico and the construction of a “Mestizo identity” that would become the foundation for the modern Mexican national identity. Cultural synthesis, and the mixed bloodlines that were a process of colonization became a national project of creating identity based on the mixed nation. The “mixed nation” was attributed to a kind of pathology, whose history and origin were timeless and unchanging. Anzaldúa reappropriates the term in order to call for a new strategy of identity formation and politics. Mestizaje, for Anzaldúa, is based on the fluidity within identity rather than a singly subject position. Anzaldúa mobilizes this term in order to use it as a means of demystifying and producing resistances against social and territorial borders. It is in the interstitial places between cultures and nations that Anzaldúa focuses on in her discussion. These spaces, Anzaldúa argues, are what the individuals living alongside the border must negotiate. This new subject, la mestiza, is one that is “cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war” (78). This text becomes a production where she speaks on behalf of Chicanos or rather, a new kind of Chicano - one that is political and who "no longer feel [the] need to beg entrance” such as the translation from English to Spanish. The mixing of Spanish and English, the refusal for a complete accordance to one or the other reflects the multiple and mixed identity that she feels is part of a new “language of the Borderlands.”

Gloria Anzaldúa has become an influential writer in the concept of mestizage and on the possibilities of Chicano politics, which makes her somewhat sacrosanct texts, according to many people actively engaged in Chicano politics, so difficult to position. On the one hand, it is important to note the contribution to identity politics that this book produced historically to the identity and political engagement of what could be called Chicano-ness.  Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s contributions to the discussions of racial and cultural marginalization, but also a marginalization based on gender and sexuality, Anzaldúa herself a lesbian. Her theory of mestizaje as one that opposes stationary subject positions and one based on fluidity becomes the battle cry of Chicano studies, a text that avoided essentialism or reductiveness. Perhaps we could compare it to a kind of theorizing that Bhabha seems to construct in The Location of Culture:

“It is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence…there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration” (12).

Using Bhabha theory, then, we could say that in certain regards Anzaldúa’s text is an intervention into the politics of recognition as she attempts to create a new kind of identity based around the multiple and mixed traditions, culture and languages that the subjects of migration and borderlands experience. This analysis, however, is written with a certain amount of apprehension. My apprehension stems from the artifacts from which she uses to construct this new kind of identity. For example, throughout Borderlands, feelings of resistance are positioned as intrinsic or instinctual. Concerning the existential nature of her struggle, she writes:

"This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positioning consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows" (7)

Or concerning the choice to challenge dominant ideological constructions:

"I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me" (16). 

The ways in which it has been regarded as a way of living or a standard of attributes that define Chicano-ness. Even if this identity is one “based on difference and hybridity,” in what ways does it still create a very defined representation of identity? Rather, in what ways has this text been used as a means to identify and define what it means to be Chicano? How does it still become folded over into an essentialist identity – one that is always politicized and as necessarily positioned as resistant to the State and “White Culture” as well as “Mexican Culture”?

What is also cause for some hesitation on my part is her use of history, or rather, the mythic historico-cultural symbols of Mexican and more specifically, indigenous identity. For example,

"My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance. The Aztec female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which disrupted the equality and balance between female and male...I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine...in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back" (21).

This declaration brings up a series of questions. How does such a relation to symbols of a somewhat ancient and arguably, origin history, serve as a means for authentication as a Chicana? How can a break from patriarchal and machismo mindsets, as Anzaldúa argues be made through the mythic constructions of Aztec social structures and the roots from which she must return and constantly desires? How does this idea of origins, in many ways, contradict the very mestiza, that she argues for? What are the political stakes for using history and even moreso, indigenous history? What does it mean to reading meaning with the myths of Mexican national symbols and Aztec culture, even if it is, in some ways, a rereading? 

The Non-Places of Recognition - Augé

 In Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, the role of recognition is formulated through the role and effects of recognition as it shifts from the anthropological place to the non-place. The role of recognition is important for Augé in that the places that are created, symbolic universes that are closed and total, are existences that rest upon an organization of space. What kind of recognition is Augé referring to? Is it similar to the kind of recognition that Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists are concerned with? Augé’s theory of recognition is concerned with the recognition of self within totalizing systems where individuals and groups are simply expressions inside such systems. Augé argues that the symbolic universes that the anthropological subject inhabits is constituted by recognition, rather than knowledge? What does he mean by this and could a postcolonial theory of recognition speak to this kind of recognition in any way?  This passage initially sparked my interest and perplexity in the politics of recognition in Augé’s text:

"The indigenous fantasy is that of a closed world founded once and for all long ago; one which, strictly speaking, does not have to be understood. Everything there is to know about it is already known...All the inhabitants have to do is recognize themselves in it when the occasion arises...Every unexpected even, even one that is wholly predictable and recurrent from the ritual point of view...demands to be interpreted not, really, in order to be known, but in order to be recognized: to be made accessible to a discourse, a diagnosis, in terms that are already established (my emphasis)” (44-45).

The relations that  individual have with non-places, by contrast, is the mediation of space between the self and others could be seen as an intervention in the politics of recognition which I what I think he is arguing. Supermodernity, characterized by the spatial overabundance and the individualization of references for which Augé argues overwhelms and relatives an idea of anthropological place. The politics of recognition also become the politics of space. Such a recognition is the recognition of the self within systems of consumption and global circulation. The recognition of place, such as the logo of a multinational corporation in an unfamiliar space, within the non-place of consumer space, the recognition of place becomes a recognition of the globalized, consumer self. The individual is called upon or addressed as an individual consumer in non-places. His argument that the space of supermodernity overwhelms and relativizes such spaces and the paradoxical relation that the ­­non-place produces is interesting in relation to the desire of recognition and Bhabha’s theory of cultural presence through creation. The role of desire in Bhabha work, particularly in relation to the desire for recognition of cultural presence, a desire that he sees as taking “the experience of history beyond the instrumental hypothesis” sparked my interest in the relation between the two, although Bhabha’s discussion of the politics of recognition becomes more in-depth later in his text (9).

Mobility and Travel - Ong & Clifford

In Aiwha Ong’s Flexible Citizenship, the flexibility that certain modern subject are forced to posess as a result of new geographical and social positioning can be related to the “flexibility” that is attributed to modern capitalist accumulation. Rather, the idea of flexible citizenship allows subjects to respond fluidly to changing political and economic activity (6). Even though Ong articulates a fluidity tied to flexible citizenship, Ong makes clear that these practices and exchanges are within structures of meaning surrounding class, nationality, gender, etc., a different grounding than Bhabha acts of production “in the beyond.” Aiwha Ong focus on the relation between the identity production of such flexible citizens and their role within capitalist systems of exchange and circulation offer a different way to think about the space of negotiation, not simply at the “level of culture”. Rather, Ong pushes the construction of narratives and the study of such relations, such as migration studies in relation to the nation and looks at the ways in which “hybrid subject” becomes mobilized. For example, Ong argues that the efforts of poor exploited immigrants of exported labor become racialized proletarian others, participating in the “nation-building” project of the United States.

"Poor immigrants are thus converted from being minorities to be assimilated into the host society into being some kind of universalized lower-class subjects who attain subaltern vindication both from struggling against racism in the United States and from transcending class and political barriers in their home countries" (9).

In the case of the United States, Ong notes that such mobilizations of the migrant figure not only produce an new idea of subjectivity for migrant groups, but also positions them in a very different way from other constructions of race based on mobility (9). This argument is provocative in that it brings to light the relationship between the migrant and other marginalized races in United States culture and the role of mobility in such constructions. How does flexibility work for or against the figure of the migrant in nationalist discourse? If, as Ong argues, their mobility is converted to a universalized proletarian in the field of migration studies, then in what ways does it work in the opposite way, the immigration seen as a threat because of their very mobility? Ong’s model at a more fundamental level, allows for an engagement with the ways in which such individuals accumulate, move and are displaced.  At another level, Ong’s analysis of the flexible subject under late capitalism allows for an account the power systems of class stratification and other societal barriers that affect mobile and non-mobile subjects. What allows some to cross and others not? How do certain societal structures prevent the movement and migration of individuals? This point is important not only as a way to think about the (im)permeability of borders based on societal stratification based on race, class, gender and sexuality, but also in relation to those who frequently cross borders for travel and leisure. The border, as such, becomes articulated and means vastly different things.  Although the positioning of the flexible subject within systems of capital and circulation, the ways in which laborers are articulated within society and the national discourse also becomes important in thinking about these subjects at the level of representation and rights.

            James Clifford takes this complex negotiation between cultures and their global histories of colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, exploration and tourism in his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and looks at the mobility of such subjects. Adding to Ong’s discussion of the power of mobile and non-mobile subjects, Clifford further argues that it is also a matter of travelers’ movement under strong cultural, political and economic conditions, confronting these issues as an anthropological problematic. For Clifford, culture lies at the sites of dwelling and travel, or more broadly, in the relationship between movement and stasis. The relationship between movement and stasis, both physically, in terms of literal displacement and migration, as well as culturally produced  (the ways in which subjects are stuck within a representational essentialism or anthropological space), is one of tension. The relation and subsequent tension between movement and stasis are what’s most at stake in “borderzones” or lands, as conditions allowing/disallowing such movement and the ways in which subjects negotiate those zones.

            Using a model of “dwelling in travel” and “travel in dwelling,” travel is foregrounded as a cultural practice, as transnational routes of travel and displacement produce different knowledge traditions, cultural expression and the emergence of diasporic and migrant cultures (35). Clifford takes this relationship and using it as a mean of looking at the inside/outside of such relations in terms of how anthropology can and should approach such situation. Fieldwork can no longer solely look at the centers, villages and intensive fieldwork when these societies are transnational and global connected in the negotiation of external relationships. Clifford calls for new representation means and strategies, writing,

 “ We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes, barrios, favellas, immigrant neighborhoods --- embattled histories with crucial community “insides” and regulated traveling ‘outsides’ (Clifford 36).

Clifford offers the theory of shifting locations, allowing one to take into account the many ways in which borders are formed and imposed upon individuals, both physically and otherwise. Clifford uses Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a “contact zone” as a means to think about the space of such encounters. The argument that locations are “multiple, conjunctural and cross-cutting,” avoids the traps of a guaranteed shared experience or collectivity, while simultaneously opening up sites of “alliance building”, or Bhabha ideas concerning “political negotiation” (Clifford 87).

            Returning to Flexible Citizenship, Ong brings the discussion of such spaces back to the still important role of the state. For in the ways that the tensions and disjuncture are present at the borders of culture and nation, oppressive structures and border-crossing flows, Ong argues that “the nation-state -- along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities – continues to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence" (15). Even though the differences of stasis of movement are productive in the ways in which such oppressed groups are studied and articulated, Ong allows for a bridge to think about the ways that individuals are positioned and controlled within state apparatuses and capitalist structures.

            In a further engagement with Clifford, Aiwha Ong offers a reading Clifford’s project as one that “attempts to shape their own cosmopolitan intellectual commitment” (13). Ong draws on Clifford’s project in order to think critically about the relationship between the diasporan subject and the cosmopolitan intellectual. Because Clifford uses the idea of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in traveling,” which is a very compelling idea, he is able to take in diverse subjects with specific histories and a range of cultural practices. This grouping can also be seen in a variety of other work dealing with such spaces of cultural difference and mobility.  The kind of move made by Clifford can also be seen in other works such as Marc Augé’s Non-Places, where travelers, both cosmopolitan citizens and displaced people cohabit a space of transition and temporaneity or in Appadurai’s “Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” where the multiple identifications that communities possess form translocalities not rooted in the nation-state, a locality that both cosmopolitan citizens and marginalized subject inhabitants. What is the relation between the two figures and how do they affect one another? Put differently, if certain mechanisms of power enable or disable mobility, then how are the diverse populations within these transnational systems shaped by the relations of global inequality? As both the cosmopolitan citizen and marginalized mobile subject are articulated at both the global and local level, how can we think about the ways in which they engage in the production of one another? 

Negotiations - Bhabha, Ong, Pratt

            Many of the readings from this section deal with the ways in which culture is produced when marginalized members of society and the nation such as the diasporic subject, the im/migrant, the refugee, the exile, etc., live and engage in the spaces of cultural difference between dominant or hegemonic forms of culture their own positions within geopolitical structures.  From theories of the hybrid cultural space that subjects translate through performative acts of negotiation (Bhabha), to the conditions of places or the non-places in supermodernity that mobile subject confront (Augé), to the complex relations of movement and stasis (Clifford), the sites, zones and spaces of cultural difference that these subjects face, translate, negotiate, confront happen at the interstices and borders of nations and “culture”. 

            In Homi Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture, Bhabha is concerned with the types of cultural negotiation that happen at the sites “in-between” cultures, or the hybrid cultural space that emerges in “" the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (7). Experiences of nationness or collectivity, for Bhabha are formed in the “beyond” or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference. The space as theorized by Bhabha is one of intervention, where the translation of such cultural differences is refigured through performative identity production. However, what is somewhat questionable in Bhabha’s theory of translation through performative negotiation is the ways in which such “negotiations” are taken up and the “parts” of difference that are used and mobilized in such translations. For example, Bhabha praises the reappropriation of the past for the refiguring into the present as an intervention, or “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (7). Bhabha further argues that it is not only a cultural negotiation of the self through identity performance that happens within these interstitial places, but also the political negotiations of collectivity and belonging. Moving to group identity politics, Bhabha points to a similar kind of hybridity that is necessary for collective action versus theories concerning the possibilities of collective will. The heterogeneous and fragmentary ways in which subjects identify and act upon become a “struggle of identifications”, calling for a rethinking of political struggle as “political negotiation” (29). However, while Bhabha’s insistence on the necessary relationship and engagement between theory and practice offers a helpful critique of the time and place distance that the theorist places against their object, a critique similarly made by Augé and Clifford, the performative hybridity that Bhabha proposes as a means for the re-creation of the self seems haphazard in its acknowledgement of the asymmetrical power relations functioning in such translations of cultural difference.

I think the historical genealogy of travel writing and its roots in the European project of Empire during the 19^th century that Mary Louise Pratt brings up in her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, prove particularly productive in thinking about the conditions of such cultural negotiations. Because Pratt focuses on the space of cultural negotiation as the same space of colonial encounters, or as she terms, the “contact zone”, these relation are historically wrought with a colonialist past and are produced within asymmetrical power relations. According to Pratt, contact zones are the "social space where disparate culture meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination -- like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived across the globe today" (4).  Whereas Bhabha seems to present a performative hybridity that finds oppositional or binary relations between oppressor/oppressed or national/ethnic separation as unimportant or irrelevant, Pratt theorizes a space where encounters with different cultures are still lingering with colonialist pasts and power relations. The location for the postcolonial subject who contests the interstitial spaces of culture, can be seen, for Bhabha through readings of literature and art, where "being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space… to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now" (7).

However, these celebrations of hybridity through performance hold the danger of becoming trapped within their own valorization. How does Bhabha cling to this idea of hybridity through performative acts of translation? Put differently, the diasporan subject’s “insurgent act of cultural translation” that, in some ways, necessitates the appropriation of the past, the subject standing in-between tradition and modernity. In such exchanges and negotiations, Bhabha elides similar exchanges of culture in systems of capital. How does Bhabha’s performativity play out in modes of consumption and commodity and what does that mean for acts of translation?

Aiwha Ong, in her work Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, critques valorizations of hybridity for the diasporan subject taken up in postcolonial discourses. Ong writes,

"American studies of diasporan cultures have tended to uphold a more innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, "cultural" border crossing, and the production of difference… who write about displacements in "borderland" areas, emphasize subjects who struggle against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in society. The unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariable assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of the exclusive focus on texts, narrative and subjectivities, we are often left wondering what are the particular local-global structural articulations that materially and symbolically shape these dynamics of victimhood and ferment" (13).

Ong’s critique nicely articulates what is at stake in such theories. If performative acts of identity production from oppressed subjects become inherently tied to a resistance against the state then such politics run the danger of such essentialist constructions of identity and identity politics. The role of such a performativity will be particularly relevant to Chicano politics and the ways in which identity politics are performed and reproduces, both since its theoretical beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s and the relevance of Chicano politics today concerning border identities. Ironically, in the above quote, Ong’s references Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal Chicano text, Borderlands/La Frontera, as an example of the valorization of cultural crossings and hybridity.  Following Ong’s line of thought we might ask, what are the means of production of such a politics of identity and how do such politics fit into systems of capitalist exchange and circulation? For the ways in which identity production and performance could be seen and liberating and resistant, in what ways has it been reinscribed within a kind of liberal multiculturalism, where the status of the immigrant or the Chicano becomes one that is always resistant, or that is called upon to always resist or perform resistance? How do such production become framed as existing outside of capital and current systems of geopolitics? Importantly, how do they become mobilized as representative as the figures for resistance?

Week 2: Notes on a Postnational Geography

Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes on a Postnational Geography,” offers a close examination of territoriality, a central problem facing the modern nation-state.  If the basis of the nation-state has historically been territorial sovereignty, defined as a capacity for jurisdictional governance or state control of civil society, then territory, as defined by Appadurai, is in a state of crisis as the globalized construction of locality signals a disruption in the relationship between the nation and the state. The globalized construction of locality with weak or nonexistent ties to the nation-state is being produced through global flows of capital, labor, information and people. Although disjunctive, these flows produce ties to communities not rooted in the nation-state. Using the term translocalities, for the multiple identifications that these communities possess and perhaps even thrive off, the disjunctures that these global and local phenomena produce pose a significant threat to the territoriality of the nation-state and its claims to sovereignty. This is the framework that Appadurai sets up as he begins to map the disjunctures between space, place, citizenship, and nationhood, proposing a new kind of cartography that thinks beyond the nation-state and instead a global economy or geography based on difference. 

            In this project of mapping difference and disjuncture, Appadurai marks two kinds of translocalities: one that is produced through the marginalization or abandonment of communities by the nation-state such as border-sites and conflict zones and the plural community or cities produced by something like cosmopolitanism. These two translocalities, however seem to have very different relations to the nation-state. More importantly, what is the relationship between these two translocalities? Is the translocality of the pluralist cosmopolitan city reliant on the translocality of those marginalized from the nation-state in terms of their exploitative positions? What is the role of cosmopolitan geopolitical discourses and how do they affect these disjunctive spaces?

Week 1: Introduction (part 1 of 2)

In Politics and the Other Scene, Etienne Balibar looks at the universalims that structure ideas of the nation and the rights that are greanted under citizenship. In the first chapter, “Three Concepts of Politics,” Balibar  discusses the “autonomy of politics” in that it exists “only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (Politics and the Other Scene, 4).

Tracing the thought that Balibar refers to as “the autonomy of politics” is that first, individuals are given Natural Right. However, as Balibar immediately points out, the Natural Rights that are allotted to people (or more specifically citizens), although Natural, become a set of rights that must be “won” or “gained”. Put differently, the maintenance of one’s own rights falls upon the individual and is their own responsibility. In addition, since these rights are not merely God-given or unconditional, but must be “won”, the Individual Rights of Man are only possible through a collective struggle or if won collectively. This line of thought, Balibar continues provides the framework for the nation and its constructions of citizenship.  The Natural Rights given to individuals become the same right that must be collectively won or gain, so that both the “natural” and the “earned” rights are both one and the same. The natural rights given to Man or Humanity are also the same rights that must be earned or won as a collective of citizens.  Balibar writes, “In this way, we move from the self-determination of the people to the autonomy of politics itself” (4). 

Put differently, “it is always-already time to demand emancipation for oneself and for others,” yet at the same time, it must always be something that, through systems and institutions that guarantee these rights to its citizens, it must also be protected and gained for every human equally. Being a citizen is equal to being human. Balibar writes, “To be a citizen, it is sufficient simply to be a human being, ohne Eigenschaften” (4). The space in-between the “natural” and “earned” rights that the construction of the nation seem to provide individuals with is precisely the area that Balibar confronts. The “other scene” of politics, then, becomes a space that lies outside of the scene of politics that is most apparent or that are structured by the discourse surrounding the construction of these universalisms, but the “other scene” also seems to function as the scene of the other.

What is the status for those who reside outside of citizenship? More important for my own interest, what is at stake in the in-between space of human and citizen? What is at stake in construction of identity of those who live in such spaces? This text is important for my research in that it poses similar questions. This idea that rights need to be won or gained, if carried out further, expand to an evolutionary or Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence as a universal truth. The implications of such universalisms on individual rights become particularly important if carried out to this degree. What is at stake in speaking of such a universal where life, basic life, is always already a universal struggle for existence?