Alien In America Research Articles

Fishes Out of Water: Aliens in America (CW, 2007–2008) and the Depiction of Islam in the Midwest

Fishes Out of Water: Aliens in America (CW, 2007–2008) and the Depiction of Islam in the Midwest

The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana. By Mark T. Johnson

The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky is based on the important and well-accepted premise that historians and audiences need to know more about the lives of Chinese people in nineteenth-century America and in the diaspora from the perspectives of the Chinese (in America and abroad) themselves. Working with this compelling idea, Mark T. Johnson offers a fascinating history of the Chinese diasporic experience in Montana from 1870 to the 1950s, using previously ignored and untranslated collections at the Montana Historical Society. Indeed, Johnson’s attention to sources makes this work critical reading for scholars interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and transnational relations, as well as historical methods. The latter will be especially engaged by his accounts of the translation work undertaken by student and inter-generational volunteers, which speak to methodological challenges and conceptual possibilities of this approach. Johnson’s scholarship reveals what is possible when using a trove of “local” sources to pursue diasporic research (the content of the letters and the international nature of the correspondence challenge received notions of what we mean by the term “local”). In a wide-ranging analysis, Johnston explores the lynching of Ah Chow in 1870 (described in a manner that evokes Beth-Lew Williams’s analysis in The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America), the activities of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, the 1905 anti-U.S. boycott in China (and the material impact in Montana), Chinese women in Montana, burial rituals, and how people navigated immigration restrictions in the Cold War. The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky is a compelling diasporic analysis that explores how the lives of Chinese residents in Montana were simultaneously rooted in place and shaped by concerns abroad.

The Complexities of Alienation, Otherness, and Marginalization in Miral Al-Tahawy’s Novel Brooklyn Heights

This paper is an attempt to bind the reader to the complexities of otherness and marginalization as trauma experienced by the protagonist and other immigrants in the America depicted in Brooklyn Heights . In all of their complexities and nuances that this paper seeks to explore and discuss these concepts, otherness, alienation, and marginalization, in light of Homi Bhahba's concept of otherness and Daphne Grace's theorization on the geographical senses of 'belonging' or 'dislocation'. As such, since Al-Tahawy’s narrative focuses on spaces of otherness and marginalization, this paper aims to reveal how the novelist tends towards the deeply personal, and creates interesting transnational connections through a wide cast of multi-racial immigrants and refugees. The paper further exposes how Al-Tahawy, through her compelling and masterful style, captures the confusions and conflicts of marginalized immigrants and how otherness and marginalization, as experiences of social and psychological disjunction, lead to cultural alienation in America; how attempts at assimilation in a new host country even further highlight the sense of loss and alienation, especially if the immigration from the original home country takes as a result of a traumatic event; and whether or not assimilation necessarily nullifies one’s ethnicity or means total disappearance or “dissolving” into the mainstream.

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. By Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. By Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

Racial Purges

Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

Book Review: The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

Book Review: The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

Beth Lew-Williams. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

Beth Lew-Williams. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

Review: The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

Review: The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

Emotional Labor of Racialization: Carlos Bulosan’s Anger as a Critique of Filipino Alienation in America

This article examines the anger expressed by Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino migrant writer in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Bulosan’s anger evaluates the beginnings of a paradoxical racial form for Filipinos who lived and worked as colonial subjects in the United States. While the Philippines was under U.S. colonial rule (1899–1946), Americans perceived Filipinos as happily servile because of the exploitable labor they performed as household servants, farm hands, and cannery workers. But paradoxically, Americans also considered Filipino men to be sexually threatening because they viewed them through stereotypes of black males as hypersexual predators of white women. By taking into account Bulosan’s antagonism to alienation in the workplace, this essay argues that we especially understand the relevance of Bulosan’s oeuvre to scrutinize racial oppression through his Marxian critique of Filipino alienation in America in a process I call the emotional labor of racialization . Through his anger at work exploitation, Bulosan articulates a materialist analysis of the emotions that assesses the emergence of a Filipino racial form and calls attention to emotional objectification in Asian American racialization. Moreover, through both expressing and describing his struggle to manage a vehement affect such as anger, Bulosan critiques the racialized perception of Filipinos as objects of commodity happiness—as subjects of happiness for hire—in the eyes of white Americans who ascribed to the Filipino laborer the Chinese migrant’s supposedly unusual capacity for highly exploitable work.

Repoliticizing the Left

In this interview, Jodi Dean discusses her career as poststructuralist political theorist, activist, and blogger. She has written on Slavoj Zizek, political solidarity, neoliberalism, media politics, media theory, the Occupy movement, and communism. Long concerned with the issue of solidarity on the left, Dean laments the contemporary Left’s inability to say “we,” a reluctance that, she argues, makes political action impossible. She finds that leftist currents such as radical democracy and radical pluralism have lost the conviction that capitalism must be overturned. However, her quarrels with Ernesto Laclau and others remain a discussion among comrades, in the spirit of an antagonism vital to any political movement. In her latest book, The Communist Horizon, she argues in favor of a new communism and a new communist party capable of uniting the Left against neoliberal capitalism. Unlike many contemporary thinkers on the academic left, Dean defines politics in terms of fundamental antagonism and advocates a return to party hierarchy and structure, which she is convinced are essential for achieving egalitarian goals. The interview helps connect the ideas threading through Dean’s published monographs, which include Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics; Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace; Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy; Zizek’s Politics; Democracy, and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics; Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive; and The Communist Horizon.

(Re)presenting: Muslims on North American television

This article describes and analyzes the portrayal of Muslims on several North American television shows. Greatest detail is given to the two seasons of Sleeper Cell, the first show on American television created to deal with Muslim lives post 9/11. I deal briefly with Muslim characters on Oz for a look at portrayals of Muslim life pre 9/11. I also mention Muslim characters in Lost and 24 as well as some films to add further insights to my argument. These television dramas are compared with two comedies, Aliens in America as well as Little Mosque on the Prairie, the first Canadian television show to examine Muslim lives. The conclusion is that in dramas, Muslims are not recognized on American television as citizens of their own country, but instead are portrayed as dangerous immigrants with a religion that is both alien and wicked. Moreover, the religion as it is lived out on the television drama is one of violence—there seems to be no other substantive practice that embodies Islamic faith. The case is very different with regard to the television comedy.

Aliens in America: the strange truth about our souls

Arguing that human beings can only be ambiguously at home in this world, Lawler's Aliens in America is one of the first books of political philosophy to take seriously the threat posed to human nature by the therapeutic biotechnological project.

Exile and Alienation in America

Of Marc Dollinger's many interesting insights into American Jewish political behavior, his most daring may be the following: when American Jews feel directly threatened, as during the Holocaust or when they resided in the segregated South, they do not show any particular political affinity with other groups that are even more oppressed. When in trouble, the famous liberalism of the Jews disappears.1 My own work substantiates a complementary phenomenon that is less surprising but perhaps still puzzling. When American Jews are blessed with periods of success and inclusion, they tend to identify with those who remain marginalized, even acting politically to support them. When Jews are making it, they jeopardize their social position by pairing themselves with America's outcasts, not simply by helping them but by claiming they belong among them. I call this behavior outsider identification. From the perspective of rational self-interest, the former behavior makes a great deal of sense. When under attack, Jews circle the wagons and worry about themselves. Dollinger's insight may be uncomfortable for those who prefer to explain contemporary Jewish behavior in the light of Isaiah's prophecy. However, most Jews realize that the prophetic ethical tradition is not uniquely theirs, but that helping the orphan and the widow is an ideal widely shared in both the ancient and modern worlds.

Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

Marx, Religião e Política: O Protestantismo Conservador Norte-Americano como Ópio do Povo

Political scientists and sociologists alike have been intrigued by the phenomenon of low voter turnout in US elections during the second half of the 20th century. This paper explores the connection between religious affiliation and rising political alienation in America during this period. Recent studies on religion and politics in Latin American countries have identified lower-class religion, or the so-called church of the poor, as a catalyst that mobilizes the poor to engage in political action aimed at reforming or overthrowing political regimes. Using a Marxian framework and working with statistical analyses, this study shows that lower-class religion in America has the opposite effect. When all significant secular determinants of political alienation are controlled for, affiliation with conservative Protestant churches is shown to be significantly and positively related to nonvoting.