Ethnic Studies Programs Research Articles

Rage-ography: Rigor, Anti-wokeness, and Technoviolence

Abstract: Feminist studies scholars and those in related critical studies traditions have long encountered resistance arising from STEM disciplines and capitalist logics on our campuses and in the wider public discourse. The struggles to establish and preserve feminist studies and ethnic studies programs over the past five decades remind us that the present pandemonium has historical roots that can be traced, not only to identify patterns instructive for us in this moment, but also for a visceral resonance that buoys us in this time and place. We recognize our own outrage at injustice even as we feel the rage directed at feminist studies scholars from sites of elite power, sustained through false dualisms of left and right, minority and majority, woke and anti-woke, STEM and non-STEM. This piece explores the preservation of elite power through the examination of institutions and epistemics at the heart of contemporary wage capitalism: the world of engineering education and practice, and critical resistance within that world. We analyze (ostensibly nonidentitarian) projects such as technoscientific teaching, research, and production. We choose to analyze episodes from the "before times" that reveal a sustained pattern of misogyny, white supremacy, heterosexism, and ableism pervading society and the academy prior to current enactments of that kind. In so doing, we follow an emergent line of inquiry, tracing emotion as well as argument: these dynamics are now, and have long been, fraught with rage. It is the systematic, historically robust, and selective acceptance and denial of rage that we want to explore here as a foundational feature of the present pandemonium, common to feminist studies academic contexts and to engineering, as well as interactions between the two.

Ethnic studies programs in America: Exploring the past to understand today’s debates

The debates that involve banning critical race theory and implementing ethnic studies programs have recently surged. But this is not the first time that controversy about ethnic studies programs and other efforts to promote equity has led to dissension. In the 1960s, similar discord led to violence. Today, right-wing activists are making efforts to prevent ethnic studies programs from being implemented. Many educators and historians, however, are expressing the need to teach the accurate histories of racial and ethnic minority groups at educational institutions. In this article, I argue that today’s resistance to implementing ethnic studies programs is a continuation of the opposition that occurred in the 1960s against this trend and the other efforts that were designed to promote equity. In contrast to the idea that ethnic studies programs contribute to divisiveness, I argue that they offer a better way of teaching students in a country that has become more racially diverse. I retell what happened during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the strikes at Columbia University and San Francisco State College to offer a perspective that is often neglected when authors describe the movement to ban critical race theory.

Uprooted but Unbroken: Ethnic Studies Programs in California Prisons

Asian Americans compose a relatively small but growing portion of the prison populationboth nationwide and in California, with the number of AAPIs incarcerated in the US quadruplingfrom 2000 to 2010. Incarcerated Asian Americans face unique challenges, often having arrivedto the US as refugees fleeing war and genocide and struggling with intergenerational trauma,familial isolation and stigma, and a lack of culturally informed programs in prison. Thus, thisresearch project focuses on ethnic studies programs in California prisons, with a specific focuson Asian American studies programs. Constructed through interviews with participants andfacilitators of these programs, this project finds that ethnic studies programs have transformativeeffects on incarcerated people’s sense of self, personal healing, sense of community, and capacityas agents of change for themselves and others during and after incarceration.

More than We Imagined: A Reflection on the First 25 Years of the Journal of Asian American Studies

More than We ImaginedA Reflection on the First 25 Years of the Journal of Asian American Studies Donna Doan Anderson with Naomi Joseph and the Asian/American Studies Collective In the inaugural introduction of the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) in February 1998, co-editors John M. Liu and Gary Okihiro outlined the prospects for the newest journal in the field of Asian American studies. Arriving thirty years after the founding of the first academic programs in the field, Liu and Okihiro called the journal "a testament to the power of the original vision of Asian American studies" and a "fruition of decades of struggle towards a more inclusive and equitable future."1 They proclaimed that JAAS, affectionately pronounced "jazz," was a place where scholars could present their latest intellectual developments and demonstrate a diversity of perspectives while offering space for critical dialogue. At a time when the field of Asian American studies fought for legitimacy, recognition, and consistency in academia, Liu and Okihiro described their projections of JAAS's future goals as "lofty" but hopeful in stating, "our heady past and collective actions have shown that we can indeed accomplish more than we might have ever imagined."2 As we wrap up the journal's twenty-fifth year, it is important, then, to reflect on Liu and Okihiro's remarks and consider the extent to which the imaginings of the journal's inception have been realized. The journal encapsulates the many shifts, changes, and tensions of the field and how, as the June 2022 issue raised, we reckon with the interdiscipline that is Asian American studies. In many ways, questions of institutionalization continue to shape how we view, engage, and participate in academic spaces. What are the costs of institutionalization, [End Page 21] recognition, and legitimacy? In the wake of its activist past, what purpose does Asian American studies (hereafter ASAMST) serve and to whom is it accountable? Whether the answers were clearer twenty-five years ago is debatable.3 The establishment of the journal in 1998 offered the academic legitimacy and institutional recognition that ASAMST scholars sought after a tumultuous beginning. Born out of the racial justice, Third World liberation, and student activism movements of the 1960s, the field of ASAMST established its foundations amid institutional challenges to acknowledge marginalized and minoritized experiences.4 Early studies sought to rectify institutional erasure by emphasizing identity and histories often ignored in the traditional disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, and literary studies. The establishment of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in 1979, and its annual conferences since 1982, helped to legitimate and, for many, professionalize ASAMST as a distinctive field of academic inquiry.5 By the 1990s, at least thirty universities and colleges hosted ASAMST or ethnic studies programs on their campus, with the field's first bachelor's program at a major research university at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995, initiated by Sucheng Chan.6 Maintaining degree programs, however, required more than the virtue signaling of academic visibility; it required the precedent of publishing. Prior to JAAS's inception, UCLA's Amerasia Journal, initially established by Asian American students at Yale University in 1971, advanced knowledge in the field in important ways as the main academic journal.7 Additionally, Washington State University Press published several edited volumes and AAAS conference proceedings in the late 1980s and mid-1990s that chronicled central conversations that further shaped the field.8 After a number of volumes, however, Washington State University Press discontinued their publication noting that poor sales did not justify their production.9 The growth of the field in the 1990s and departmental demands to publish in peer-reviewed journals necessitated additional avenues for academic publishing, which raised the possibility of creating an official journal for the Association. Led by Gail Nomura and Kenyon Chan, AAAS presidents in the mid-1990s, and Gary Okihiro, discussions on pursuing a Journal of Asian American Studies began. Relying on preestablished connections at John Hopkins University Press (JHUP), Nomura and Okihiro met with editors and a contract was settled between the Association and JHUP in 1997. Coordinating a journal to meet the needs of a growing field raised logistical...

Demands from Duke Asian Students

This document shares the 2021 demands by students at Duke University, as they seek to create Asian American and Ethnic Studies programs on their campus. It includes an original letter of demands by a coalition of student groups directed to university leadership, an extensive timeline of such demands from previous students, and a call for campus-based cultural centers. The document also demands better data disaggregation and a change in how the institution understands hate and bias incidents.

MAST Teach-In Pamphlet (2021)

This document is a copy of the program used by Mobilizing Asian Students Together, a coalition of student organizations and individuals at Duke University, to promote a teach-in aimed at calling for the establishment of Ethnic Studies programs and the enhancement of campus cultural centers. It lists eleven scheduled speakers who presented their arguments for the creation of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies departments and support of cultural centers like the Center for Multicultural Affairs. The teach-in was held in the Bryan Center Plaza on September 24, 2021, and was also livestreamed for online participation.

Notes on Contributors

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

The “Essential Worker” in the Time of Corona: Ethnic Studies and a Legacy Canceled in the Napa Valley

As the wrath of COVID-19 among the poor and BIPOC communities continued into summer 2021 and beyond, and so did the uprisings. Calls to defund the police entered mainstream discourse, as did calls to abolish prisons. Connecting the pandemic and the renewal of social justice mass struggle leads to a new appreciation of ethnic studies as a decolonial practice. Ethnic studies itself has become one of the “essential workers” needed to assess the present conjuncture. Yet for that very reason, ethnic studies is also presently under attack at local, national, and international levels. It is within this context that I situate how the elimination of the Legacy Youth Project (LYP) in Napa, California —the only ethnic studies program offered at some local schools—became a dangerous reality for K–12 students.

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

The Racial Politics of Emotion: Teaching an Interdisciplinary Border Institute in the Midwest

The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and humanitarian emergency surrounding the border has negatively impacted students and schools. Responding to the impact of U.S. border politics on education, we taught a week-long institute for local teachers to learn about the histories and lived experiences connecting the Central American, Mexican, and U.S. borders. During the institute we asked participants—who were predominantly white K-12 teachers—to reflect on their learning experiences in personal journals. The aim of this study was to investigate the racial politics of emotion when confronting border issues in a classroom setting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our analysis, we conducted qualitative content analysis and close readings of twenty-one teacher’s journals to determine patterns in the emotional response’s teachers had to the histories, testimonies, audio, and visual accounts to which they were exposed through readings and seminars. The results of our analysis reveal that emotions were used by participants to maintain racial boundaries and reinforce race-based notions of national belonging, but also to challenge injustice both in and beyond classroom settings. The findings have significant implications about the impact that ethnic studies programs and critical race theory curriculum may have on teacher education.

Situating Chicana/o/x Studies Programs on Community College Campuses

ABSTRACT The study evaluates the location and prominence of Chicana/o/x Studies courses on community college campuses nationally according to their websites and public-facing resources through content analysis methodology. To date, the research on Chicana/o/x Studies and on Ethnic Studies programs in community colleges, in general, has been limited, so this study is intended to establish some macro-level understanding for the presence of these programs across institutions. This inquiry serves as a starting point for understanding the place of these programs, their curricula, and some of the extracurricular support they offer to Latina/o/x students.

Beyond Nation and Empire

Beyond Nation and Empire Leo T. S. Ching (bio) Every discursive formation has its own institutional itinerary and condition of possibilities, and Asian studies and Asian American studies are no exceptions. Asian studies emerged out of American Cold War policy that divided the world into delimited regions. The underlying logic was that a region formed a complex whole that was unique and bounded, and could be distinguished from other regions by its sociocultural particularities. Asian American studies was institutionalized in response to the civil rights movement in the late 1960s United States as a politics of recognition and to create a broad coalition with African American studies and ethnic studies programs. Despite their common origins in the American Empire, abroad and at home, Asian studies and Asian American studies, until recently, have remained largely insulated from each other. This disengagement, for example, has obscured the parallelism between modernization theory as applied to Japan and later other East Asian countries and the model minority myth that aimed to divide Asian Americans from other underrepresented populations, specifically Black and brown peoples. Reading modernization theory and the model minority myth contrapuntally allows us to apprehend American imperial design as a dialectical process of expansion and domestication under the ideology of postwar liberalism. As a process of decolonizing American studies, one needs to be more attentive to this liberal imperial dialectic by opening itself to the seemingly non-American histories, aspirations, and polemics. This forum provides a much-needed conversation to deepen our understanding of this transpacific entanglement with a focus on Taiwan and Taiwan/America. This collection of essays intervenes not only in the critique of American empire but also the complicity of Taiwan's desire for a "normative" nation-state status. Unlike the conventional understanding of nation and empire as antithetical—the nation is homogeneous, egalitarian, and particular, whereas empire is diverse, hierarchical, and universal—Taiwan's aspiration for national independence and the disavowal of its settler colonialism tell another story. Instead of oppositions, nation and empire are seen as alternative or complementary expressions of the same phenomenon of power. Unlike earlier [End Page 383] scholarship that has lamented the marginalization of Taiwan, hence the desire for recognition and inclusion that often finds itself having to choose between Chinese and American empires, younger scholars included here resolutely refute this discourse of victimhood and false choices. Taiwan's long history within global coloniality, or what Arif Dirlik has referred to as "the land colonialisms made,"1 its ambiguous nation-state status, and fledging digital democracy offer possible alternatives to imagine a different relationship to nation and empire. Wendy Cheng's account of the arrest and prosecution of Chen Yu-hsi highlights the entanglement of Taiwanese/American history and the hypocrisy of American liberalism in adjudicating freedom and unfreedom that in turn silences voices of those prosecuted under Cold War anticommunism. Cheng's critique of American freedom reminds us of the long history of liberalism's intimate relationship to imperialism and colonialism. One only needs to recall that the founding of American freedom is on the backs of the unfreedom of others: the dispossessions of the indigenous population and the enslavement of people from Africa. The "rescue" of Chen Yu-hsi from the silencing of Taiwan/American history reveals the complicity of American hegemony and the institutionalization of area studies. While the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i was ostensibly established as an instrument of Cold War policy, the transpacific network of scholars and allies mobilized in support of Chen opens up the possibility of resistance to state-sanctioned violence. Cheng demonstrates that the freedom to speak and the freedom to remain silent concomitantly enables and incapacitates, includes and excludes, certain inconvenient narratives. Cheng implores us to resist this "silencing of the past" and to expose the complicity between state power and institutional formation. If Chen Yu-hsi's case represents the "silenced" history of Taiwan/America, Yukari Yoshihara's George H. Kerr and his transpacific traversing constitutes the dominant history of American studies' institutionalization in Asia. At the same time, Yoshihara alerts us to the "forgotten" imbrication of Asian studies and American studies in Asia. As a proficient Asianist trained...

A Necessary Pairing: Using Academic Outcomes and Critical Consciousness to Dismantle Curriculum as the Property of Whiteness in K-12 Ethnic Studies

ABSTRACT Using Critical Race Theory, the authors explore how K-12 Ethnic Studies attempts to dismantle curriculum as the property of Whiteness by replacing it with a social justice education curriculum that centers the lived experiences and epistemologies of people of color. The authors assert that when Ethnic Studies programs cultivate a dual focus on developing critical consciousness and academic skills, these programs can de-center Whiteness and better serve the educational needs of students of color. Using Harris’ four property functions of Whiteness, the authors explain how class assignments that include both critical consciousness and academic skills displace Whiteness as the center of the curriculum. The authors contend that, in the age of Ethnic Studies expansion, targeted and aligned curriculum, which supports the social and academic needs of students of color, is necessary to contest curriculum as the property of Whiteness and to forward the racial justice project, increasing access and equity in education for students of color.

Teacher Professional Development for Ethnic Studies: A Critical Youth-Centered Approach

In this article, we discuss a partnership with a district-wide Ethnic Studies (ES) program, the Ethnic Studies Professional Development (ESPD) project, through which we designed and led a year-long teacher professional development series for middle and high school ES teachers in one school district. We describe the context of the ESPD project, our vision for a critical youth-centered professional development experience, how this vision aligns with scholarship on ES content and pedagogy, and how we operationalized this vision through key choices we made about the scope and sequence of the year. We conclude with a summary of what was accomplished, the project’s next steps, and implications for teacher-educators.

Model Minority Terrorist: Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

Decolonizing Professional Development: A Re-humanizing Approach

ABSTRACTAfter the outlawing of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in Tucson, Arizona, K-12 Ethnic Studies programs have materialized across the U.S. at an accelerated rate creating an urgent need for critical Ethnic Studies professional development for K-12 educators. In direct response to both the elimination of the MAS program and the pressing need for teacher training, the Xicanx Institute for Teaching & Organizing (XITO) emerged as a strategy to continue the legacy of the MAS program. XITO, a grassroots urban education collective, has developed a decolonizing and re-humanizing model of Ethnic Studies professional development to counter the deficit model of current teacher education by infusing critical identity work—a critical analysis of race, power, and systems of oppression—together with an Indigenous epistemological framework formerly implemented in the highly successful MAS program. A thorough description of the philosophy and model of XITO’s praxis is presented along with testimonios from participants of the professional development and how they have integrated this critical Ethnic Studies training into their own educational spaces. Recognizing the rate of expansion of K-12 Ethnic Studies programs in the U.S., coalition-building with other grassroots urban education collectives is necessary to scale up the movement to prepare critically and politically conscious Ethnic Studies teachers and organizers.

Postcolonial Media Studies

Research Article| April 01 2018 Postcolonial Media Studies Madhavi Murty Madhavi Murty Madhavi Murty is an assistant professor in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an affiliate of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program there. Her research and teaching interests center on popular media, nationalism, globalization, feminism, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, and modalities of difference such as race, caste, and gender. Her current book project focuses on the intertwined projects of Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism in India and their narration in popular culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 147–151. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.147 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Madhavi Murty; Postcolonial Media Studies. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 147–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.147 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: deconstruction, interdisciplinarity, media, Stuart Hall, subaltern The work of Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and sociologist, has been central to my own intellectual development in postcolonial media studies, as it has been for others engaged with questions about culture and difference, political economy and popular culture, postcolonialism and Marxism. I first encountered Hall, a postcolonial subject himself, racialized in Great Britain, on the shelves of a bookcase in the least-visited section of the British Council Library (BCL) in Mumbai, India. The BCL, that vestige and sign of colonialism and an embodiment of postcoloniality, for a teenager for whom the British raj was a story in a history textbook, was a site to access “high culture.” Indeed, this is precisely how the BCL constituted and narrated itself. Sutured to that narrative, the BCL was where I could access and read Austen, the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, in short where I could access... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Case for Decentering Whiteness in Education

Ethnic Studies undermines and challenges the racism inherent in dominant education systems by centering identities and epistemologies of people of Color. While much focus has been paid to the damage done to students of Color by White teachers and the White standard curriculum, this paper addresses the intellectual and material benefit White students disproportionately gain from this curriculum. Through a mixed-methods empirical study examining social studies textbooks and standards from Texas and California, the author argues that the standard White canon acts as a form of White/Western studies that directly privileges White students. Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, Pierre Bourdieu cultural reproduction, and Tara Yosso’s community cultural wealth provide theoretical frameworks in calling for a broader implementation of Ethnic Studies programs and pedagogies while calling for reform of traditional curriculum and standards that act as couriers of dominant capital for White students.

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

A Critical Examination of K-12 Ethnic Studies: Transforming and Liberating Praxis

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to use the theoretical framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to highlight and understand the vision, process, and practice of creating an Ethnic Studies program in an urban public school district, and (b) to inform social justice praxis by producing counter-hegemonic knowledge about K-12 Ethnic Studies programs. By focusing on K-12 Ethnic Studies, this paper seeks to show how everyday social justice praxis interrupts “race-neutral” or colorblind master narratives and White cultural hegemony in traditional social studies (Ross, 2001; Apple 2004; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Hursh & Ross, 2000).