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Reviews
| The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. By Grace Kyungwon Hong. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxxiv + 190 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $58.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).
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Grace Kyungwon Hong thoughtfully explores the cultural complexities at the intersection of gender, race, labor, and law in The Ruptures of American Capital. Critical of the cultural processes involved in the emergence of the U.S. nation-state, Hong draws from women of color feminist practices to elucidate the mutually constitutive relationship between culture and capital as illustrated by two significant shifts in American capitalism: the national phase, in which the social relations of capitalism were manifested in ideas of citizenship and property rights, and the global phase, which homogenized categories of difference through U.S. consumerism. |
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The Ruptures of American Capital investigates the cultural implications of these shifts in two ways. First, Hong argues that epistemological ruptures—ways of knowing that disrupt the universalizing structures of liberal capitalism—mark the transition from capital's national phase to its global phase through cultural formations that arose during the restructuring of the global political economy after World War II. Second, Hong turns to narrative conventions—particularly the genre of the novel and autobiography—to illustrate the multiple subjectivities simultaneously erased and produced by capital's uneven development. By analyzing the written work of authors such as Hisaye Yamamoto, Jessica Hagedorn, the Combahee River Collective, Cherrie Moraga, and Helena Maria Viramontes, Hong aims to demonstrate the porosity between the texts and the context of liberal capitalism. |
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