|
|
|
Reviews
| Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States. Edited by Nicholas De Genova. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. vii + 233 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
|
|
The recent immigration marches, increasing numbers of immigration raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and contentious political debates around immigration reform all speak to the complex ways in which Latino and Asian American immigration, and Latinos and Asian Americans themselves, are framed and understood in the United States. This edited volume provides historical contexts for these issues along with an exceptionally rich set of analytical tools for the interrogation of Latino and Asian American subjectivity within the nation. Although edited volumes are often uneven or not very coherent, this volume's contributions all present substantive new information and analysis of a variety of historical events from highly interdisciplinary perspectives. Together they shed important new light on the transnational nature of U.S. race relations and their role in (re)constructing the American national subject. |
1
|
|
De Genova's insightful introduction sets the tone in arguing that the key to unlocking the black-white racial order in the United States may be found in the history of Native Americans. "Blackness" was defined as "inside" the U.S. racial order and "savagery," or the indigenous population, was seen as "outside." Thus, racialization as "foreign," or "outside," is a part of U.S. colonialism that necessitated the removal of Native Americans. Subsequent incursions into Latin America and Asia should be seen as extensions of this colonialism, rendering Native American racialization "a decisive ideological template in the material and practical subordination of Latinos and Asians" (p. 10), who are continually constructed as foreign. |
2
|
|
The remaining contributions are organized thematically. The first section, "Racial Science and Social Control," includes Gary Okihiro's "Colonial Vision, Racial Visibility," which compares Puerto Rican and Filipina/o racialization to argue that U.S. expansion should be understood as an attempt to reconstitute American whiteness and manliness in the face of the social upheavals accompanying the 1890 census's declaration of the "end of the frontier," large-scale European immigration, and changing gender roles. Similarly, in "Inverting Racial Logic," Natalia Molina shows how early-twentieth-century public health discourse in Southern California racialized Japanese and Mexican Americans as "dirty" and therefore as either threats to society or in need of public assistance. Like Molina, Victor Jew, in "Getting the Measure of Tomorrow," reveals the overt role of the state in racializing the Chinese and Chicano communities of Los Angeles with the help of white academics in ways that shaped public services. |
3
|
|
The second section examines multiracial coalitions through the lens of the Méndez case and redistricting reform. Tom R. Robinson and Greg Robinson's "The Limits of Interracial Coalitions" masterfully lays out how Mexican Americans' "whiteness"—stemming from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—affected the deracialization of arguments in the Méndez school desegregation case. They warn against making assumptions about similarities of interracial interest because "it is tempting and sometimes profitable for members of racialized groups to identify themselves with the white population and to seek equality by distancing themselves from more identifiably nonwhite minorities" (p. 114). This theme also runs through Leland Saito's "The Political Significance of Race," which traces multiracial coalition-building during the 2000 redistricting processes in New York and California to shows how class often interacts with race in determining the desirability of particular political partners. |
4
|
|
The final section, "The Perils of Inclusion," examines literary constructions of Latino and Asian American subjectivities. In "Joining the State," Andrea Levine analyzes texts by Junot Díaz and Chang-rae Lee to trace their protagonists' experiences as transnational subjects and the incompleteness of their adaptation to models of U.S. citizenship dominated by a white male and heteronormative framework. In "The Passion," Crystal Parikh scrutinizes the narratives surrounding the Elián González and Wen Ho Lee cases through the lenses of passion and betrayal. Both Levine and Parikh illustrate the degree to which American national identity requires that Latino and Asian Americans remain "foreign" subjects that therefore cannot be realized fully. |
5
|
This volume is unique for the themes it joins together and its true interdisciplinarity. It expands our basic knowledge of different historical periods while pushing readers to reconsider dominant understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and class. It will undoubtedly become a standard pointing to important new directions for racial studies, and I would highly recommend it for use in any graduate or upper-division undergraduate course on race. As De Genova notes, "one of our critical tasks is to illuminate the ways that racially oppressed people do and do not make claims on 'American'-ness.... These questions must necessarily be among the more urgent and most dire concerns of any responsible and engaged scholarship that critically investigates the workings of racism in the United States" (p. 17). This is a tall order, which this book definitely fulfills.
Lisa García Bedolla
University of California, Irvine
|
6
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|