Week Three: Lowe

1.     Key argument:  p. 63:  “Interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians.” 

2.     The making of culture and “Chinese American Culture”  p. 64-65

3.     “Asian America” p. 65  NB:  Difference and Other than, in relation to Difference and diverse among ousrselves.

4.     Heterogeneity p. 67

5.     Hybridity p. 67  NB:  “Does not suggest assimilation to dominant forms but instead marks the history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination.”  P. 67  NB:  not a mathematics of “race”

6.     Multiplicity:  p. 67

7.     “How does do these (H, H, and M) concepts help us critically understand the material conditions of Asians in the US?”  p. 68.  NB:  “not relying on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of difference!”  Name another system that relies on that type of framing (construction of sameness and exclusion of difference).

8.     Really flesh out and understand her “recasting of cultural politics” p. 70-73  NB p. 73 “against the divide and conquer, otherizing, and fixed and stable binaries.” 

9.     Fanon!  P. 72

10.  The failure of race or nation based explanations p. 74

11.  Angela Davis’ notion of a political formation p. 74

12.  “Politicizing this identity—basing the identity on the politics rather than the politics on identity.” p. 74 and note no. 23

13.  Cultural Nationalism:  p. 75 we will look at this in week 5

14.  Discourse p. 75

15.  Strategic Essentialism p. 82

16.  Stuart Hall, “positioning” and “a politics of identity.”  P. 83