RP3: Stretch or Die

       I think that reflecting on the course material of the last six weeks has allowed me to understand in a more conceptual way the theme: Stretch or Die: An Argument with the Given. All the articles, films, music, poems, etc. that I have encountered during the time has extended my verrryyyyy basic knowledge of race, citizenship, nations, Elsewheres, America, Ethnic Studies, and the racialization of specific types of bodies on the land of the people. I feel “The Bridge Poem” by Kate Rushin was great to begin with because my curiosity/interest in Ethnic Studies was reinforced. Reading part of her poem loud in class and putting together a skit on site with the group really pulled me out of my comfort zone, which I feel hasn’t happened for a while. In a way I feel like I was in an argument with ‘my given.’ When Dr. Gómez asked something along the lines of, “Who knows what an Asian American is?”(Something like that) I felt like I knew, but then we went on with the conversation and my mind was blown! I think all the texts reflected and reinforced each other well, which allowed me to learn and analyze concepts such as Essentialism and how this concept is not static and fixed. Contemplating that nothing is fixed but real at the same time was something that did not make sense because I thought I knew that “everything is made-up by ‘society’,” therefore making it not real. However, reading texts like Lisa Lowe’s, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences” and of one of her arguments that there is a necessity for an identity but also important to be weary of creating a hegemonic character brought to life an example of the made-up concepts and how they are very real. Also, in her “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” Lowe discusses how Asian American cultural productions are spaces were contradiction with “U.S. national memory and national culture” is found (3). She contends that Asian Americans have a peculiar case being integrated and simultaneously rejected in legal, economic, and cultural forms within the United States. Furthermore in both pieces, Lowe describes the racialization of “Asia” and “Asian Americans” and how even though their bodies have been racialized within political, legal, economic, and social spaces, “Asian Americans” have been resilient in their fight against “their given.”