Blog Post

In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown uses the wall as an analytical symbol of state sovereignty, but a state sovereignty that  is threated or non-existent.  Walls are being built on the borders of numerous countries, making political scientists like Brown “ask not only what psychological needs and desires fuel their construction but what contingent effects they have in contouring nationalisms, citizen subjectivities, and identities of the political entities on both sides” (Brown).

Building these walls creates an internal discourse on both sides of it. For example, Brown talks about the wall between Mexico and the United States. This wall was built to signify the nation’s defense against Mexican immigrants or drug wars or any other discursive tools of fear the United States uses to justify this wall. However, all the wall actually signifies is the weakness of the US’s government, since the wall is being built in the first place. Brown says it best, hinting toward a Foucault reference: walls “are demanded when the constitutive political horizon for the “we” and the “I” is receding (Brown 118). Essentially the wall is a literal representation of the discursive tools used by neoliberal nation-states.

De Genova’s article helped to solidify Brown’s arguments for me, by asserting that the primary discursive tool used to demonize “illegal immigrants,” other than calling them illegal, is the looming threat of deportation. This constant threat results in a clear Subject/Object relationship, and it manifests itself in many ways… including the building of walls on borders. Ahmed points out the “instability of hate” and creating a wall is a very stable representation, but everything it represents is so abstract. Rather than actually creating separate spaces, the wall represents what it wants to eliminate: an insecure white hegemony.

The Thirst for Sovereignty in a Globalized World

      The idealized view of the world today is that of a transnational, international, global, even glocal economy that thrives through interactions across borders and economies. The reality is that in the face of all the globalization of the world today, often touted as a benefit of international relations, there exists a persistent need to protect the hegemonic world order in the face of sovereignty. This thirst for sovereignty can be seeen in the building of walls as illustrated in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown as well as in the creation of culprits as others as described in "The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of Homeland Security" by Nicholas de Genova.
     In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Brown provides various examples from theorists on the idea of sovereignty and the state. Her examples include John Locke and Carl Schmitt. But these examples of land ownership as necessary for civilization are inherently hegemonic and ethnocentric, as well as capitalist. Who gets to own land, including its acquisition and conquests? It also creates an idea of anything "beyond the pale", as other and therefore as as uncivilized, barbaric, odd, unholy, and other such perjorative descriptors. At best, it requires that these lands be conquered and civilized, extension of the pale. Brown describes beyond the pale as "where civilization ends, but...also where the brutishness of the civilized is therefore permitted, where violence may be freely and legitimately exercised (46)." The creations of walls, which can be both physical and metaphorical, works to legitimize otherization of "outsiders" and therefore violence, including in the name of civilizing these others. For example, the War on Terror. But first it required that a discourse  be created that leads to the necessity of exploiting other lands, outside the pale. The spreading of the idea of ending terrorism, which Genova compares to the spreading of the idea of endig communism, works to make a war seem necessary. Other actions are also legitimized, such as deporting and detaining, because even with the creation of the wall, it not only requires that you keep out, but also keep in certain ideals. When others live within your borders, you can easily restructure them as culprits through discourses that, if seen as those beyond the pale, those even within are painted as complicit with the barbarianism and idiocy of those without.
     Interestingly, before reading this book and the article, I held idealistic notions of a world without borders, with the ability to move freely. Brown realistically questions the efficacy of actualizing this ideal. But I continue to wonder how can we live within borders, even if we don't create walls, that does not exclude people and exploit resources leading to uneven distribution?

Politics of Hate_10/29/13

            In this week’s readings the topic of hate with its many forms take the focus. In transnational feminism there is the task of trying to acquire the equality of all regardless of gender, race, class, etc. In the article “The Organisation of Hate”, are given a quote of the Arayan Nation that describes the love they have for their white counterparts and the way in which they have such a strong love for one another that the interference of the foreigner feels as if it is there to destroy all that they have built. A quote that grabbed my attention was “…it is implied that the white subject’s good feelings (love) have been ‘taken’ away by the abuse of such feelings by others. (p.44)” The love that is experienced by the white race is considered sacred and of only right to them. It is not to be taken and abused by the foreigners, they are presumed to not understand love and its fundamental essentials. This is assumed supremacy of the white race, this is seen in the many of the literature that we have reviewed. Works like Transnational America show how the white race is presumed to be of more value than that of the foreigner, as seen in the example of the Mattel Barbie being white dressed in a traditional sari. The white doll was presumed to be more profitable than the Asian-Indian doll would have.

            With this you have to consider the emotional contribution of hate. It is not the white race in this case that is victimized, it is the foreigner which is not presumed to have the privilege to understand the depths of love. The hate that forms from the feeling of deserving and ownership of a superiority is what develops this deep rooted hate.  What about love makes it so special that it can only be for that of the superior. Does that mean you have to possess superiority to experience what something that should be available to all?

Building Walls

The readings for the week which included The Organization of Hate by Sara Ahmed, The Production of Culprits by Nicholas De Genova, and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown provides new perspective into the different types of “walls” that separate people and even countries from each other. In the Organization of Hate, Ahmed examines “the role of hate in shaping bodies and worlds through the way hate generates its object as a defence against injury.” (42) In The Production of Culprits, De Genova analyzes the events after September 11^th and the “wall” or “defense” America used in an effort to protect its country from further terrorists entering the country and those migrants who suffered in the process. Brown’s book brings this all together and makes us look deeper at these types of “walls” and the physical walls, for example like the walls dividing the U.S from Mexico and the Berlin Wall, and the logic behind it. It is Interesting in how Brown looks at the act of walling in her book. In her book, she suggests that these “acts of walling can be read as symptoms of a theological anxiety induced by the numerous forces that attack and erode nation-state boundaries.”

After reading Ahmed’s scholarship, I cannot help but wonder if this can work in regards to people? In Audre Lorde’s testimony, when she was on the subway train and the white woman hugs her coat closer to her in disgust in an effort to separate herself further from a young Audre Lorde. Could it be that this coat represented a “wall” built to keep this woman away from Lorde? Or was it the emotion of hate? Could it be considered a “wall”? After 9/11, the U.S created so many laws out of fear and anxiety in an effort to protect itself from any further attacks from “terrorists”. Could it be with these acts we were building our own “wall”? Yet, does this really work, this act of “walling” and creating new spaces, does it really protect us from what we fear most?  

Walls to separate and to join

by Ben Woodruff

When we look at walls, we must consider what is kept apart but more importantly what is joined together. In the United States, there is great political concern about how labor flows north from Mexico and further south. Through NAFTA there have not been the same barriers for goods and through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund there are few barriers for capital.

This is because the true purpose of walls is not to truly defend a nation or even to keep undesirable immigrants out. Instead the walls hide the fact that the government no longer has power. International agreements have removed power from those elected governments and transferred that to global organizations. The wall then instead serves to define who is "us" and who is "them" in the discourses of power. 

The wall can be physical or metaphorical. Often the barriers are built into bureaucracy on who we allow more free movement and who must struggle to enter. This othering was used by Ahmed to define the hate that another by simply encroaching on one's space "threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject" (43). The other is described not only as being dirty or dangerous but they are an embodiment of that abjection. 

Alabama has been an example of this. There is a great deal of support for a frontier fence along the southern US border but the state also enacted laws to further separate "bad" immigrants from the global south from the "good" immigrants from Germany and Korea. 

Selling Sovereignty

Sara Ahmed’s “The Organisation of Hate, “ Nicholas De Genova’s “The Production of Culprits,” and Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty collaborate within the collective investigations into spatiality in relation to economies and identities within transnational fields.  Ahmed’s analyses of hate and love within both the psychoanalytic and legal domains work to illustrate the truly paradoxical nature of space.  Sara Ahmed states, “If the demand for love is the demand for presence, and frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure of that demand, then hate and love are intimately tied together, in the intensity of the negotiation between presence and absence” [my own italic emphasis](Ahmed, 50).  Within this notion of love and hate, acceptance into spaces of “presence” or “absence” are constantly fluctuating, and are dependent upon varying vectors of being.  De Genova extends articulations of space-flux by noting how definitions of identity, in relation to national “citizenship,” have remained contradictory; “…‘illegality’ may entail a significant contradiction within the politics of nation-state space, it nevertheless has remained under ordinary circumstances a more or less viable way of life and transnational mode of being within the global space of capital” (De Genova, 438).

Wendy Brown highlights the connections between legality, space, and capital by painting the neoliberal state as an empowered, hegemonic instrument in conventionalizing desired standards within these aforementioned fields of power.  In her book she notes how differences in monetary privilege between nation-states spur the creation and extension of walls and borders.  These massive walls call to an oppressive history of empowered few and enslaved many due to capital discrepancies;  “Capital mocks efforts by national and subnational communities to contour their ways of life or to direct their own fates, making such efforts appear similar to those of feudal fiefdoms at the dawn of modernity” (Brown, 65).  Feudal kings and lords maintained power over their subjects with force and myths of “outside” invaders in which only the extensive powers of their feudal powers could protect them.  This narrative of an instable state is being reinscribed within the context of international terrorism and illegal immigration.  De Genova notes, “The metaphysics of antiterrorism is replete with an acute and beleaguered sensibility about the instability and permeability of nation-state space and borders” (De Genova, 423).  All of these paradoxes and contradictions work in painting a wider picture of neoliberal market control of identity constructions and space allocations.  The democratic ideal of personal sovereignty is seemingly faltering to the capitalistic, hegemonic realities of “global” markets and capital control.  Brown elaborates, “Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut as well by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers…which displaces legal and political principles…with market criteria…” (Brown, 22).

Walled States

In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown examines the constant wall building occurring on the borders of many countries.  She basically says that while these walls are going up, they are decreasing the power of nation states.  My first thought was how interesting it is that so many walls were/are going up during a time when globalization is increasing.  In my mind, globalization in its purest form is supposed to be about broadening borders mostly through trade and migration (including all the exploitative tendencies that come along with that).  So, the borders do not exactly make sense from that simple standpoint.  What Brown has helped me realize is all the tensions and contradictions that connect globalization and wall-building (8, 20, 94).  So, in some ways increased globalization has generated the “need” for these walls to begin with.

Her idea of the walls themselves adding to the destruction of a nation’s sovereignty is interesting.  She speaks about how in most cases the walls are said to be built in order to stop some kind of perceived illegal activity, whether drugs, violence, etc.  Yet, these walls produce even more illegal activity.  According to Brown, the “walls codify the conflicts to which they respond as permanent and unwinnable…and further weakens the link between the state and sovereignty” (84).  This makes me think about narratives, in particular danger narratives.  In the U.S. we have created these danger narratives about “outsiders” trying to get in and how dangerous they are.  This connects with the narrative created about refugees in Grewal’s Transnational America, especially the Sikh women and how the U.S. classifies terrorism, and the issues this created for these women.  In both instances, some kind of barrier went up.  On the U.S./Mexico border, a wall was constructed, and for these refugee women, barriers went up that made it more difficult to obtain asylum.

The next step in this examination for me would give a closer look into the construction of different walls.  It is clear that the barrier on the Saudi border with Yemen (16) is much different from the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border (10), which in turn differs greatly from the India-Pakistan border fence (15), none of which seems as complex as the Saudi Arabia/Iraq border being built at the time of publication (17).  I wonder what these nations claim to be keeping out, and how that translated into a particular construction.

Walls, Hate, and Bodily Harm in The Bubble

Wendy Brown’s discussion of the Israeli wall brings up some useful and interesting points. Essentially, she describes it (along with other postmodern walls, such as the US border wall) as being an assertion of state sovereignty that no longer exists. This assertion of sovereignty then has different effects on the people of Israel and Palestine. Specifically, she discusses the ways in which the Wall projects negative associations onto the people of Palestine. This aligns closely with Sarah Ahmed’s discussion of how hate is organized.

What Ahmed says is that hate depends on associating the hated group with negative stereotypes and traits.  The Palestinians are thus associated with violence and terrorism (the stated reasons for erecting the Wall in the first place) and the Israelis with peacefulness and restraint.  Some anti-Wall activists, as Brown states, go so far as to say that the ugliness of the Wall is a deliberate attempt to associate Palestinians with this ugliness and claim that they are the cause of many if not all negative effects on Israel.  Ahmed goes on to state, however, that it is not just the hated group as a whole that is negatively affected by hate but also the bodies of the people belonging to the hated group.  This effect is shown quite thoroughly in the Israeli movie “The Bubble” (הבועה).  

The opening scene of this movie, which follows a group of young people living in Israel and Palestine, features strongly emotional negative effects of hate on the body of one Palestinian woman, and continues from there.  During the opening scene, one Palestinian woman ends up giving birth at one of the checkpoints to cross over into Israel.  The negative associations the Palestinians have actually force her to give birth in the road with any number of bystanders, mostly Israeli soldiers and other Palestinians attempting to enter Israel, looking on.  

Later on one of those bystanders, Ashraf, enters into a romantic relationship with one of the soldiers who was at the checkpoint, returning to Palestine when a friend’s ex-boyfriend threatens to reveal that he was in Israel illegally.  Ashraf’s Israeli boyfriend and one of his friends then pretend to be French journalists to cross over to Palestine and talk to him.  When Ashraf’s sister’s fiance catches the two men kissing, he blackmails Ashraf to try and convince him to marry his cousin.  Ashraf later finds out that his sister’s fiance is part of a terrorist organization setting up bombings in Tel Aviv.  On the day after her wedding, his sister is fatally shot by Israeli soldiers looking for those behind the bombings.  Out of grief and a sense of helplessness, Ashraf decides to take his brother-in-law’s place as a suicide bomber, eventually killing himself and his boyfriend but limiting other casualties.

As can be understood from this brief plot summary, in this movie the Israeli wall and more generally Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians cause significant bodily harm to two Palestinian women and one gay Palestinian man.  The way in which these negative associations are attached to specific bodies causes harm to those bodies.  

How is it that specific bodies come to more harm than others in this movie through these negative associations?  Why might the filmmaker be portraying the situation this way, rather than as causing harm to different Palestinian bodies?  How do ideas of violence as a self-perpetuating cycle influence the production and interpretation of this movie?  Who does the filmmaker set up as being responsible for these negative effects, and why might he have chosen them as opposed to others?

"hate crimes" Week 12

            The United States is a nation that has been characterized by a group of laws, demands, crimes, the idea of “hate”, and insider vs. outsider. These traits are created and placed upon different bodies based on prior events (i.e. the cold war, 9/11, the world wars), and specifically identities. The White nation is a fundamentally biased space with contradictions placed on locations, time and collective similarities among groups of people. In these readings, the idea of hate vs. love is accumulated based on the grouping of objects in response to created subjects of the “other.” These subjectivities were in response to the 9/11 in the discourse associated around emigrants into the United States of any other descent than Caucasian. Japanese, Muslim, Arab, and lets not forget the African American race were  systematically placed in a category of difference or a “threat” or as “illegal aliens” which needed to be deported or detained whenever necessary under the command of the President.

            This notion of outsider vs. insider places a pivotal role in the definition of hate. Who hates who, and why? The mindset of the superior, power dynamics of control, and law give the idea of victim and criminal a different lens to view from. The emotional attachment such as the events of 9/11 allowed the U.S. as a nation to create law specifically for the “outsider”, deem certain bodies officially as an “outsider” and position them as individual criminals to the state as a whole. The national security created after and prior to 9/11 built boundaries to all that identified as Muslim/ Arab. This notion only reflects the self-hatred among other races prior to 9/11. The U.S. created these stipulations in emotional rage as well as political power and stability; however, these bodies to which they were created for were forced to be viewed as criminals globally in connection with the U.S., while simultaneously placing the location and space of U.S. citizens as the victim.

            In referring to which bodies are associated with hate, Audrey Lorde mentions a particular incident she has a child. Hate is an emotional process of continuously placing subjects as objects in a realm of personal belief in collaboration with levels of signification. These are created norms given only to specific people in specific locations at specific times. It almost seems as if the laws are bent in response to who is the victim and who is presented as the criminal. In the White nation, hate has been dispensed in many different manners, it is only redressing how “hate” has accumulated and under what circumstances is still stands. The government is an entity which follows certain rules and regulation with only certain individuals as beneficiaries. These readings remind me of “Taking Haiti” with the military invasion over bodies to benefit the U.S. and in return ruling power over the natives. In placing assumed terrorists under surveillance, in Guantamo Bay, or imprisonment without any notion to why, except their identity is enslavement. These individuals may not be forced to do labor, but they are detained without choice. I am not saying I agree or disagree, but I am relating race to social and political power and diplomatic administration even outside the African American race over 400 years ago. 

Walls: A Performative Contradiction and Icons of Erosion

What interested me most in this week's readings was the delineation of the power structure outlined between the immigrant community and the "native" based upon the erection of walls. I kept coming back to Foucault's theories on the construction of power as relative to how a person is acknowledged as having or being denied power. The relation of such allocations of power is an interdependent one that requires one to be without power in order for the subject to be in possession of such power, much like Wendy Brown explains the interdependent relation between that of the construction of walls and the imperialist notions of "the content of the nations they barricade" (41). Brown describes the interdependence of these two as, "the kinds of subjects that Western nation-state walls would block out are paradoxically produced within the walls themselves" (41). The construction of such walls only fosters and "intensify the criminality and violence they purport to repel, and hence...generate the need for more fortifications and policing" (38). In this instance, Brown is depicting a sort of cyclical relation of the wall, notions of the subjects that walls are purported to repel, and the xenophobia that is fostered as a result which then feeds into the idea that these walls are a necessity and the cycle begins all over again. Because of the wall's role in increasing the criminality and violence of migrant individuals (through the use of border patrols at the border and the criminality that is subsequent to the immigrant's requirement of the protection of more "challenging areas," which Brown specifies as "urban areas," as a means of circumventing border patrol), the migrant community can only be further marginalized from society (38). Ahmed's article furthers the notion of an interdependent relation between the "native" and the migrant when she highlights the role of "hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nations together" (43). Both Ahmed and Brown are focusing on the xenophobia that such walls produce as the reason that there are even social constructions of the existence of those "beyond the pale" (45).
Second was the notion of the necessity of land as the premise to all law and power. Brown cites the work of John Locke in understanding the central role that many believe private property serves in the acquisition of sovereignty, "bounded property... secures and reproduces the relationship of individual and state sovereignty. Obtaining legal status and protection for property ownership motivates entry into the social contract" (44). Brown then delineates the kind of "chicken or egg" relationship that sovereignty and the walling of space and how one may argue which one came first but that they are directly related to one another and happen in conjunction with the undertaking of one (45). This emphasis placed upon the ownership of land as inherent to power and autonomy is also seen in De Genova's text as she positions the role of and the possibility of deportation as the key factor in creating the immigrant's status of "illegal" (426-427). Wherein the "illegal immigrant" has the possibility of being forcibly removed from all property and land that they may have acquired within the nation-state, they assume no political, legal, or personal power. Therefore, there is an argument to be made in the drawing off of borders, but the socially heightened idea that a wall will offer this sovereignty is falsifiable and ultimately depicts a "performative contradiction" and creates an"icon of erosion" (Brown 24).

Week 11: Borders, Citizenship, and Constructions of Illegality

       Ahmed, De Genova, and Brown's works all illustrate the social, political, and psychological ramifications of borders.  Ahmed's article is particularly interesting in that it talks about the love/hate relationship the Self (the white state) has with the Other (the immigrant).  Ironically, instead of distancing from each other, Ahmed states that, "it is the emotional reading of hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nations together" (43).  As such, the two seem dependent on each other for existence.  Indeed, there would be no such thing as a white state if there was nothing to oppose it.  Hate, in this instance is a unique tool that functions on some level like love since the two are bound together.  This does not stop the dichotomy of the victim and perpetuator.  In fact, in order to conceal the strange communal bond between the two, "the ordinary or normative subject is reproduced as the injured party; the other that is 'hurt' or even damaged by the 'invasion' of others" (43).  De Genova looks at this relationship and recognizes that the immigrant is said to "invade" the state because of their illegality.  Indeed, "Migrant 'illegality' is lived through a palpable sense of deportability--which is to say, the possibility of deportation, or in the bureaucratic euphemis of the U.S. immigration regime, the possibility of being 'removed' from the space of the state" (426).
        This sense of power would bee considered a false front by Brown as she describes the nation-state's lack of power.  Indeed, Brown states, "Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion" (24).  As such, the more walls are built, the more insecure the nation-state is.  Indeed, it looks to the creation of walls to legitimize its power when it really demonstrates, according to Brown, their lack of power. Walls, Brown states, are performative: "the new walls often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they also performatively contradict" (25).  This contradiction would be in relation to Ahmed's theory of hate wherein the two entities, however different they are, rely on one another for existence; that these walls are more performative than functional.

America the Modern & India the Ancient

In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal reiterates what Kim and Parreñas also illustrate--that the U.S. and non-Western countries (India, Korea, the Philippines), are constructed in oppositional binaries, each defined by the other. To travel in space becomes to travel in time, as India, in this case, is constructed as a backward, traditional, primitive place unenlightened by the neoliberal feminism that would enable women to conspicuously consume whatever materials they desire. Two of Grewal's primary concerns in the text are to show globalization to be the politicized, value-laden term that it is and to explain how it is often used in ways that makes it seem innocuous and inevitable. She has a similar mission for the term cosmopolitanism. Variations of both of these terms are frequently used in popular discourse to explain "progress" and "development," to describe movement through time as an inevitable march toward the neoliberal, democratic end that Fukuyama imagines. Grewal's mission is to illustrate that notions of cosmopolitianism and globalization, that even the fact of the existence of the terms themselves, are dependent on the colonial and post-colonial nature of the relationship between the West and the non-West.

I was interested in the ways in which Grewal shows Ghosh, Mukherjee, and Divakaruni to be complicit in racist/neocolonialist myths about South Asia and the South Asian diasporas. I read all of Divakaruni's novels and stories when I was in high school. I was attempting to be what Grewal describes as a "world citizen," which "emerged as the consumer of multicultural, immigrant, and postcolonial novels through a neoliberalized difference in many regions." (79) I wish I could go back and know what I was thinking then as I read her words. My first semester at Alabama, I took a Victorian literature course entitled "Imagining British India." For the course, we were supposed to pretend to be imperial British subjects living on the island, with no knowledge of India save for what we read of it in the newspapers and novels of the day (which we read for class). The images of India as fragmented, backward, primitive, etc. presented in British press and literature in the 19th century are eerily similar to Grewal's description of contemporary portrayals today. As a high schooler, I consumed the novels "about" India because that was my way to access a distant land. Of course we have film and internet, now, but literature remains a powerful way to imagine access to the way other people live and feel. Much like Lee's descriptions of self-congratulatory white adoptive families, Grewal's "global citizens" are ignorant to the ways in which, as Massey would say, their access limits the access of others. By allowing so few diasporic voices to infiltrate culture stages, and especially voices that might challenge popular myths like the American Dream, we limit the possibilities of what a place or a people can be. Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie discusses this in her TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story"; when we only allow one voice from a group to represent the experiences of that entire group, we believe that one voice to be true, and we cannot imagine that there is a diversity of experiences within that group. This limiting of voices also puts unfair pressure on novels, which are, after all, decidedly not non-fiction. When readers and writers place pressure on "ethnic" novels to do exclusively anthropological work rather than artistic, aesthetic work that will also reveal some version of the author's perspective of truth, we create an under-class of novels which are not measured by the artistic/aesthetic criteria of novel-hood that apply when a novel is not under extra pressure to teach its audience about an entire people or a place. What I am trying to say is that I think the U.S. publishing industry, and white male readers here, generally consume novels by immigrant writers, or writers of color, or white women, with different expectations than they bring to novels written by white men; one does not read Steven King or Tom Clancy to learn something about white men, or American society, because whiteness, masculinity, and U.S. citizenship are all dominant discourses and are therefore invisible. By the same token, one would not read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni expecting a story of zombies or werewolves; there is an expectation of domestic realism, or exoticized magic realism, that still portrays cultural truths, for writing by immigrant writers in the United States. I am not at all saying that many, many writers don't write in completely divergent ways, but the immigrant or international writers who land major book deals and produce bestsellers in the U.S. generally follow this model.

I was also interested in Grewal's discussion of women's/human rights. The discourses on human rights and women's rights and the revamped "white man's burden" continue to pervade our political discourse today. The almost-intervention in Syria, the war in Iraq, and, most notably, the war in Afghanistan have all been justified by the need to spread human rights, and specifically women's rights. In order for this human rights/women's rights discourse to still function, Mohanty's monolithic image of the oppressed non-Western woman must be reiterated. What better stage to do this work than in literature? I was interested in Grewal's discussion of the ways in which the narratives of human rights are used to support totalitarian regimes as when she quotes Ilumoka as writing "at worst, human rights laws could become tools to punish subalterns." (128) Grewal frequently invokes Spivak, and she also problematizes the idea of citizenship, with the transnational argument that we are all influenced by each other, whether we leave our homelands or not.

Resistance is Futile

Resistance is Futile

By Ben Woodruff

     Inderpal Grewal looks specifically at the middle class Indian people and their treatment among geopolitical interest groups. The impact of power on the lives of real people living in the United States and India is a very important. This impact specifically on Indians was the common theme through the chapters. The neoliberal view of Indians created “subjects gendered, classed, and radicalized in specific ways” (3) is the underlying thread. Grewal looked at rhetoric of feminism and how that impacted the view of the Indian women in a transnational framework.

     Grewal did not ignore the role of global commerce on this analysis. Grewel used the terms connectivities and collectiviies to explain how the separation of the production from the consumption alienates labor. It goes deeper than that though because the idea of how citizenship and the impact of the inherent inequality of who can become a citizen show that unevenness will propagate in this neoliberal system. 

     One obvious use of the model is the discussion of Mattel’s Barbie. Mattel did not chose to sell a more traditional looking Indian Barbie but instead sold the white Barbie from the United States. This Barbie was simply wearing the sari associated with India and so served to separate the Western view from the Indian reality. This was compounded by the Non-Resident Indian category created by the Indian government. This meant that the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) saw their lives reflected in the "white" Barbies found in the hotels and airport shops and so see themselves as markedly different than the Indians living in India. 

     This was very telling to me particularly. The dominant culture, that of the United States, has large impacts globally. In this case it fractured the view of what it meant to be "Indian" for those that lived outside of India.

Exporting Ideologies

The particular elements of Inderpal Grewal’s Transnational America I would like to highlight are the roles of neoliberal socioeconomic practices in altering the ways in which borders, markets, and welfares operate within constructed “global” notions.  Grewal pays close attention to the ways in which United States imperialist marketization and commercialism works in tandem with the exportation of hegemonic-state conventionalized products, resources, and ideologies.  Grewal notes, “…shifting and changing national subject…moving across nations and national boundaries to produce American identities imbricated within a consumer citizenship that exceeds the bounds of nation to become transnational” (loc. 150 of 3647).  The desire for the “American dream” and the empowerment of white, Western privilege furthered the transnational distribution and retention of neoliberal policies. 

This repression of varied cultural identities, in the endeavor of creating a global cosmopolitanism, by the United States and other Western neoliberal imperialists reminds me of Castenada Ahmed's "Introduction to Uprootings and Regroundings."  Ahmed states, “...the emergence of...flexible cosmopolitan cultures or civil societies still depends on the constraints of particular articulations of power, hierarchy, inequality and positioning" (Ahmed, 4).  While the empowered nation-states altered world social, political, and economic pathways under the façade of “progress,” in reality, their methods have subjugated “less advanced” peoples and nation-states in the name of capital and power accumulation; “Transnational capital has helped to resuscitate some nation-states while simultaneously reducing the power of others” (Grewal, loc. 1079 of 3647). 

Grewal’s most captivating example of this relation between American ideals bleeding into newly formed transnational markets and subject identities is that of the infamous Barbie in India.  By throwing America’s generic, white female Barbie doll in the traditional sari garb of Indian women, Mattel’s iconic figure assisted in the building up of transnational, “global” markets and the (re)empowerment of Western ideologies.  Grewal notes, “The cultural work required to create a consumer desire for a product…contributes to and participates in wider cultural changes within which the product can become meaningful…” (Grewal, loc. 1157 of 3647).

"Civil Society?"

Inderpa Grewal's work Transnational America was an interesting take on the idea of the extension of states beyond the means of boarders. Specifically I favored her section on "Managing Human Rights: NGOs and Civil Societies" because of the topics that really paralleled texts that we had read earlier in the semester such as Lila Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" such as when Grewal writes, "In the context of the US, the state, and the discourses of American nationalism produced female subjects who saw themselves as 'free' in comparison to their 'sisters' in the developing world, and these attitudes often pervaded the encounters between women's groups, as at the NGO meetings of the UN women's conferences" (142). This in addition to the entire notion of women's rights as the gateway to human rights that Grewal writes of reminded me of Abu-Lughod's mention that, " the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the dignity of women" in which was in a statement given by Laura Bush following the decision to invade the Middle East post 9/11. The two statements map human rights and protections against "terrorism" (whatever, the current definition of terrorism may be) moving in opposite directions to and from their in-statement of women's rights. Also, in the way that Grewal discusses the notion of the "free" woman and the notion of "sisterhood," implied the nature of the statement Chandra Mohanty stated in her "Under Western Eyes"when she commented on the state of sisterhood as, "sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender, it must be forged in concrete historical and political praxis" (Mohanty 57). The entire notion of the idea of what a "free" woman is and the divergent global understandings of such a notion is the underlying theme of Lila Abu-Lughod's text as well.
Finally, Grewal even ties in the research that she and Caren Kaplan published in "Scattered Hegemonies" when she includes, "the influence of nationalisms and nation-states in creating certain kinds of NGOs and groups was an important one, visible most particularly in the US and Western Europe within 'global feminism'...the hegemony of first world women's groups to affect women's lives nd women's groups worldwide by creating a 'common agenda' that produced women as their subjects and as a target population" (Grewal 143). The monopolizing of the term "global feminism" by western imperialist nations has continually created a system "prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures" (Grewal and Kaplan 17). They further their warning of the dangers of such an idea as "global feminism" by stating, " Conventionally, 'global feminism' has stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism. The term 'global feminism' has elided the diversity of women's agency in favor of a universalized Western modernity" (17). Ultimately, the aims of many Western NGOs and their roles in forming "civil" societies has been mainly the subtlety imperialize the new host societies to further the western notions of "civil" and to reinstate Western ideals of "human rights."

Transnational America

            In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines the idea of “America” and how the United States is much more than an imperialist nation-state. Instead, Grewal uses a postcolonial feminist’s lens to look at the discourses in circulation and how they create transnational subjects.

            One of the interesting points Grewal makes is regarding gender and class identity in the United States. She uses the example of post-9/11 U.S. to explain further. It’s particularly interesting to me how the United States pushed an even more inflated sense of nationalism rather than pushing a global understanding, or a more transnational identity. Instead, we focused on “’Merica” and the American way.  This idea of what “America” means is being used as a discursive tool. aIn doing so, it really just pushed the White patriarchal society upon which the United States is based. This really reminded me of the first article we read in class, “Do Muslim women really need saving?” What the article could have more accurately read is: How can we frame the sex/gender dynamics in other countries so it seems oppressive and harmful, since it is different than our own? This is exactly what the patriarchy wants. By doing this, we dismiss the reality of sexism and patriarchy in the United States because it isn’t as bad.

            I’m sure we were all intrigued by the Barbie example that Grewal uses, because her fame is far-reaching and a very concrete example of the unattainable ideals enforced by European/U.S. American society. Even when reconciled with more transnational imagery (wearing a sari), Barbie still had her fair skin and European face.