Online Event
“Making Allies and Affines: Rethinking Racialization” A talk by Elda Tsou, St. John’s University, as a part of CSER’s MA Program in American Studies. Elda Tsou is an associate professor in the English department at St. John’s University. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Studies of race have predominantly approached it as a mode of power that produces racial categories to justify exploitation, inequality, subordination and conquest. Recently though scholars have begun to explore how race-making can also involve processes and practices of “inclusion.” This essay uses the Asian American subject, often represented as an “honorary white” to explore an unfamiliar modality of race-making its author calls “a politics of proximity.” In two different historical examples, the paper examines their formal similarity to explore how these Asian American subjects are racialized by claims of affinity rather than difference and alterity.
