Synopses & Reviews
Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice, Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem and the ‘Yellow Question in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.
Review
"Subtle, lucid, and stylish, Walker's book offers a provocative and challenging model for living and writing in 'sustained contradiction.'"-Elizabeth Meese,University of Alabama
Review
"One of the great virtues of Lisa Walker's Looking Like What You Are is the ease with which she is able to personalize theoretical discourses. After being drawn in by her narrative style and her engaging use of anecdote, the reader will discover an elegantly written, thoroughly substantiated, and deeply convincing argument about the role of visibility in twentieth-century identity politics."-Bonnie Zimmerman,San Diego State University
Review
"Both a remarkable feat of conscientious scholarship and a pleasure to read, Looking Like What You Are will prove of great interest to scholars of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality alike."-Renée C. Hoogland,University of Nijmegan
Review
"Libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and graduate students should acquire this work."
"One of the great virtues of Lisa Walker's Looking Like What You Are is the ease with which she is able to personalize theoretical discourses. After being drawn in by her narrative style and her engaging use of anecdote, the reader will discover an elegantly written, thoroughly substantiated, and deeply convincing argument about the role of visibility in twentieth-century identity politics."
"Both a remarkable feat of conscientious scholarship and a pleasure to read, Looking Like What You Are will prove of great interest to scholars of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality alike."
"Subtle, lucid, and stylish, Walker's book offers a provocative and challenging model for living and writing in 'sustained contradiction.'"
Review
“Original and compelling. . . . Simultaneously sophisticated and accessible, Race for Citizenship fills a critical lacuna in‘race relations studies.”
-Elaine Kim,University of California, Berkeley
Synopsis
Looks can be deceiving, and in a society where one's status and access to opportunity are largely attendant on physical appearance, the issue of how difference is constructed and interpreted, embraced or effaced, is of tremendous import.
Lisa Walker examines this issue with a focus on the questions of what it means to look like a lesbian, and what it means to be a lesbian but not to look like one. She analyzes the historical production of the lesbian body as marked, and studies how lesbians have used the frequent analogy between racial difference and sexual orientation to craft, emphasize, or deny physical difference. In particular, she explores the implications of a predominantly visible model of sexual identity for the feminine lesbian, who is both marked and unmarked, desired and disavowed.
Walker's textual analysis cuts across a variety of genres, including modernist fiction such as The Well of Loneliness and Wide Sargasso Sea, pulp fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s and the 1960s, post-modern literature as Michelle Cliff's Abeng, and queer theory.
In the book's final chapter, "How to Recognize a Lesbian," Walker argues that strategies of visibility are at times deconstructed, at times reinscribed within contemporary lesbian-feminist theory.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-265) and index.
About the Author
Helen Heran Jun is assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.