Friday, January 31, 2020

Week 5_Melanie Manuel_ASA 114


Melanie Manuel
ASA 114 001
31 January 2020

One of the topics that Michael Peter Smith’s “Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics” discusses is “deterritorialization,” which I understood to be a breaking of boundaries in the simplest of terms. Smith explains through Appadurai that this poses an issue for community research because of the following two reasons: 1) “the loosening of the ties between wealth, population, and territory ‘fundamentally alters the basis for cultural reproduction’” and 2) “ethnographers of deterritorialized peoples are increasingly finding that the ‘there,’ or ‘homeland,’ of transnational migrants, exiles, and refugees…” (18) This part later goes into Benedict Anderson’s concept about the “imagined community,” which seems to be a thought pervading the back of deterritorialized people’s minds. This notion of deterritorialization seems to imply a blurring of lines, reminding me very much of the pan-ethnic term, “Asian-American” in the way that it serves as an identifier for those fighting for a particular social justice, whether that be to alter social class hierarchies or even the very concept of race, because this creates a sense of camaraderie in being an outlier. I find that migrants play an interesting role in the United States demographic makeup, because they’re positioned, just as people of color are, as people that live in the in-between. But for migrants, there seems to be an additional layer to this in-betweenness that gives them a kind of advantage when thinking about how to give back to their communities or even just thinking of diaspora, because they are folks that make up a good fraction of it, who are trying to evolve what it means to be a migrant in the United States. 
 
I incorporated this image of Yuji Ichioka, the man who coined the term “Asian American” as a way of forming solidarity in the Asian American community, not to subsume problems within the other, but to remind us that are problems are quite similar in the grand scheme of white hegemony. 


Works Cited
Smith, Michael Peter. 1994. “Can You Imagine? Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics.” Social Text, No. 39 (Summer, 1994), pp. 15-33.

Image Used
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4671187/user-clip-yuji-ichioka

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