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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