Week2_KellyWang_ASA114

Evelyn Hu-Dehart's piece on "Age of Globalization" touches upon the role asian immigrants played in terms of integrating into american society as well as highlighting the contributions asians/asian americans have made. Hu-Dehart mentions how if culture does not have value in learning and scholarship and hard work, future gain would come much slower and that the superiority of Western standards of "organization, production and technological development have been called into question by the success of a distinctly alien form of capitalism" (p.6). It is Interesting to see how immigrants are often told to go back to where they came from, however when we really look at history, immigrants have contributed a lot more than we are given credit for in terms of building this nation into what it is today: "Fortunately for the United States, these Asian values have been carried across the Pacific by generations of Asian immigrants" (p.6). Brain flow is also mentioned later in the reading which I saw as parallel to "brain drain", in reference to the homeland's relationship to losing their resource to the host land. In the second reading, "The Ordeal of Ethnic Studies in the Age of Globalization", Anderson and Lee make a call to action: "We need to engage in a research program of systematic demystification in order to clarify the complex articulation of ethnicity and racialization in the capitalist world system" (p. 274). They critique Hu-Dehart's views on ethnic studies for being too naive and believe that ethnic studies will only continue to be prevalent in today's society if "its practitioners adhere chiefly to the power/knowledge regime of the “role model” and regard this subject-position as the pedagogical transcoding of the chameleonic politics of identity" which I understood as ethnic studies only having a place if it was contributing to the success of the host land (America) as well as dominant culture. The term ethnicity is also discussed as not just being the color of your skin, but something which much more depth: "the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, and situated and all knowledge is con-textual” (p. 275). Turns out, ethnicity is far more complex than the age old question asian americans have heard at least once in their lifetime, "where are you really from?".