Make up blog post

Week 4:

Response to George Sanchez's Becoming Mexican American

Thank you for this meticulous scholarly work, where you attempt to catch identity in the making by you zooming in on exactly those moments where identity is, as you write, becoming. We see the way an identity is being created in the present: "Ethnicity, therefore, was not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experiences in the United States." Here, we learn that way that categories such as ethnicity are theorized and collectively understood around shared daily experience. They are thus ever constructing and responding to lived experiences. I found the quote that you give from Stuart Hall particularly brilliant at driving this point home: "Cultural identity is a matter of "becoming" as well as of "being." It belongs to the future as much as to the past." By positing that identity is not fixed in an unchanging past, you recover the true nature of identity as an ever changing, ever becoming entity and this openness also makes it possible to imagine a future of resistance, a future of an entirely different set of identities. 

This study also challenges the invisibilizing gaze that often chooses to unsee identities in the boderlands (the concept of boderland identities is credited to Gloria Anzaldua). 

I'm grateful for these insights.

Week 5:

Dear Claudia Rankine,

I think the use of second person throughout Citizen is crucial to one of many interventions the book makes the question of identity (in particular, how one navigates one's identity when constantly faced with anti-black racism). The you in the book becomes increasingly sharply defined by the outside world --- the you does not always choose her own identity. Rather the world lets the you know her identity as the you faces a continuous series of anti-black racism. In this way, the book captures identity making in all its aspects: not just as those elements that are claimed and forged by the persona as resistance but also all the ways in which the persona has no say. Thus, the persona is constantly subject and object. Acting and acted upon. It is in between this duality that identity is created. An unidentified you becomes identified, gradually, through this process.

Thank you for the way your work is able to capture that duality!


Week 7:

Response to Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America 

I found the section on the "loyalty questionnaire" particularly revealing in terms of how the a perpetual alienness is ascribed to people of some identities, even after they may have been legally accepted as citizens. In the national imaginary, only people of a certain racial identity are imagined to have a naturally arising loyalty while the loyalty of others must always be checked and proved. The perpetual alien must forever strive to prove her loyalty to the nation or else! I connected this anxiety in the national imaginary to many recent events in the United States, where peoples of certain identities have been asked to demonstrate their loyalty and constantly scrutinised as potential betrayers.






I responded the same week on Week 9, but I wrote my response as a comment. Since the comment might be missed, I'm repasting my Week 9 response here:

Thank you for your post about the ways in which white appropriation of Native American culture is a historic manifestation of white American identity crisis. In fact, the very reason for the instability of American identities, as Deloria points out, "stems from the nation's inability to deal with Indian people." As the title of Deloria's piece indicates, the act of playing Indian —— appropriation which is performative —— manifests the creation of American identity itself. Just as the nation of America as we know it was created from the massacare of Native American peoples, the myth of American identity to hinges on that same history. It too starts from the same place. We must not forget that history.