Making and measuring race, ethnicity, and language : South Asian racialization across community contexts
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Mainstream approaches to understanding ethnoracial categories such as Asian American presuppose them to be pre-existing, self-evident empirical phenomena that can be objectively perceived and measured according to stereotypical signs thereof. Rather than such approaches for granted, I demonstrate, how, under the guise of (neo)liberal multiculturalism, the presupposition of stereotypical signs of Asianness portend the techniques of government that motivate demographic projections and the perceived reconstitution of Americanness, necessitating modes of governance for managing difference. Building off scholars' examination of liberal multiculturalism as a political technology for (re)producing difference embodied as societal abjection, I am in dialogue with theorizations of racialized populations' positionality that are located in a relation between (neo)liberal multiculturalism and a politics of "post-multiculturalism". That is, this dissertation explores the interplay between the liberal democratic politics of inclusion/production of difference and the positioning of difference as a legitimate object of liberal democratic exclusion as it plays out in South Asian American serving community-based organizations in the Chicagoland area. Through analyzing the relationship between historical, institutional, and interactional negotiations of the English as a Second Language (ESL) intake process, diversity discourses, and securitization processes, I ask (1) How are colonially constituted and institutionally sanctioned modes of categorization and measurement, particularly in relation to South Asian Americans, understood, (re)produced, and negotiated across scales in the Chicagoland area?; and (2) In what ways can we conceptually rethink pragmatic approaches to educational and societal stratification and attendant inequities by attending to how racializing histories constitute contemporary material relations? Through the deployment of qualitative methods, including over a year-long ethnographic engagement with South Asian American communities entailing participant observation, structured interviews, archival inquiry, and critical discourse analysis, I focus on the ways South Asians are recruited to occupy circumscribed political subjectivities, identities, and modes of expressivity rooted in the settler colonial and imperialist formation that is the US. This racializing histories approach to contemporary material relations helps to fundamentally rethink the nature of educational and societal inequities.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Trivedi, Sunny |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Rosa, Jonathan |
| Thesis advisor | Rosa, Jonathan |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Martínez, Ramón, 1972- |
| Degree committee member | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Degree committee member | Martínez, Ramón, 1972- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sunny Trivedi. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/hc866yd5097 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Sunny Trivedi
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