"Few sites within the university open a richer critical reflection than that of the M.F.A., with its complex crossing of professionalism, theory, humanistic knowledge, and the absolute exposure of practice. Howard Singerman's Art Subjects does a magnificent job of both laying out our current crises, letting us see the shards of past practices embedded in them, and of demonstrating—rendering urgent and discussable—what it now means either to assume or award the name of the artist."—Stephen Melville, author of Seams, editor of Vision and Textuality "Art Subjects is a must read for anyone interested in both the education and status of the visual artist in America. With careful attention to detail and nuance, Singerman presents a compelling picture of the peculiarly institutional myth of the creative artist as an untaught and unteachable being singularly well adapted to earn a tenure position at a major research university. A fascinating study, thoroughly researched yet oddly, and movingly, personal."—Thomas Lawson, Dean, Art School, CalArts

This sophisticated and comprehensive study is the first to situate Japanese American women's writing within theoretical contexts that provide a means of articulating the complex relationships between language and the body, gender and agency, nationalism and identity. Through an examination of post-World War II autobiographical writings, fiction, and poetry, Traise Yamamoto argues that these writers have employed the trope of masking—textually and psychologically—as a strategy to create an alternative discursive practice and to protect the self as subject. Yamamoto's range is broad, and her interdisciplinary approach yields richly textured, in-depth readings of a number of genres, including film and travel narrative. Looking at how the West has sexualized, infantilized, and feminized Japanese culture for over a century, she examines contemporary Japanese American women's struggle with this orientalist fantasy. Analyzing the various constraints and possibilities that these writers negotiate in order to articulate their differences, she shows how masking serves as a self-affirming discourse that dynamically interacts with mainstream culture's racial and sexual projections.

Explores a Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

A groundbreaking attempt to theorise the feminist subject One of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop a concept of the subject able to meet the challenges facing feminist politics. Although theorists in the 1980s raised the problem of feminist subjectivity, Kathi Weeks contends that the limited nature of that discussion now blocks the further development of feminist theory. While the problems of an already constituted essentialist subject have become patent, what remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is a theory of the constitution of subjects capable of explaining the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account. Drawing on a number of different theoretical frameworks, including feminist standpoint theory, socialist feminism, and poststructuralist thought, as well as theories of peformativity and self-valorization, the author proposes a nonessential feminist subject—a theory of constituting subjects.

Considering a wide range of cultural materials and engaging in a close reading of literary texts, this book draws a compelling comparison between national identity in Europe and the Third World. The author explores historical periods of nation building in Europe (Early Modernism) and the postcolonial world (post-1945 decolonization) to demonstrate that intriguingly similar circumstances of imperial rule, linguistic diversity, and educational systemization facilitated the emergence of national consciousness in both European and non-European countries. By bringing the insights of postcolonial studies to classic canonical dramas of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, the author describes the impact of New World colonial encounters on Spanish and English national formation and self-conception. This book is the first to investigate the rich intertextuality of El Nuevo Mundo (Spain, 1601) and The Tempest (England, 1611). Turning to Ousmane Sembene and Salman Rushdie-perhaps the two most important postcolonial writers-this study shows how their finest novels write back to the European tradition of Lope and Shakespeare and simultaneously represent the trend of postcolonial literature from assertive anticolonial nationalism to postmodern national critique. Tracing developments in the study of nationalism and literature from Louis Althusser and Benedict Anderson through Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Partha Chatterjee, the book's introduction serves as a lucid guide to a central problem in contemporary cultural studies for the general reader or the specialized scholar. Juxtaposing Renaissance etchings, traditional African and Indian sculpture, 19th-century political cartoons, and intriguing works of contemporary art, Making Subject(s) is of unusual interest and visual appeal.

Questions of national identity, indigenous rights, citizenship, and migration have acquired unprecedented relevance in this age of globalization. In Exalted Subjects, noted feminist scholar Sunera Thobani examines the meanings and complexities of these questions in a Canadian context. Based in the theoretical traditions of political economy and cultural / post-colonial studies, this book examines how the national subject has been conceptualized in Canada at particular historical junctures, and how state policies and popular practices have exalted certain subjects over others. Foregrounding the concept of 'race' as a critical relation of power, Thobani examines how processes of racialization contribute to sustaining and replenishing the politics of nation formation and national subjectivity. She challenges the popular notion that the significance of racialized practices in Canada has declined in the post Second World War period, and traces key continuities and discontinuities in these practices from Confederation into the present. Drawing on historical sociology and discursive analyses, Thobani examines how the state seeks to 'fix' and 'stabilize' its subjects in relation to the nation's 'others.' A controversial, ground-breaking study, Exalted Subjects makes a major contribution to our understanding of the racialized and gendered underpinnings of both nation and subject formation.