Strange Affinities

Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the "strange affinities," afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the task of critiquing the racial configurations and contesting the inequities generated by neo-colonialism. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and lab or exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally non-racialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors find the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of colour feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of colour critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life. Contributors: Victor Bascara, Lisa Marie Cacho, M. Bianet Castellanos , Martha Chew Sanchez , Roderick A. Ferguson, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Helen H. Jun, Kara Keeling , Sanda Mayzaw Lwin , Jodi Melamed , Chandan Reddy , Ruby C. Tapia, Cynthia Tolentino