Patriot Games: Citizenship & National Apartheids

Fall 2008 Speaker Series
INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL STUDIES CERTIFICATE PROGRAM

“Patriot Games: Citizenship and the Making of National Apartheids”

Dr. Nandita Sharma

Ethnic Studies and Sociology
University of Hawai'i at Manoa

In this year’s US presidential election, there was both a notable presence and absence of talk about ‘foreigners.’ Barack Obama’s racialized Otherness was very much inflected with talk of his ‘nonAmerican-ness’ (at times cast as ‘unAmerican-ness’), particularly in the last months of the McCain/Palin campaign. At the same time, both candidates chose to de-emphasize their shared approach to US immigration policy reform. In this presentation, I analyze this tension in the presidential campaign through the theoretical framework of neo-racism. By discussing the neo-racist emphasis on the supposedly deep relation between ‘culture’ and ‘nation,’ I argue that racism has been reconfigured in the United States since the 1980s so that those constituted as ‘(im)migrants’/ ‘foreigners’ have come to stand in for the subordinated ‘race’ of American culture. By examining how the legitimacy of subordinating ‘foreigners’ profoundly influences US immigration policies, I discuss the effects of according differential legal statuses to various groups of migrants, with a special focus on unfree H-visa workers. I show that these differentiations have fashioned a contemporary American apartheid whereby a ‘citizenship contract’ has come to overlay the more widely discussed ‘racial contract.’

Date: Wednesday, November 12th
Time: 12 pm – 1:20pm
Place: Burns Hall Room 2118

Sponsored by:
The UHM/EWC International Cultural Studies Program
Telephone: 808-944-7593 Fax: 808-944-7070
Office: Burns Hall #2069
Email:culture@hawaii.edu Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~culture

Event Sponsor
International Cultural Studies, Manoa Campus

More Information
Program Manager: Patty Harris, 944-7593, culture@hawaii.edu, http://www2.hawaii.edu/~culture/

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