Posts Tagged ‘history’

Book Review – Beyond Walls: Reinventing the Canada-United States Borderlands

// August 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Education, Political Theory

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I just finished a book review for the Journal of Landscape Research. The book is aptly titled ‘Beyond Walls: Reinventing the Canada-United States Borderlands‘ because the entire book is a complete reinvention, devoid of much historical understanding or exploration of how the Canada-U.S. border is so ‘benign.’ Of course, I was nicer in my book review parts of which I can share:

Konrad and Nicol claim that their purpose is “not to attempt a comprehensive history in a book devoted largely to contemporary border issues…[but to] entice readers to search beyond the national narratives…” (64). While the last chapter on transnationalism provides some narratives of people living in the borderlands, it leaves out much of the complications from the new security border. For example, the border fence between Canada and the United States in Derby Line, Vermont is spreading hatred and discontent among residents as they can no longer see long-time neighbors.

Additionally, while recognizing that it is futile to talk about the border without talking about immigration issues (210), the authors shy away from delving into this homeland security imperative, which has completely transformed the cultural landscape. The fact that Canada and the United States do not dub each other as ‘foreign’ is worth further historical examination than the book provides.

Since the evolving borderlands are not cloaked by violence and anguish of power struggle and the changes are aligned in the interests if both countries, Konrad and Nicol conclude that the Canada-United States border offers a model of future borderlands.

(more…)

Journal of Peasant Studies – Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India

// September 23rd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Desi-Indian, Ethnic Studies, Nationalism, Political Theory

This book review should appear in the upcoming edition of the Journal of Peasant Studies. I cannot publish the whole bit here even though it is my work, since I signed over licensing rights but it should be available through your college databases.

I don’t know whether I will have time for more book reviews in the future or if it is an endeavor that I am any good at, but it was worth experimenting and I am not too displeased with the results. (The Publisher ain’t complaining; why should I)?

Review: Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India, University of California Press, 2007.

by Prerna Lal

Small excerpt:

The untold narrative of peasant classes marginalized from the promise of the postcolonial nation-state is a popular subject of research and criticism among subaltern scholars seeking to pose ruptures and discontinuities in the hegemonic history of Indian nationalism.

In Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India, Chaturvedi embarks on this project after a chance discovery while pouring through archives on the agrarian economy of Gujarat: he discovers notes by the district magistrate about the historically-celebrated Patidars forcibly extracting labor from the Dhalara peasants in Kheda. Upon further investigation, Chaturvedi discovers that the Dharalas were considered a ‘criminal class’ by both the colonialists and Indian nationalists through the passage of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and given their treatment, it came as no surprise that the Dharalas opposed Patidar-led nationalist politics along with colonialism.

Enamored by the prospects of an untold history of peasant pasts, the central thesis of this scholarship revolves around the actions, practices and discourses of the Dharala peasants before the emergence of an Indian nation-state. Chaturvedi claims that the Dharalas were political in their own right and their opposition to Patidar nationalism allied with Gandhi did not denote that these peasants lacked an understanding of politics or an inability to imagine political community. On the contrary, through rigorous fieldwork and archival study, Chaturvedi lays out a fragmentary and episodic history of the Dharala peasants that establishes their broad political discourses, complex understandings of political community, and subsequent resistance to both colonialism and nationalism.

If history is indeed written by victors…

// May 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // All things LGBT

I take great inspiration from this quote by Jennifer Beals at an NAACP event a few years ago:

“It has been said, ‘History is written by the victors.’ I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history. Imagine if all of our stories were told?”

Yesterday, Ilene Chaiken, producer, writer and director of the L Word wrote something she called a rant about how when the L word is over next year, we would again be relegated back into the closet. Once again, we would hop from channel to channel trying to find some representation or other of our lives, some acknowledgment of our existence. She pretty much ends with a call to action:

And for those of us in the LGBT community, I say, if history is indeed written by the victors, let’s make ourselves victorious by writing our own history… and directing it and producing it and starring in it.

I hardly have any skills in screenwriting, much less acting. My artistic skills are also sorely lacking though I can always use Photoshop. But I think I am trying to say, in my own way, how much I believe in writing our own stories, in controlling (or trying to) our own destinies. So day after day, I blog away, sometimes about exceedingly important social issues, other times about my own addictions and obsessions, but I know that I have a space, a niche on my blog. And it does reach out to some people.

Today I told a reporter interviewing me about the pro-migrant santuary sphere what purpose or objective we were trying to achieve and I told him that as an individual I am trying to change the discourse of the immigration debate; to move beyond “illegal is illegal.” Because, seriously, besides redundant, it really doesn’t do anything to reform our broken system. But I am not too bent on convincing the Minutemen (or the Neo-Nazis and whatever anti-gay groups are called)–it is the mainstream American, the working class person that we hope to win over.

I sometimes feel a sense of betrayal to some or other aspect of my identity–it cannot be helped. I cannot possibly represent every social identity that is expected of me and neither can I vouch to speak for anyone else but myself. As an immigrant who has seen some really dark days of immigration to this country, I have been part of a movement of undocumented students, to get my dear friends to start blogs, to take back the discourse in the debate over our future. My MA thesis was mostly about a country that we left behind but a culture that we have held onto. It pains me at times to read bad news about Fiji, but I trudge on. My gayness probably shames the Indian community (that I avoid like the plague) but its my pride and empowerment, no matter how silly it might sound to be proud of your sexual orientation–after all, it cannot be helped. But I indulge myself even though I am still too shy to go to Pride or other LGBT social events to which I am invited (or maybe just a homebody)!

I don’t know what sort of history I am supposed to write or be a part of at the end of the day but I know that I don’t want to give anyone the pen or paper to write my story for me. Sometimes I feel daunted by a huge responsibility, like a wounded soldier in a war for which I did not sign up; I just want to disappear into oblivion for a few days. Other times, I write for myself out of total self-absorption (maybe like right now)! I don’t know if JB would consider my incessant blogging about our stories, our lives, our troubles as a radical act. I suppose the net has created a space for the subaltern to speak in–and the subaltern is speaking out.

This is probably one of my shout-outs to my dear friends in the pro-migrant sanctuary sphere for promoting a sense of belonging, to my idols Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman and the entire cast/crew of the L word for helping us form a community and something to hang onto, to my professors for guiding me towards the light, and to everyone reading for encouraging me to carry on. We may call this my rant. Si, se puede.

A History of Xenophobia in U.S. Immigration Policy and the new McCarthyism

// March 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Immigration, Nationalism

Discrimination against those that are seemingly foreign-born and ‘different’ from the

(White Protestant) norm is pervasive in the immigration control history of United States.

It goes back to when the United States was a budding new nation of (illegal) immigrants from Europe and conscious of the ‘dangerous’ Irish and ‘revolutionary’ French migrating into the country.

Response: Congress passed legislation in 1798 lengthening the period of years required for citizenship from five to fourteen and also gave the President the power to deport any alien deemed a threat to public safety.

Next came discrimination against Chinese laborers most of whom had been welcomed into the country as cheap labor in the 1860s but with the economic crisis of 1873, faced nativist fears.

Response: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which created the category of ‘illegal immigrant’ for the first time, establishing border controls and sparking violence against Chinese migrants.

But the country still needed cheap labor and migrants continued to flow into the United States to fulfill that role, this time from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Response: Besides the many acts of violence against these immigrants, Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act in 1924 that strictly limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Entering the Cold War period, we are struck with the lunacy of McCarthyism, and hence heightened fear of ‘strangers’ and dissent.

Response: The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 set quotas of 100 immigrants only from each country in Asia, while immigrants from the United Kingdom and Germany consisted seventy percent of the annual immigrant quota. On top of this, noncitizens faced deportation for simply harboring radical and supposedly subversive ideas.

The witch hunts were truly on at this shameful period in United States history. However, we came out of our ‘temporary insanity’ made progress in the 1960s with the Immigration and Nationality Act that abolished discriminatory quotas and gave preference to skilled workers.

As immigration from across the border increased and we noticed a proliferation of ‘brown’ skin and Spanish languages in school, anti-immigration efforts were launched again, this time squarely at Latinos. In the 1990s, Proposition 187 in California was an act to deny public education to children of illegal immigrants, and soundly defeated by the Courts.

The anti-immigrant fervor did not let up, especially with 9-11 and the economy taking a nose-dive, again we were more fearful of ‘difference.’

Response: International students were restricted and hassled by immigration authorities, visa petitions incredibly backlogged especially from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines, and for a short while, even post-operative transsexuals denied residency based on marriage to partners of the opposite sex.

Now we have ICE agents conducting raids, separating children from their parents and locking teenage students in detention centers for months, deporting students for being truant and even going after sanctuary cities.

I am having a déjà vu of the witch hunts conducted during McCarthyism. Think about the similarities for a second. This anti-immigration climate is ideologically-driven and we are using countless resources to round-up and question hard-working Americans all over again, separating them from loved ones and smearing their names.

I wonder what we would call this era when we look upon it shamefully in the distant future. Let’s hope we wake up from this period of temporary insanity soon.