Cultural Citizenship as Subject‐Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States, 1996

Abstract

Taking an ethnographic approach, the author considers citizenship a cultural process of “subjectification,” in the Foucaldian sense of self-making and being-made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration. His approach constitutes an intervention into the conventional theorizing of American citizenship solely in terms of racial politics within the framework of the nation-state. The San Francisco Bay area was one of the major sites of resettlement for refugees from all over the Third World, the majority of whom were Southeast Asians. The moral imperative to offer refugees shelter has been a hallmark of US policy since 1945, breaking from earlier policies that privileged race, language, and assimilation concerns about human suffering. Mutual class and racial discrimination thus broke through the surface of what initially appeared to be a negotiation over normative cultural taste in the urban milieu.