Questions

I'm sorry for being late... I got a bad cold last week. Take care guys...

Historiography question

Throughout our class, we dealt with some redemptive histories for working ladies, Aboriginal people, and illegal aliens. With regard to the histories, I cannot but think of the questions of Spivak, Can the subaltern speak? in the context of historiography. How can we get a legitimacy for this kind of histories even though all historians are not the voiceless and marginalized? How can we judge and conclude life and culture of the subaltern? Can we just answer that it just depends on historian’s close examination or sincerity on his/her subjects? Or can we just say that historian’s racial, ethnic, social, economic, and gender background can get a legitimacy for his/her work like Enstad and Ngai? If Raibmon were a descendent of Aboriginal people, her work would get more legitimacy?

When we think of Ngai’s racial background as a first generation immigrant and social background as an activist for labor movement, these backgrounds give her a certain right to represent illegal aliens or add an aura to her book? I do not deny that these experiences might lead her to a better investigation and research for her subjects. Moreover, by focusing on sociolegal history rather than cultural and micro history of illegal aliens, Ngai’s history is relatively free from the criticism on the problem in representation of historical subject. But still, I am curious about the question, because I am studying a history of gay culture of 20^th century America as a straight Korean.

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History Question

As Ngai points out in the introduction, “this book addresses these and other issues by charting the historical origins of the “illegal alien” in American law and society and the emergence of illegal immigration as the central problem in U. S. immigration policy in the twentieth century”(3).

In this sense, this book only shows the one-sided gaze from America to illegal alien. For example, when she mentions about social backgrounds of the anti-Filipino riots (109-116), she only presents the viewpoints from American which had promoted the colonized identity of Filipino. As Dave mentioned, this book does not present any agency of illegal alien, and represent any resistance of the subaltern to its readers. Does this book reproduce a narrative of victim who has no power to change anything? She seems to believe Bhabha’s notion that “the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation”(14), but she focus on examining the power of colonial world rather than resistance of illegal alien in this book. Does the fact degrade the potential of this book to rescue illegal alien as an agent who must fight with and change the nation?