ANNOUNCEMENTS• Need names of attendees for 4/16 CARE Project Meeting

• Office hours:

• Today! By appointment from 11 to 1• Mon 4/15 – 11 to Noon and by appointment Noon to 2:30

• For Mon: Be prepared to discuss paper prompt in depth.

• How and why is an anticapitalist critique necessarily attentive to the intersections of race, gender, class and labor?

• While such practice is transnational, how does it also pay close attention to specific places and communities?

• In other words what is the tension between a transnational understanding of globalization and a persistent sense of place consciousness in such a practice?

• Film screenings @ Arts Library! Check in at front desk.

• W 4/17, 10am-11:30 – Maquilapolis• F 4/19, 10am-11 – We Don’t Play Golf Here• M 4/22, 10am-11:30 – Maid in America

LANGUAGE & ACTIONBEYOND MASTER’S TOOLS & MASTER’S HOUSE

CULTURE AS MEDIATION, PT 1• Narrative, testimony, oral history as powerful cultural

forms of mediation because they enable understanding of individual subjectivity and larger social forces (156)

• Cannot be valorized as transparent record of reality – reveals subjectivity of individual

• Cannot be dismissed either as completely relative fiction – grounded in material experience of larger social forces

• Cannot be solely reduced to individualistic experience• Cannot be seen as totally determined by larger social

forces either

CULTURE AS MEDIATION, PT 2

• Narrative, testimony, & oral history make possible alternative frameworks of “politicization” (Lowe 158)

• “The particular location of racialized working women at an intersection where the contradictions of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism converge produces a subject that cannot be determined along a single axis of power or by a single apparatus, on the one hand, or contained within a single narrative of oppositional political formation, on the other” (Lowe 164)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS• According to Audre Lorde, what are “the master’s tools”?

What is the “master’s house”? And why can’t those tools be used to dismantle that house?

• Why does Lowe insist that an attention to “difference” as evoked by Audre Lorde’s speech on “Master’s Tools” is crucial for Asian immigrant and Asian “American” women?

• How do the narratives, testimonies, & oral histories of Asian “American” women transform silence into language and action?