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The Ruptures of American Capital

Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor

2006
•
Author:

Grace Kyungwon Hong

The Ruptures of American Capital

An incisive and far-reaching account of how race and gender reveal the fissures of capitalist society

The Ruptures of American Capital examines women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women's culture in order to argue that race and gender are contradictions within the history of U.S. capital that should be understood as marked by its crises. Interweaving discussion of U.S. political economy with literary analyses, Grace Kyungwon Hong challenges the fetishization of difference that is one of the markers of globalization.

Grace Kyungwon Hong gives us an impassioned and careful argument for an intersectional feminist analytics as an ongoing mode of resistance to new conditions of capitalism and racism and the importance of literature that expresses such resistance.

—

Inderpal Grewal, author of Transnational America

Universality is a dangerous concept, according to Grace Kyungwon Hong, one that has contributed to the rise of the U.S. nation-state that privileges the propertied individual. However, African American, Asian American, and Chicano people experience the same stretch of city sidewalk with varying degrees of safety, visibility, and surveillance.

The Ruptures of American Capital examines two key social formations—women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women’s culture—in order to argue that race and gender are contradictions within the history of U.S. capital that should be understood not as monolithic but as marked by its crises. Hong shows how women of color feminism identified ways in which nationalist forms of capital, such as the right to own property, were repressive. The Ruptures of American Capital demonstrates that racialized immigrant women’s culture has brought to light contested modes of incorporation into consumer culture.

Interweaving discussion of U.S. political economy with literary analyses (including readings from Booker T. Washington to Jessica Hagedorn) Hong challenges the individualism of the United States and the fetishization of difference that is one of the markers of globalization.

The Ruptures of American Capital

Grace Kyungwon Hong is assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Ruptures of American Capital

Grace Kyungwon Hong gives us an impassioned and careful argument for an intersectional feminist analytics as an ongoing mode of resistance to new conditions of capitalism and racism and the importance of literature that expresses such resistance.

—

Inderpal Grewal, author of Transnational America

Hong deftly interweaves her discussions of the U.S. political economy and culture with brilliant observations and highly original interpretations of texts on women of color writers from Hisaye Yamamoto and Toni Morrison to Jessica Hagedorn and Helena Viramontes.

—

Elaine H. Kim, University of California Berkeley

Hong offers a deeper understanding of the cultural implications involved in the production and reproduction of American capital.

—

Journal of American Ethnic History

The Ruptures of American Capital

contents

Introduction

Part I

1. The Possessive Individual and Social Death: The Complex Bind of National Subjectivity
2. Histories of the Dispossessed: Property and Domesticity, Segregation and Internment

Part II

3. Bad Workers, Worse Consumers: U.S. Imperialism and the Trouble with Industrial Labor
4. Consumerism without Means: Immigrant Workers and the Neocolonial Condition

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited

Index