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  • The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor
  • jennifer y. chung
The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. By Grace Kyungwon Hong. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005

We are arguably living in an era of U.S. economic, military, and cultural dominance. Some declare that America is at its height; others contend that we are witnessing its decline. Lines are drawn and redrawn that divide—justifiably (or not)—conservative and liberal; optimist and pessimist; oppressor and oppressed. Regardless of our particular allegiances and realities, we find ourselves living in and with "American capital." Taking a step back, what is American capital? How has it survived and thrived? Given its apparent penchant for multiplication, incorporation, and absorption of "difference," what, then, are the possibilities for resistance? Grace Kyungwon Hong tackles these questions in The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor.

To begin, Hong situates her analysis of American capital on the terrain of culture. Culture does not transcend the material world or material realities but "is itself always a material and social practice" (xii). It is "a site of struggle" over how we make sense of the world and is, thus, "ordered by relations of power" (xi, xii). In making the connection between culture and capitalism, Hong finds David Harvey's work useful. Harvey provides a historical narrative toward the end of capital, recounting its ebbs and flows and heralding its eventual demise. However, he also considers the role of culture through capital's cycles. Hong's critique of Harvey is that he identifies only one contradiction within capitalist development: overaccumulation. She points to the inadequacy of an over-reliance on political economic analysis. Rather, Hong contends that there are multiple contradictions in capital because political-economic processes inflect racialized and gendered difference. Culture not only reflects these multiple processes, they become sites for resistance. And it is in culture thus fashioned that Hong premises her text. [End Page 115]

Hong's understanding of culture and its possibilities is grounded in women of color feminist practice. For Hong, women of color feminism is not an identity category but is a "methodology for comparative analysis" (xvi). She emphasizes the importance of a reading practice or methodology, where meaning-making is the source and substance of a movement. By compiling the contributions of various women of color feminists, Hong establishes three key components of this methodology: first, intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw and similarly, Cherríe Moraga's analysis, in which racial and gender formations are produced relationally. Second, identity politics as defined by the Combahee River Collective: "We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else' oppression" (as cited in Hong, xxvii). Third, the conviction that contradictions are the "root of our radicalism" (Moraga and Anzaldúa as cited in Hong, xxviii) and that differences are the basis for community (drawing from Lorde).

Despite this catalogue, Hong is careful not to reify women of color feminism. She recognizes that there is a long history of women of color organizing, as noted by Angela Davis. Rather, Hong identifies a particular moment in this critical practice that marks the shift from the national phase of American capital to its global phase. The two unique phases are characterized by distinct economic processes: Fordism and imperialism, respectively. Hong notes expressly that women of color feminism, while a methodology, is also a historical formation of cultural production that signaled crisis within the national phase. Using this methodology, Hong names racialized immigrant women's culture as marking rupture in the global phase. This is a difficult task as it requires expressing "erasures at the very moment of articulation" (xxiv). Historically literature has been one avenue to "seize the imaginative" for "different ends" (ibid.). Women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women's culture do just this; they are sites for contesting American capital even as capital works, at the same time, to subsume racialized and gendered difference.

Hong utilizes literary criticism as the primary method...

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