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270 14 —————————————————————— —————————————————————— The Ordeal of Ethnic Studies in the Age of Globalization E. SAN JUAN JR. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. . . . [T]he nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. —Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux After September 11, 2001, reflections on ethnic and racial conflicts in the “homeland” have automatically undergone surveillance and security checks. But is this a new situation? Have we, people of color in the racial polity, ever been truly released from such emergency measures? In any case, I want to frame the following discourse in the context of what precedes it: the killing of FilipinoAmerican Joseph Ileto by a white supremacist in 1999 and the trial of ChineseAmerican scientist Wen Ho Lee, and what occurred after the destruction of the World Trade Center—the murder, ostracism, and continuing harassment of thousands of South Asians and Arab Americans, coupled with the imprisonment by the government of hundreds of unnamed suspects who might be tried before military tribunals. The “war on terrorism” threatens to preempt all agendas. With the persistence of the neoconservative tide and the accelerated rollback of civil rights gains and initiatives throughout the country, it might be superfluous if not an otiose imposition to rehearse at this time the predicament of ethnic studies in the academy today. What can be more droll for besieged scholars, or even dangerous for community activists and partisans of social justice? It might be the “changing same,” as Amiri Baraka puts it. But history never repeats itself in exactly in the same manner—because we intervene through collective praxis, memory, reinscriptions, and other transformative ways. And often the past, the repressed has had a way of returning without consulting us in order to make us aware that history is what hurts. The cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and Assata Shakur, not to speak of Wen Ho Lee and who knows how many undiscovered cases of enslaved migrant workers in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and the new global cities—all these remain “hurts” left for us to discover. They are not Baudrillard’s simulacras or counterfactual simulations regurgitated by cyborgs. George Lipsitz (1998) has cogently warned us of the “ruinous pathology of whiteness” that continues to sustain the “absence of mutuality,” responsibility, and justice in our society, while David Harvey (2000) reminds us how Marx long ago taught us that the constructions of race and ethnicity are implicated in the ongoing circulation process of variable capital— labor power as commodity is now racialized in the global marketplace policed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. With the changed global/local conditions, a reassessment of our critical tools and paradigms is needed. The conversation on the situation of Ethnic Studies today is always an act of historicizing, a process of articulation in the moments of passage from one crisis to another. Every interruption of “business as usual,” no matter how minor, opens up the space for strategic interventions. Crisis not only implies danger but also provides the break for seizing opportunities to intervene in refashioning our life-world. Whether before or after September11, the discourse on race and ethnicity— both dynamic sociopolitical constructs—remains as politically charged as before. The terrain of controversy is sedimented by objective contradictions that cannot be flattened by the customary pedagogical formula of either “teaching the conflicts” or replaying the “intersections of class, race, and gender” in the classroom. Less insistent now is the debate over terminologies: race vis-àvis racial formation, race versus ethnicity, and so on. The predicament I address may lie in the forgetting of origins and concomitantly in the loss of purpose. The program brochure I revised three years ago for Washington State University ’s Department of Comparative American Cultures (CAC) features its beginning in the mid-seventies with the setting up of individual programs and their gradual if contentious coalescence: Chicano Studies, Black Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies. Aside from the tasks of improving ethnic representation in body counts of...

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