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1. From Cultural Politics to Cultural Capital
- NYU Press
- Chapter
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23 1 From Cultural Politics to Cultural Capital In order to describe the struggles that take place in the disparate fields of culture, politics, and the academy, we must specify the particular forms of capital at stake in each field, as well as the ratios of exchange by which the specific capital of one field can be transferred to another. The model of capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework that preserves the relative autonomy of different sectors of the social formation while simultaneously enabling us to grasp the dynamics of capital underlying the struggles both within and across fields. As part of the political-intellectual project of Asian American studies, literary and cultural studies have theorized in various ways the relation of culture to politics and the role of culture in the political life of Asian Americans and the academic work of Asian American studies. This chapter establishes the foundation for a model of cultural production attuned to the dynamics and relations characterizing the fields of Asian American politics, Asian American culture, and Asian American studies. This analysis relies in particular on the concepts of field and cultural capital, but it heeds Bourdieu’s own injunction that we can arrive at the most general principles only by attending to the particularities of specific cases and by excavating the structural principles and mechanisms that reproduce a field or social space. A field is constituted by a form of capital specific to it, and it consists of a set of objective relations expressed in a structure of positions. This space of positions defines a set of possible position-takings. Agents occupy particular positions in strategic efforts to maximize their share of the specific capital at stake in the field, but they can take positions only against other agents and other positions, thereby reconstituting the field. In the cultural field, occupying a position means seizing the field’s legitimate definitions and thus controlling who is or is not included in the field as well as the criteria by which value is 24 From Cultural Politics to Cultural Capital recognized. Every social formation is composed of a hierarchical structure of fields, which are relatively autonomous from one another and, more important, from the economic and political fields. The degree of a field’s autonomy is directly related to the extent to which it is able to function solely with regard to its own internal logic and rules. To locate Asian American literary studies in relation to the “community ” and the university, this chapter expands on the notion of a symbolic capital of race proposed by Viet Nguyen. The first half of the chapter asks what it would mean to think of Asian American literature or culture as constituting a new kind of cultural capital, and it does so by engaging with John Guillory’s influential book Cultural Capital. Guillory offers a brilliant and sweeping account of literature’s evolution as cultural capital across the history of “Western culture,” but I take issue with his critique of minority literature in relation to the debates over the canon and the culture wars of the 1980s. Guillory argues that it does not make sense to conceive of minority literature as noncanonical or as constituting an alternative canon because that simply means that it has no value and is therefore not worth teaching. I will demonstrate that the plan he proposes is fraught with contradictions. My argument is that the construction of a separatist minority literary field participates in a larger politics of struggle to transform the dominant cultural capital. The second half of the chapter takes up recent work in Asian American cultural studies centering on questions of identity and difference. I am especially interested in theoretical efforts in Asian American studies to negotiate the apparent contradictions between identity politics and various articulations of the poststructuralist politics of difference. I argue that Bourdieu’s model of relational analysis resolves many of these contradictions but that it also allows us to situate Asian American studies (as well as the related fields of ethnic studies , women’s/gender studies, queer studies, and so forth) within the larger academic field in a way that helps illuminate the complex interests and forces motivating these forms of academic work. As part of his response to the “crisis of representation” surrounding the controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, Nguyen proposes the concept of a symbolic capital of race. He raises the question of how the material interests of...