by Lisa Sun-Hee Park
about Lisa Sun-Hee Park
Lisa Sun-Hee Park (she/her) is Professor and Chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Entitled to Nothing: The Struggle for Immigrant Health Care in the Age of Welfare Reform and co-author of The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden.
Assimilation
The definition of “assimilation” and its subsequent usage has long been a contentious issue in American scholarship. Fundamentally, assimilation raises difficult questions about the social composition of a society or culture. More specifically, the debates around the term address the adaptation of those populations or individuals understood as outside or different from mainstream society. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “assimilate” as a verb meaning to “take in (information, ideas, or culture) and understand fully” and “absorb and integrate.” The dispute over the meaning of assimilation follows the intertwined history of racial formation, immigration politics, and national identity in the United States. In 1897, W.E.B. Du Bois published “The Conservation of Races,” in which he argued against assimilation. Du Bois pushed for the substantive retention of racial difference, beyond that of physical difference, in acknowledgment of distinct, racial experiences and their particular contributions to society. In this way, to assimilate was understood as meaning to absorb into white America, which requires the negation of black experience and knowledge. He asked, “Have we in America a distinct mission as a race—a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is self-obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood...
Migration
The study of modern human migration takes place across multiple disciplines and engages a wide variety of methodologies, and yet issues of gender and sexuality have largely been understood as marginal to this pivotal area of research. This essay highlights key contributions regarding migration by gender and sexuality scholars. First, research on women’s migration experiences has opened new historical understandings of national inclusion and exclusion. Second, critical, queer, and trans migration studies approaches have scrutinized normativity in ways that have produced new and generative questions regarding state-based rights and policies. Third, and relatedly, this critique has forced us to rethink such fundamental social concepts as citizenship, belonging, and borders. To begin, we know that migration is not a haphazard event. Rather, patterns of human migration follow established global political, economic, and military linkages. Saskia Sassen’s (1990, 1999) work has been pivotal in countering the myth of migration as an indiscriminate flow, or “mass invasion,” of the global poor. And while the sources, routes, and numbers of transnational migration may have changed over time in accordance to shifts in capital, technology, and military priorities, its integral role in providing the labor essential for the global economy remains constant. For example, Kitty...