Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Best of 2012 Part V

I read the bulk of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, appropriately enough, on a flight to Mexico City. I’ve always appreciated the urban dystopia genre despite its obvious flaws. While Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums annihilates any particularities in the proliferation of slums throughout the world, he at the very least writes with the urgency the phenomenon demands. Boo’s book is of an altogether different nature. Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells the story of several children and families in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. Lurking throughout the novelistic narrative is a vivid critique of global capitalism. In addition to this critique, Boo attempts to display the failings …

Nueva York: Politics, Art, and the Transnational Big Apple

In Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, disaffected American star Bill Murray sleepwalks through his stay in Tokyo.  Not speaking a lick of Japanese and cynically overwhelmed by the massive high rises and technology of modern day Tokyo, Murray’s character embarks on a series of small journeys punctuated by his inability to fully grasp events as they unfold before him.  Instead, through Murray’s eyes, one experiences the city as brightly lit, whiskey induced, metropolis full of quirky Japanese and self absorbed Americans. While many critics applauded Coppola’s efforts, others saw the movie as simply another well intentioned but nonetheless painful exercise in Western …

Intimate Citizenship: The Influence of Marriage, Sexuality, and Transience on National Membership

In Spike Lee’s 2006 crime drama, Inside Man, a mysterious group of robbers with an apparent political agenda hijack a downtown NYC bank holding dozens of employees and customers hostage. Though the movie focuses primarily on the travails of embattled NYPD police detective Keith Frazer (Denzel Washington), Lee delivers a movie that encapsulates the stunning diversity of New York.  Even minor characters with small moments provide useful insights into the various racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts and tensions that embody twenty first century urban life. In particular, Lee’s treatment of Sikh American cab driver, Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) illuminates the ambivalent place of South …

The Ties that Bind: The Transnational Trick of Immobilizing the Mobile

Few words in historical discourse (outside of the word discourse mind you) elicit cynical responses more than transnationalism. If definitions remain murky for some, others argue transnational connections are falsely constructed via sophisticated argumentation and careful selection of evidence. After all, we can all agree that Kung Fu movies broadcast over superstations in Chicago and New York influenced metropolitan young people of all stripes in the 1980s, such that rap collectives like Wu Tang Clan reimagined Staten Island as Shaolin. The Wu Tang refracted these experiences through the prism of Eastern martial arts (see GZA’s Liquid Swords for a precise example). However, the pervasive …

Making the Spectral Real: Asian American Film in Glen M. Mimura’s Ghostlife of Third Cinema

“What is Asian American cinema?” asks Glen M. Mimura in Ghostlife of Third Cinema. As other scholars in related fields have addressed Asian American citizenship, housing segregation, and racialization, Mimura explores the cultural production of Asian American film and its relation to the transnational Third Cinema. Mimura describes Third Cinema as a “revolutionary international movement,” radical in its politics and form. Emerging in the 1960s, the Third Cinema proliferated over the following two decades. According to Mimura, it helped to develop community based film centers and independent Asian American cinema, while also creating spaces for previously marginalized identities, …

Goats, Swords, & Fried Oreos: The Old 321 Flea Market as a Landscape of Globalization

The Old 321 Flea Market in Dallas, NC is now known as the I-85/321 Flea Market, even though it is even farther from Interstate 85 than it is from Highway 321.  The name change is most likely designed to lure the bargain hunters who seek out flea markets to come to the small town of Dallas by suggesting that the market is right off the interstate, when it is actually situated in a semi-rural stretch of town on the way to the even tinier hamlet of High Shoals. But the name change also reflects the greater connection of Dallas and Gaston County in general to the broader world, as symbolized by the interstate that connects the area's mill villages to a more cosmopolitan circuit of commerce …

Seven Ways of Looking at a City

Assumptions about human nature have long shaped the way people think about politics, economics, and even their own personal relationships. Often these assumptions take the form of metaphors or tropes, as when we think of an election as a horse race or the workplace as a rat race, with all the unspoken implications about greed, success, failure and fulfillment they entail. A famous example of these tropes can be found in the literature on immigration, where a classic work of history, The Uprooted, approached the subject with a very different set of assumptions in 1951 than The Transplanted did in 1987. Newer literature eschews both the themes of ripping people out of one culture and planting …

America’s Ace in the Hole Is, Of Course, Its Awesomeness

The United States likes to think of itself not just as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but also as the world’s heartland of homegrown optimism. Since at least de Tocqueville, visitors have commented on Americans’ predilection for thinking big and looking on the bright side – a cultural trait that has often been linked to the American fixation with free enterprise and capitalism. A depressive poet is not likely to conquer a continent or invade everything from Mexico to the moon. As a Latin American history professor once told my class, the American businessman’s idea of history is a 45-degree angle into the future, quite unlike the squiggly, ambivalent line most …

Cosmopolitan Tensions: Contradictions in the Theory of Cosmopolitanism

Eminent philosopher Immanuel Kant has long served as a source of confusion and inspiration. Freshman undergrads grapple with his philosophical treatises in humanities classes across the nation. While Kant’s contributions to college coeds’ early philosophical foundations provide one example of his influence, recent work on the issue of cosmopolitanism has excavated his 1795 essay entitled “Perpetual Peace.” In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant suggests that trade, travel, and commerce point toward a future in which war becomes a diminishing factor. Interdependence demands peace. Under this rubric democratic states would avoid war because the need for the public’s consent amplifies the …

Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Footballers: American Antipathy toward Soccer

Don’t waste your time on soccer kid it’s a game for commie pansies … - Sports columnist Dick Young Over the past 20 or so years, the study of history through sites of leisure and sport has expanded. No longer do historians simply view sport as spectacle alone. Instead, scholars have considered the meanings and cultural importance of sport in the lives of a nation’s people. For example, Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) proves to be a largely theoretical text focusing on issues of transnationalism, identity, and social imaginaries. Built on the theoretical underpinnings of Foucault and Habermas while drawing upon the work of …