Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the "strange affinities," afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.
Contributors
Victor Bascara
Lisa Marie Cacho
M. Bianet Castellanos
Martha Chew Sánchez
Roderick A. Ferguson
Grace Kyungwon Hong
Helen H. Jun
Kara Keeling
Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
Jodi Melamed
Chandan Reddy
Ruby C. Tapia
Cynthia Tolentino

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction / Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson 1
I. Alternative Identifications
1. Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead / Lisa Marie Cacho 25
2. I = Another: Digital Identity Politics / Kara Keeling 53
3. Reading Tehran in Lolita: Making Racialized and Gendered Difference Work for Neoliberal Multiculturalism / Jodi Melamed 76
2. Undisciplined Knowledges
4. The Lateral Moves of African American Studies in a Period of Migration / Roderick A. Ferguson 113
5. Volumes of Transnational Vengeance: Fixing Race and Feminism on the Way to Kill Bill / Ruby Tapia 131
6. Time for Rights? Loving, Gay Marriage, and the Limits of Comparative Legal Justice / Chandan Reddy 148
7. Romance with a Message: W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess and the Problem of the Color Line / Sanda Mayzaw Lwin 175
3. Unincorporated Territories, Interrupted Times
8. "In the Middle": The Miseducation of a Refugee / Victor Bascara 195
9. Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Mestizaje through the Chinese Presence in Mexico / Martha Chew Sánchez 215
10. Fun with Death and Dismemberment: Irony, Farce, and the Limits of Nationalism in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People and Ana Castillo's So Far from God / Grace Kyungwon Hong 241
11. Becoming Chingón/a: A Gendered and Racialized Critique of the Global Economy / M. Bianet Castellanos 270
12. Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship / Helen H. Jun 293
13. "A Deep Sense of No Longer Belonging": Ambiguous Sties of Empire in Ana Lydia Vega's Miss Florence's Trunk / Cynthia Tolentino 316
References 337
Contributors 359
Index 363

Grace Kyungwon Hong is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor.

Roderick A. Ferguson is Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique.