Disciplines Unbound: Notes on Sociology and Ethnic Studies

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510 Symposia management is notforeveryone. It is acomfort- ideas into management. Since I like moving able location only if you are willing to move between disciplines and between theory and beyond the boundaries of sociology and, at the practice, I wouldn't trade places with anyone. same time, are inclined to bring sociological <strong>Disciplines</strong> <strong>Unbound</strong>: <strong>Notes</strong> on Sociology and Ethnic Studies YEN LE ESPIRITU University of California, San Diego The new social movements of the 1960s and sociology, the Chicago School sociologists spoke the post-1965 increases in racialized immigrant powerfully to the social issues of industrialization populations transformed the academy, usher- and urbanization through their attention to ing in new subjects of social knowledge as well as everyday experience. In the late 1950s, C. new critical social knowledges (Seidman 1994). Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination advo- These new subjects posed new questions, chal- cated a critical social science, urging sociologists lenged the dominant paradigms of academic dis- to commit themselves to an activist critique and ciplines, and contested the separation of reconstruction of society. But there were also knowledge and politics. The new critical knowl- prominent countertrends; in particular, during edge seeped into the traditional disciplines, but the postwar decades, the growth of the research took full shape in the emerging interdisciplinary university and of funding sources for the social fields of Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, Third sciences "scientized" sociology (Long 1997: World Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer 9-10). Anchored in positivist epistemologies, Studies. It was amid this changing intellectual the disciplinary mainstream of sociology became and political milieu that I entered the United increasingly more specialized and correspond- States and eventually the university. Arriving ingly less engaged with related disciplines; its from Vietnam in 1975 and entering higher edu- claim to universal and objective knowledge also cation in the early 1980s, I inherited a more moved the field away from an explicit commit- democratized and diversified university and a ment to social activism (Sprague 1998). more critical and politicized body of social Paradoxically, even as sociologists wrestled knowledge. By the time I began graduate school with issues of power, conflict, and inequality, in the mid-1980s, I had come to view the uni- they have largely neglected or subordinated race versity as a potentially important site for and thus have missed the manner in which race activism a site to generate critical social has been "a fundamental axis of social organiza- knowledge and practices aimed at social change. tion in the U. S." (Omi and Winant 1994: 13). Focusing my scholarship on comparative race The great social theorists of the nineteenth cen- and ethnic relations, I received my graduate tury all predicted that race and ethnicity con- training in sociology but have worked since then ceptualized as remnants of a preindustrial in the interdisciplinary field of Ethnic Studies. It order would decline in significance in modern is the relationship between sociology and Ethnic society. For example, the classical Marxist Studies both the gaps and the overlaps that I understanding that capital seeks "abstract labor" will attempt to sketch in this brief essay. overlooks the ways in which capital has profited At its best, sociology grapples seriously and precisely from the "flexible" racialization and effectively with issues of social inequality, pow- gendering of labor. In the United States, before er, and collective action. From its inception, the 1 960s, much of the sociology of race sociology has asked difficult questions about expressed assimilationist principles and predict- important social issues and believed that it could ed that with each succeeding generation, U.S. inform social action in answering them. The ethnic groups would improve their economic founding sociologists Marx, Weber, Durk- status and become progressively more similar to heim, Simmel, and others all responded to the the "majority culture" (Park 1950; Gordon crises of emerging industrial capitalism and 1964). Developed to explain the experiences of intended to shape the course of historical events European immigrants and their children, this through their social theories. Within American assimilationist framework did not differentiate
Syrnposia 511 between the experiences of racialized minorities the complex roles played by race and ethnicity and those of white ethnic groups, and therefore in social relations as a way to produce new epis could not account for the enduring and specific temologies and new data on social power, social ways in which race as manifested in conquest, institutions, and social identities. genocide, slavery, and immigration has been The early Ethnic Studies scholarship and ingrained in the nation's social structure and programs were intensely nationalistic. Writing culture. from an anti-assimilationist stance, many schol- The social upheavals and minority move- ars sought to unearth a "buried past," to chroniments of the 1960s underscored the centrality of cle traditions of protest and resistance, and to race in American life and shattered the myth of establish that racialized populations have been the inevitability and even the desirability of absolutely crucial to the making of history. assimilation. Race relations along with pover- Though important, this cultural nationalist ty, gender, and sexuality surfaced as an urgent paradigm tended to homogenize differences, social problem. Sociologists varied in their assuming heterosexuality and subordinating responses. Some sought to uncover and fill gaps issues of gender and social class. For example, in sociological knowledge by documenting the early Asian-American cultural nationalism puraccomplishments and contributions of previous- sued an aggressively masculinist agenda "to chally unstudied and uncelebrated individuals and lenge the metonymic equation of Asian with the groups. Others began to incorporate race into feminine" (Yanagisako 1995: 287). Confronted their research, but as a mere variable or as a with a history of painful "emasculation," these source of research rather than as a central theo- male writers took whites to task for their racist retical concept. Still others conceptualized race myths, but were often blind to their own accepas a "problem" to be managed and to get beyond. tance of the racialized patriarchal construct of Conceptualized primarily in terms of difference, gender stereotypes (Cheung 1990: 236-37). The race remains a subordinate component of broad- focus on individual groups also obscured the er and supposedly more important social rela- ways in which racialized ethnicity is relational tionships, especially class. By treating race as a rather than atomized and discrete, and the ways property of individuals instead of a principle of in which group identities necessarily form social organization, sociologists saw "difference" through interaction with other groups through but failed to "see differently." In other words, the complicated experiences of conflict and cooperinclusion of race in sociology has most often ation and in structural contexts of power. been additive, not transformative. But racialized groups are heterogeneous; their The Ethnic Studies response was different. cultures are varied and unfixed; their group Emerging from the student and community boundaries are unstable and changeable; and grassroots movements of the late 1960s and ear- their identities are marked with identities of ly 1970s, Ethnic Studies claimed the academy as gender, sexual preference, class, and religion. one site of struggles over culture, education, and These complex realities the products of citizenship (Lowe 1996: 37). Explicitly critical uneven histories and unequal power relationsand oppositional, this scholarship condemned challenge the binaries implicit in the cultural the production of"objective" and "universal" nationalist paradigm, and they demand that knowledge that misinterprets, misinforms, and Ethnic Studies scholars pay attention to the erases the histories, experiences, and actions of complicated, conflicted, and composite nature racialized groups; and it demanded more inclu- of all social identities, particularly to the insepasive, situated, and transformative knowledge. rability and mutually constitutive realities of The Ethnic Studies critiques of socially sanc- race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, tioned forms of knowledge echo those raised by writing from and about the realities and comsociologists of knowledge: Both call attention to plexities of living on the borderlands, Gloria the ways in which struggles over the production Anzaldua (1987) insists on the interconnectedof knowledge over meanings, ways of assessing ness and simultaneity of the often contradictory "truths," and control of discursive production aspects of her gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and authorization are intimately connected to and feminist politics. Calling attention to the struggles over the (re)production of power and interconnections between patriarchy and the inequality. However, the primary intellectual racialized capitalist state, Chandra Mohanty goal of Ethnic Studies is specific: to investigate (1991) argues that the definition of citizenship is
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Disciplines Unbound: Notes on Sociology and Ethnic Studies

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