| This dissertation asks: how is it possible to engage in immigrant, racial, and indigenous issues when neoliberal politics has appropriated the progressive discourse of "fairness," "justice," and "racial equality?"; It opens with a reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau to establish the theoretical and historical terrains of liberalism, social Darwinism, and statist employments of hybridity. The remainder of the dissertation, however, is organized around three core chapters. The Hawai'i chapter begins with the Rice v. Cayetano Supreme Court Case to stage two contending notions of equality. Whereas native Hawaiian activists argued for equality based on the righting of historical wrongs, Rice's neoliberal litigants sought a "racial equality" where all Americans are equal. The chapter argues that as long as native Hawaiian advocates pursue equality within the framework of Constitutional law, they will be more than likely to fail, since the objectivity of law ignores the specificities that differentiate Rice from other inquiries into racial discrimination. The chapter proceeds by destabilizing the neoliberals' argument, asking not "Who are native Hawaiians?" but instead, "How were Hawaiians produced as a racial group?"; The US chapter explores recent attempts to answer the question, "Who Are We?" By examining current events---the Trent Lott controversy, Huntington's latest polemic, and the US 2000 Census---it foregrounds the neoliberal attempt to domesticate the complexity of America's racial makeup through the impositions of an antiracial, ahistorical we-ness. It concludes by evincing how neoliberal celebrations, those that herald "an end of racism," recode overt discrimination and obscure intra-national hierarchies.; The last core chapter situates the critique of neoliberalism in an examination of Japan's so-called "immigration problem." It charts a trend towards an individuated society, which has been consolidated around the recapturing of a lost Japanese essence. To illustrate the simultaneous concealment and exposure of intra-national difference, the chapter examines the disruptive position of the Latin American-born nikkeijin who have "returned" to live and work in Japan, arguing that their incommensurablity (neither resolutely "foreign" not essentially "native") loosens Japan's biopolitical boundaries in a manner that can create a more hospitable engagement with alterity. |
