Lisa Lowes Power of Culture Essay – Description
Lisa Lowe’s “Power of Culture” is a dense and challenging text. She is interested in the mechanisms through which people are produced as particular kinds of subjects, particularly in relation to the nation-state and dominant national discourses. She challenges us to think about the power of alternative cultural forms (or forms produced by differently located racialized and gendered groups) to reveal something about dominant national culture (and how it operates through inclusion, exclusion, and exploitation, for instance) and the supposedly universal category of citizenship. She focuses in particular on Asian and Asian American experiences in the United States.
For PART ONE of this Discussion assignment, start by choosing ONE of the following questions and reply briefly below. In your answer, share one or two quotations from her text that you feel are important, AND several sentences of your understanding and analysis. Be sure to indicate which number question you are replying to. You can also share a specific question or confusion you have.
1) What is her specific argument about dominant national culture (see notes above)?
2) What is the significance of the public debate over the Vietnam War Memorial for Lowe’s text?
3) Why are alternative cultural forms important, according to Lowe?
4) She names Asian American culture as “a counter-site to official United States national memory and national culture.” And she emphasizes how cultural forms become sites for alternative ways of living, thinking, remembering, and being. Where in the text do you see her making this point and what do you think she means? ‘
PART TWO
After you have submitted your response to one of the questions above, respond to at least one of your classmates. Your response should be approximately 2-4 substantive sentences and should add to and enrich the thinking your classmate has share. There are a number of ways to do this, including the following:
* Reflect and Add: What do you find interesting or striking about what your classmate has shared? Can you connect it to other moments in the text or to your own interpretation/analysis? Be specific and detailed in your response.
* Ask Productive Questions: You may choose to raise questions your classmate’s post prompts for you about Lowe’s text.. These questions should be focused on Lowe’s arguments, NOT the person who wrote the post. The questions should further our collective thinking, and it may be helpful for you to speculate on possible answers.
Part 2 is
Informed Discussant Work, Part Two: Read Extra Materials and Create Annotation
For this part of the assignment, you will do some additional research and reading to contribute to your reading of the assigned course texts. You will use either J-Stor or Project Muse, two research databases available via the UW Libraries Homepage.
Project Muse link: https://muse-jhu-edu.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/browseLinks to an external site.
JSTOR link: https://www-jstor-org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/Links to an external site.
Note: You must be signed in to UW Libraries via your UW Net ID for these links to work properly.
You should find one PEER-REVIEWED scholarly article (not a book review or any other kind of article) to read to enable you to bring additional academic perspectives to our course texts. (You will need to make sure your search is for peer-reviewed articles only. If you aren’t sure, please contact me.)
For most of you, this will mean finding a peer-reviewed article that deals directly with one of course texts. For instance, if your Informed Discussant work is scheduled for one of the day’s we are discussing Toni Morrison’s Sula, you may read one of the many published academic articles about Sula. However, you may also choose to find another article relevant to our collective reading that does not directly address our course texts. For example, you might find a critical article that discusses Black feminist fiction writers that adds to your understanding/analysis of Morrison’s Sula, even if it doesn’t address Sula directly.
Your task is to read the article you find and then type a brief “Annotated Bibliography” entry—or annotation—about it. The annotation will consist of a citation, which includes publication information in MLA or another accepted academic citation format (such as Chicago or APA), followed by your annotation.
Your end result will look something like this:
Your Name
Dr. Jed Murr
BIS 379
22 February 2023
Benedikt, Michael. “Cyberspace: First Steps.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 2000. 29-44.
Your annotations follow the entry. Your annotations should include roughly four to six sentences of summary and paraphrase (briefly detail what kind of text it is; summarize main ideas and main points; paraphrase main arguments and the writer’s position or stance; directly quote useful portions or pieces of information that are better quoted than summarized) and three to four sentences of critical evaluation or analysis, focused on why the text is useful or relevant as a resource for our course, how it connects specifically to the day’s assigned texts, and what questions or insights it raises for you as a reader.
Further questions you might think about as you (re)read:
What is the primary claim(s) or argument(s) of the article?
What rhetorical strategies are being used—that is, how does the author construct the arguments she, he or they make(s)—and how effective do you think they are?
How are the stakes of the argument—why it matters—articulated in the text?
What forms of evidence does the text draw on to support its arguments?
How does the text help you to conceptualize American Ethnic Literatures and/or the particular text(s) we are reading?
You MUST post the annotation to Canvas by 11:59 PM on FRIDAY of your Informed Discussant week.
1) “Literature” keyword essay, available here: Gustafson “Literature” .pdf
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2) bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance,” from _Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures_ (MIT Press, 1990): hooks. Marginality as site of resistance.pdf
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3) Nikky Finney, acceptance speech from National Book Award, available here: Finney speech
4) Please also watch Amiri Baraka’s performance poem entitled “Why is We Americans”
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