Strange Affinities

“In a world reorganized by neoliberal globalization, the stark inequalities of new class and racial formations require newly sharpened analytic and political tools. The essays collected in Grace Kyungwon Hong’s and Roderick A. Ferguson’s Strange Affinities address these realities, stretching our too static concepts and methods, and challenging our political visions. Drawing on women of color feminism and queer of color critique, this indispensable volume suggests new modes of analysis for ethnic studies and feminist and queer theory, and it provides new ways of thinking the intertwined histories of race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality for the twenty-first century.” - Lisa Duggan, author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity

“This ambitious and theoretically compelling volume lays the groundwork for a ‘new ethnic studies’ by centering gender and sexuality within comparative race projects. In a globally integrated economy, with older forms of colonialism and the nation-state giving way to new modes of neocolonial exploitation and domination under the shadow of global capitalism, the need for a new ethnic studies that can unpack the political and cultural implications of these evolving social relations in various contexts and locations is ever more urgent.” - David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

“[T]hese essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis.” - Anna Pegler-Gordon, Journal of American Studies

“The contributors’ . . . many pieces convey both an astonishing range of insights and a tone that takes differences within difference as salutary, if not always comfortable.” - David Roediger, American Quarterly

"By deploying alternative comparisons across minoritized differences, the essays in Strange Affinities provide original analyses of racialization that unravel or unsettle existing categories of race and ethnicity (such as Black, Latina/o, and Asian)—or cut across them—to better articulate how racialized subjects and their relations are always already constituted by gender and sexual differences." - Yu-Fang Cho, National Political Science Review