UC San Diego

In U.S. Racial Imaginaries I argue that late 20th and early 21st century U.S. globalization discourse is shaped and informed by threat as the new global order is imagined to challenge U.S. hegemony in the global theater. The threat is imagined as the declining meaning of the borders of the nation-state as demarking U.S. economic and cultural production. The threat is also perceived as the fear that the U.S. will be displaced as the preeminent global leader by newly emerging economies as they challenge U.S. sovereign claims to new markets and consumers. The call for a global civil society or a "flattening" of the world also produces a fear of the (dangerous) loss of possibility for a single dominance or leadership. In this context I see how U.S. political discourse and cultural products represents global Others as "family" and "friend" that accompanies nativist projects in the domestic front. I see this conjoined love and demonization the Other as "international family romance." Global Others are measured against an idealized First World that reinforces the idea that the U.S. is an ideal patriarch for global infants and youth. Thus, I read dominant figuration of the globe as an enlarged "family" as an attempt to position the First World nation as the sole site of affiliation that is responding to the globalization and transnationalization of human interactions and political, economic and cultural processes that threatens to displace the First World nation as the ideal body and arbiter for the new global order. In a different way, I argue that neoliberal economics, policies, and ideology presses for increased differentiation of labor and production that are imagined to be ideal for particular national, racial, gendered, sexual, and aged bodies. These differences are subsumed and managed through a manufacturing of a hegemonic pluralistic discourse that informs and is shaped by the production of the globe as a romantic site where desiring partners meet each other. As I explore throughout this project, dominant U.S. pluralistic discourses reifies and naturalizes differentiation of racial Others in a manner produces them as lacking fitness to lead the globe and thus always needing U.S. guidance