Acknowledgments

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021

• Geography

Reflections on Fred Lee’s “Contours of Asian American Political Theory: Introductions and Polemics”

Routledge eBooks · 2020

• Political Science
• History
• Philosophy

Reflections on Fred Lee’s “Contours of Asian American Political Theory: Introductions and Polemics”

Politics Groups and Identities · 2018-07-03 · 1 citations

Fred Lee’s “Contours of Asian American Political Theory: Introductions and Polemics” is a welcome engagement with the idea of Asian American political theory. In particular, it usefully illuminates dilemmas both substantive and disciplinary that challenge its conventional coherence. I argue that such dilemmas ought to be kept central for its transformative vitality.

Obedience that Saves: a Dogmatic Inquiry into the Obedience of Jesus Christ in Karl Barth's Doctrine of Reconciliation as shown in his Church Dogmatics

Otago University Research Archive (University of Otago) · 2017-01-01

This thesis demonstrates the dogmatic significance the motif of the obedience of Jesus Christ has within Karl Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation as shown in the Church Dogmatics. The significance is shown by considering the threefold ‘directional’ manner that Barth treats the obedience of Jesus Christ: i) a ‘backward’ direction in drawing the incarnate obedience of Jesus into the triune Godhead ii) a present orientation in the sense of Jesus’ obedience displayed as it is in the incarnation, and iii) a ‘forward’ direction showing how the obedience of Christ leads to the obedience of those who are reconciled. At the same time, the investigation is conducted by addressing doctrinal or theological issues related to Jesus’ obedience arising from Barth’s treatment of the subject matter, rather than in chronological order as these treatments appear in the Dogmatics. The following two key findings are presented: first, in following the Tradition, Barth affirms the obedience of Jesus Christ as a genuine and authentic human obedience, involving an act of human volition in response to a higher calling or command. This genuine obedience of Jesus Christ comes to play a causative and instrumental role in God’s reconciliatory program with humankind. It is in the second key finding that we locate Barth’s distinctive contribution to the dogmatic significance of Jesus’ obedience vis-à-vis that of the Tradition. That is, Barth equates the incarnate obedience of Jesus Christ with the divine obedience of the eternal Son within the triune Godhead. In this move, Barth goes so far as to tether the command-obedience relationship between the Father and the Son in eternity to the eternally begetting-and-being-begotten relations of origin that characterize the Father and the Son within the divine processions. I argue that Barth is able to assert the notion of divine obedience only because of his underlying framework of actualistic ontology. This, in turn, is a framework specifying God’s eternal election of Jesus Christ as a divine action of self-determination that carries ontological implications for God’s triune being. Given that the second mode of being of the triune God from the outset is identified as Jesus Christ, Barth conceives the incarnate obedience of Jesus Christ as the divine obedience of the eternal Son under the trope of his actualistic ontology. The immediate result of such a conception is that the dogmatic role and function occupied by the obedience of Jesus Christ is extended from its usual domain within the economy of salvation to that of the divine will and purpose, and even to the immanent being of God. The obedience of Jesus Christ could in fact be said to occupy a co-participatory albeit
\nasymmetrically ordered role in the determination of the divine ontology itself that arises from the divine election. Barth gives maximum space to the specification of the role and function of Jesus’ incarnate obedience in a manner unprecedented within the Tradition while preserving the divine initiative and primacy. God allows the incarnate obedience of Jesus Christ to have a part in the divine self-determination that arises from the eternal decision of (self-) election, but it is still God who elects, who so determines his being in just this way, revealing himself as the God who, as Barth states, “does not will to be God without us.” (CD IV/1, p. 7)

Formative Mappings, Political Trappings

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-03-04

Abstract Contemporary scholarship on racial and ethnic politics in the United States has broadly followed three main approaches in assessing the history of race and ethnicity in the United States. We therefore map three different ways of seeing the relationship between race and ethnicity contained within Whiteness Studies, scholarship on cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, and scholarship on intersections and Intersectionality. Each locates the history of racial and ethnic difference within a larger political problematic, each attaches a different significance and valence between racial and ethnic categories, and each bears with it the particular political investments constituting its origins. By highlighting the divergent ways racial and ethnic categories are mobilized we underscore the irreducibly political nature of race and ethnicity and their ongoing generative role in American politics.

American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race

2014-07-11 · 2 citations

In contemporary American political culture, claims of American exceptionalism and anxieties over its prospects have resurged as an overarching theme in national political discourse. Yet never very far from such debates lie animating fears associated with race. Fears about the loss of national unity and trust often draw attention to looming changes in the racial demographics of the body politic. Lost amid these debates are often the more complex legacies of racial hybridity. Anxieties over the disintegration of the fabric of American national identity likewise forget not just how they echo past fears of subversive racial and cultural difference, but also exorcise as well the changing nature of work and social interaction. Edmund Fong’s book examines the rise and resurgence of contemporary forms of American exceptionalism as they have emerged out of contentious debates over cultural pluralism and multicultural diversity in the past two decades. For a brief time, serious considerations of the force of multiculturalism entered into a variety of philosophical and policy debates. But in the American context, these debates often led to a reaffirmation of some variant of American exceptionalism with the consequent exorcism of race within the avowed norms and policy goals of American politics. Fong explores how this "multicultural exorcism" revitalizing American exceptionalism is not simply a novel feature of our contemporary political moment, but is instead a recurrent dynamic across the history of American political discourse. By situating contemporary discourse on cultural pluralism within the larger frame of American history, this book yields insight into the production of hegemonic forms of American exceptionalism and how race continues to haunt the contours of American national identity.

In Defense of Women: The Cultural Defense and “Dementia Americana”

2014-07-11

Beyond the racial exceptionalism of the Japanese internment

Politics Groups and Identities · 2013-05-16 · 2 citations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See, for example, the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jarda.html. Accessed March 3, 2013. The Commission's report was published as Personal Justice Denied (1982). For instance, many have commented on how the WRA's Loyalty Questionnaire in 1943 placed Japanese internees in an ambiguous bind, both giving the WRA and Japanese internees a mechanism for declaring themselves “loyal” but also, therefore, implying that they were previously disloyal. Question 28 asked: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?” Dillon Myer himself would go on to serve as Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1950–1953 where he would take the lessons he learned as WRA Director in advocating for the policy of “Termination” wherein reservations would be broken up, Native Americans relocated to urban centers, and tribal rights removed all in the name of better integration and assimilation. Indeed, he had been cautioning against turning Japanese internees into “wards of the government” from 1943 on.

Reconstructing the “Problem” of Race

Political Research Quarterly · 2008-10-02 · 6 citations

How should the “problem” of race be conceptualized? This essay attempts to widen our understanding of the problem of race in American political discourse by examining its productive function in grounding the meaning of American liberalism. By tracing this relationship in W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, Woodrow Wilson's 1913 Gettysburg Reunion Speech, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, and Rogers M. Smith's Civic Ideals, the author argues that as long as race is conceived as the negative referent of American liberal identity, the problem of race will continue to obscure the possibilities for transformative change.