Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Nadia Y. Kim In Disciplinary Futures, edited by Nadia Y. Kim and Pawan Dhingra, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.
In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells the stories of Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women, finding that they are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization.
Prof. Nadia Kim in her new book, ‘Refusing Death,’ chronicles how Asian and Latina immigrant women activists for environmental justice in Los Angeles—namely cleaner, more breathable air—redefine racism and classism as a result of their struggles with environmental racism and classism, and their specific social positionings under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy.
This talk will address how US racism pivots as much on nativist injustices – suffered mostly by Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Middle Eastern ethnics – as it does on injustices specific to Black Americans. Prof. Nadia Kim evidences the point by way of research on Latinx and AAPI immigrant activism, as well as an analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. Although sociology has certainly given a nod to nativistic racism, mostly in relation to the Latinx population, its core theories, frameworks, and methodologies have not centered “the citizenship line”; as such, it has not defined sociology the way the color line has. Yet, the racialized insider/outsider axis has long separated “us white Americans” from the brown brother, terrorist, war-time enemy, socioeconomic threat (e.g., academic threat), exotic seductress, anchor-baby maker, and maternity tourist. As this list of representations reveals, gender, class, and the body are also interrelated with race, and all are vital to the remaking of citizenship by the mostly Mexican and Filipin@ immigrant activists whom Prof. Kim studies in Los Angeles. Not only would a citizenship-centered sociology best grasp their efforts and the implications thereof, but, in my view, would have also predicted the arrival of the Trump era, the other focus of her talk.
In recent decades under runaway neoliberalism, “foreignized” and unauthorized immigrants have increasingly made political inroads by way of grassroots community activism and by sidestepping the need for formal political channels and, at times, even dismissing them. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, 49 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, Prof. Nadia Kim … Read more
Nadia Y. Kim is Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University and the 2018 Thomas Tam Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her research focuses on transnational experiences of US race and citizenship inequalities among Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans in (neo)imperial context and among Asian and Latinx activists for Environmental (Health) Justice as well as immigration and education reform in Los Angeles; she also specializes in race/gender/class intersectionality, cultural globalization, and race theorizing.
Kim is author of Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (Stanford, 2008), an exploration of how Koreans and Korean immigrants have navigated American (neo)imperial race inequality and ideology since World War II and by transnationally connecting both societies. In addition to garnering two American Sociological Association book awards for Imperial Citizens, Kim has won multiple best article awards, early career awards, and teaching honors. She is nearly done completing her current book, We the Polluted People: Immigrants Remap Race, Class, Gender & the Body to Remake Citizenship (Stanford University Press), which examines how legal Asian and unauthorized Latinx immigrants fight nativist racism by way of a new politics of citizenship, one that prioritizes transnational, communal, embodied, and emotive politics.