Santa Clara University

Lisa Duggan
A good introduction to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, written for the general reader. Contrary to the conventional understanding of neoliberalism solely within the paradigm of economics, Duggan shows how the politics of gender, sexuality, and race have been mobilized by advocates of neoliberalism to enable the upward redistribution of wealth. Duggan argues that we need analytic frameworks that do not split economics from cultural politics, but rather comprehend them as imbricated spheres.

Mae N. Ngai
It is no surprise that Impossible Subjects has received several academic awards. Recognized and honored for its highly meticulous and detailed research, this study explains the historical context of immigration restriction in the twentieth century, as well as the construction of the category of the “illegal alien,” both concepts that many people take for granted now. Ngai demonstrates how and why laws restricting immigration were passed and enforced from 1924 to 1965, resulting in the invention of new racial categories.

Grace Kyungwon Hong
A theoretically sophisticated and highly inspired analysis of the relationship among property, consumerism, women of color, and immigrant women. In Part I, Hong demonstrates how possessive individualism has been racialized, and how women-of-color feminism provides a critique. In Part II, Hong explains how industrial workers were incorporated into consumer culture, and why consumerism is an appropriate metaphor for neocolonialism. Texts by Toni Morrison, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Dos Passos, Helena Viramontes, and others are mined for their insights.

Saidiya V. Hartman
What do pleasure and leisure mean when they are performed for one's master? What does sex mean when one is legally unable to either consent or resist? What does freedom mean in the context of racialized indebtedness and criminalization? Saidiya Hartman brilliantly explores these difficult questions of agency, terror, and power in the eras of slavery and post-slavery, exemplifying how attention to race shatters complacent assumptions about the abstract liberal subject.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450 percent in the last 25 years. What accounts for the astonishing growth of the prison industry in California, within the context of a falling crime rate? Golden Gulag astutely illuminates the crises in political economy (e.g., the fall in manufacturing employment) that gave rise to prison-building as a “fix.” Gilmore argues that prison expansion is a part of the production of racialized “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”