This path was created by Eli Simon. The last update was by Curtis Fletcher.
Cultural Politics
What is cultural politics?
Politics touch nearly every aspect of human life—the food we eat, the streets we walk on, the cars we drive, the people we marry, the medication we take. Thus, our initial question became: how are we going to define politics? Where are we going to focus our argument? Electoral politics denotes the traditional way we think about politics—the governmental structures by which representatives are elected and laws are created. The demolition of Old Chinatown, the emergence of Union Station, and the construction of China City are a few examples of electoral politics at work. We didn’t just want to ask what, we wanted to ask why? Why were these laws passed? Why did a group of people seeking financial security and economic opportunity become targets of xenophobia, disposession, and displacement? We arrived, in the end, at a different form of politics: cultural politics. Cultural politics revolves around questions of representation. In particular, cultural politics focuses on how various facets of culture — media, entertainment, literature — shape public perception and make way for legal realities. Cultural politics often informs electoral politics. In order to understand why local and state legislators were moved to restrict Chinese immigration and limit their access to land ownership, we must understand how Chinese-Americans were perceived in the first place.Thesis
In 1934, after years of slander and misrepresentation, Old Chinatown was leveled to make way for Union Station. Four years later and just a few blocks west, Christine Sterling, the city planner responsible for Olvera street, was making way her newest brainchild — China City. Sterling packaged and sold Chinese culture in the form of Hollywood-esque storefront designs, cliched merchant costumes, and Americanized takes on traditional Asian cuisine. At first it seemed ironic that China City was selling an appropriated version of the culture that city planners had just destroyed in Old Chinatown. But we later realized the depictions of both communities could be understood through the framework of white settler colonialism. White settler colonial norms require the othering of non-white people and the devaluation of their cultures, which in turn give way to spatial realities of dispossession, displacement and de-peopling of physical space.