Resistance efforts can be complicit with the very exclusionary power they oppose

Evidence

What about those who do not actively serve the nation through military service, who do not work for the government, are not heterosexual, or are not religious? Are they not equally American? In contesting the exclusion of Arabs and Muslims from the U.S. national imaginary, CAIR ends up relying on other narratives of exclusion. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have written, strategies of resistance can be complicit with strategies of power: “Practices that are resistant to a particular strategy of power are never innocent of or outside power, for they are always capable of being tactically appropriated and redeployed within another strategy of power, always at risk of slipping from resistance against one strategy of power into complicity with another.” While the Ad Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations clearly aim at producing a more inclusive framework for U.S. citizenship, their public service announcements participate in the formation of a particular exclusionary version of diversity that requires individuals to approximate a patriotic sameness in order to gain access to cultural citizenship. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1243

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘patriotic sameness’ as a condition for accessing cultural citizenship.
• XREF: The Gupta-Ferguson point about resistance being complicit with power echoes Foucault’s power/resistance analysis and the ‘model minority’ critique in Asian American studies. — connects to: Dissent is neutralized by demands for a universal alternative system — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 227; Liberation movements inherit the deformity of what they oppose — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 196; Marcuse’s call for repressive tolerance would only reinforce the powerful’s apparent impartiality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: a piece examining how inclusive diversity campaigns in any field (corporate, national, institutional) always smuggle in their own thresholds of acceptable difference.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that inclusion is always purchased at the price of a new exclusion is genuinely paradigm-reorienting, not merely a well-made point.