Resistance strategies can quietly reproduce the very exclusions they contest

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Resistance efforts can be complicit with the very exclusionary power they oppose — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1243; Anti-conformity movements reproduce the conformity they reject — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 728; Resistance acts often reinscribe capitalist and bourgeois power rather than escape it — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 78 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Resistance efforts can be complicit with the very exclusionary power they oppose #corroborates (0.97) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1243