In Dante’sInferno, as is famously known, the ninth circle of hell is reserved for the most loathsome of sinners, those given special trust and love who have proven themselves traitors to God, country, and family. Most impressively, Lucifer gnaws on the heads of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius and weeps as he struggles futilely to free himself from his own entrapment. In Dante’s portrait, betrayal is a transgression in which crime provides its own punishment. Where traitor feeds upon traitors, betrayal exacts its own self-consuming vindication. Lucifer’s flapping wings only produce cold winds, gusts of ignorance and impotence that further...

During the past decade and a half, ethnic studies and American studies have begun to consider the disciplinary and epistemological relationship between their own objects and methodologies and those of diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and area studies.¹ This question has been especially significant for Asian Americans and Latina/os in the United States, because the nation has constructed each of these groups as an “alien other,” against whom to imagine itself.² Cultural critics working in ethnic studies have duly been confronted with the “both/and” impetus of the domestic and the global with respect to ethico-political action. In other words, if the...

Because U. S. racial formations have been structured as the relations between a dominant center and raced margins, one of the most troubling questions that has attended the emergence of minority discourse is the resilience of assimilation as a viable model for cultural, political, and economic access within the United States. As has been extensively documented and recounted in ethnic studies, during the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the dual political projects of the civil rights and black nationalist movements, Asian Americans and Chicana/os began considering their own positions within the nation and developing an oppositional cultural politics that interrogated...

As we saw in Chapter 3, Richard Rodriguez and Eric Liu assert that the cultural politics of minority discourse produces for its subjects a type of “professional” identity that these writers impugn. They both nevertheless participate in such a professionalization by “reporting” to their audiences on the intimate details of their family life, against the mandate by others to “not tell.” For example, inHunger of Memory, Rodriguez describes his mother’s aversion to his autobiographical inclinations: “Just keep one thing in mind. Writing is one thing, the family is another. I don’t wanttus hermanoshurt by your writings…. Especially...

In April 2000, during the height of the media and political maelstrom surrounding the young Cuban boy rescued a little over four months earlier off the shores of Florida, theWashington Postran a picture of Elián González hanging, arms akimbo, on a playground jungle gym, with a headline reading “The Passion of Elián.” The story highlighted the local religious significance that had been attributed to the plight of this “miracle boy.” The image, headline, and story elicited a symbolic order different from the otherwise tiresome framing of the case in mainstream media as a matter of national political interests...

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the question of betrayal seemed to take on an immediacy and urgency that would have been difficult to imagine when I first began writingAn Ethics of Betrayal. And yet, it remains difficult to knowwhatexactly happened on September 11. For every narrative that marks 9/11 as a singular event irreducible to anything in the nation’s—or the world’s—past, there are reminders that the state of emergency it supposedly inaugurated is “more of the same” for both people of color in the United...