LITMIR.BIZ

Winner, 2019 Isis Duarte Book Prize, given by the Haiti/Dominican Republic Section of the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies Association [/b] Highlights the histories and cultural expressions of the Dominican people [b] Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance. Dixa Ramírez places the Dominican people and Dominican expressive culture and history at the forefront of an insightful investigation of colonial modernity across the Americas and the African diaspora. In the process, she untangles the forms of free black subjectivity that developed on the island. From the nineteenth century national Dominican poet Salomé Ureña to the diasporic writings of Julia Alvarez, Chiqui Vicioso, and Junot Díaz, Ramírez considers the roles that migration, knowledge production, and international divisions of labor have played in the changing cultural expression of Dominican identity. In doing so, Colonial Phantoms demonstrates how the centrality of gender, race, and class in the nationalisms and imperialisms of the West have profoundly impacted the lives of Dominicans. Ultimately, Ramírez considers how the Dominican people negotiate being left out of Western imaginaries and the new modes of resistance they have carefully crafted in response.

Подробнее

How the immigration policies and popular culture of the 1980's fused to shape modern views on democracy In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcomed exclusively as laborers. In The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration, Leah Perry argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular media, such as Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca, Perry shows how even while “multicultural” immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between law and culture, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.

Подробнее

In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.

Подробнее

Winner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Book Design From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italians have shaped the history of California wine. More than any other group, Italian immigrants and their families have made California viticulture one of America’s most distinctive and vibrant achievements, from boutique vineyards in the Sonoma hills to the massive industrial wineries of the Central Valley. But how did a small group of nineteenth-century immigrants plant the roots that flourished into a world-class industry? Was there something particularly “Italian” in their success? In this fresh, fascinating account of the ethnic origins of California wine, Simone Cinotto rewrites a century-old triumphalist story. He demonstrates that these Italian visionaries were not skilled winemakers transplanting an immemorial agricultural tradition, even if California did resemble the rolling Italian countryside of their native Piedmont. Instead, Cinotto argues that it was the wine-makers’ access to “social capital,” or the ethnic and familial ties that bound them to their rich wine-growing heritage, and not financial leverage or direct enological experience, that enabled them to develop such a successful and influential wine business. Focusing on some of the most important names in wine history—particularly Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallos—he chronicles a story driven by ambition and creativity but realized in a complicated tangle of immigrant entrepreneurship, class struggle, racial inequality, and a new world of consumer culture. Skillfully blending regional, social, and immigration history, Soft Soil, Black Grapes takes us on an original journey into the cultural construction of ethnic economies and markets, the social dynamics of American race, and the fully transnational history of American wine.

Подробнее

As the United States struggled to absorb a massive influx of ethnically diverse immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, the question of who and what an American is took on urgent intensity. It seemed more critical than ever to establish a definition by which Americanness could be established, transmitted, maintained, and judged. Americans of all stripes sought to articulate and enforce their visions of the nation’s past, present, and future; central to these attempts was President Theodore Roosevelt.Roosevelt fully recognized the narrative component of American identity, and he called upon authors of diverse European backgrounds including Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunne to promote the nation in popular written form. With the swell and shift in immigration, he realized that a more encompassing national literature was needed to “express and guide the soul of the nation.” Rough Writing examines the surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Roosevelt’s America and American literature.

Подробнее

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice,’ Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity. Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Question’ in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Подробнее

How does a 'national' popular culture form and grow over time in a nation comprised of immigrants? How have immigrants used popular culture in America, and how has it used them? Immigration and American Popular Culture looks at the relationship between American immigrants and the popular culture industry in the twentieth century. Through a series of case studies, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick uncover how specific trends in popular culture—such as portrayals of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema, the zoot suits of the 1940s, the influence of Jamaican Americans on rap in the 1970s, and cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s—have their roots in the complex socio-political nature of immigration in America.Supplemented by a timeline of key events and extensive suggestions for further reading, Immigration and American Popular Culture offers at once a unique history of twentieth century U.S. immigration and an essential introduction to the major approaches to the study of popular culture. Melnick and Rubin go further to demonstrate how completely and complexly the processes of immigration and cultural production have been intertwined, and how we cannot understand one without the other.

Подробнее

Punctuated by marches across the United States in the spring of 2006, immigrant rights has reemerged as a significant and highly visible political issue. Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of U.S. Citizenship brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality.

Подробнее

The many lenses of racism through which the white imagination sees Mexicans and Chicanos Historically, ideas of whiteness and Americanness have been built on the backs of racialized communities. The legacy of anti-Mexican stereotypes stretches back to the early nineteenth century when Anglo-American settlers first came into regular contact with Mexico and Mexicans. The images of the Mexican Other as lawless, exotic, or non-industrious continue to circulate today within US popular and political culture. Through keen analysis of music, film, literature, and US politics, Whiteness on the Border demonstrates how contemporary representations of Mexicans and Chicano/as are pushed further to foster the idea of whiteness as Americanness. Illustrating how the ideologies, stories, and images of racial hierarchy align with and support those of fervent US nationalism, Lee Bebout maps the relationship between whiteness and American exceptionalism. He examines how renderings of the Mexican Other have expressed white fear, and formed a besieged solidarity in anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Moreover, Whiteness on the Border elucidates how seemingly positive representations of Mexico and Chicano/as are actually used to reinforce investments in white American goodness and obscure systems of racial inequality. Whiteness on the Border pushes readers to consider how the racial logic of the past continues to thrive in the present.

Подробнее

Since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, nearly 100,000 Korean women have immigrated to the United States as the wives of American soldiers. Based on extensive oral interviews and archival research, Beyond the Shadow of the Camptowns tells the stories of these women, from their presumed association with U.S. military camptowns and prostitution to their struggles within the intercultural families they create in the United States. Historian Ji-Yeon Yuh argues that military brides are a unique prism through which to view cultural and social contact between Korea and the U.S. After placing these women within the context of Korean-U.S. relations and the legacies of both Japanese and U.S. colonialism vis á vis military prostitution, Yuh goes on to explore their lives, their coping strategies with their new families, and their relationships with their Korean families and homeland. Topics range from the personal—the role of food in their lives—to the communalthe efforts of military wives to form support groups that enable them to affirm Korean identity that both American and Koreans would deny them. Relayed with warmth and compassion, this is the first in-depth study of Korean military brides, and is a groundbreaking contribution to Asian American, women's, and «new» immigrant studies, while also providing a unique approach to military history.

Подробнее