bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
I'd Rather Play the Saxophone: Conflicts in Identity Between Vietnamese Students and Their Parents
Authors: Stimpfl Joseph , Bui Ngoc H.
Published: May 2019

Members of the Vietnamese community in Lincoln, Nebraska range in time of resettlement, background and experience in adjustment to their new home. The impact of cultural change and education on the Vietnamese youth in this community is of particular importance. The Vietnamese youth are under-examined in the areas of adjustment and identity formation. The effects of cultural conflict have profound impact on the future of Vietnamese youth. The following study presents an examination of the variables that may affect Vietnamese youth, specifically culture and education as factors in ethnic identity formation. It also presents how these factors can affect the relationship between students and parents.
Affect, Identity, and Ethnicity: Towards a Social-Psychological Mode of Ethnic Attainment
Authors: Eller Jack David
Published: May 2019

Since the days of Shils and Geertz it has been common to refer to ethnicity as a bond, a tie, or an attachment. Shils used the term “tie” in the title of his seminal 1957 article to refer to a set of social relationships, including what he called “civil,” “kinship,” “sacred,” and “primordial.” The primordial tie was notable for the “ineffable significance” which social actors attribute to it and to the relationship which it engenders: “the attachment [is] not merely to the other … as a person, but as a possessor of certain especially ‘significant relational’ qualities, which could only be described as primordial. The attachment … is not just a function of interaction.” Subsequently Geertz developed the notion of ethnic “attachment” as an affect and identity, or better yet, an affect-centered identity. The intention, often quite explicit, of these thinkers and the many who followed them was to emphasize the emotional quality of ethnicity as an explanation of its persistence and power. At the same time, as an emotional and not rational phenomenon, ethnicity was expected to decline and disappear under the onslaught of modern rationalizing social forces. This essay returns to the issue of ethnicity as an affective relationship. It will argue that affect is indeed a critical element in ethnicity but that the theoretical treatment of ethnic affect has tended to be counterproductive.
The African-American Intellectual of the 1920s: Some Sociological Implications of the Harlem Renaissance
Authors: Perry Robert L. , Peters Melvin T.
Published: May 2019

This paper deals with some of the sociological implications of a major cultural high-water point in the African American experience, the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance. The paper concentrates on the cultural transformations brought about through the intellectual activity of political activists, a multi-genre group of artists, cultural brokers, and businesspersons. The driving-wheel thrust of this era was the reclamation and the invigoration of the traditions of the culture with an emphasis on both the, African and the American aspects, which significantly impacted American and international culture then and throughout the 20th century. This study examines the pre-1920s background, the forms of Black activism during the Renaissance, the modern content of the writers' work, and the enthusiasm of whites for the African American art forms of the era. This essay utilizes research from a multi-disciplinary body of sources, which includes sociology, cultural history, creative literature and literary criticism, autobiography, biography, and journalism.
Like Sustenance for the Masses: Genre Resistance, Cultural Identity, and the Achievement of Like Water for Chocolate
Authors: Puccinelli Ellen
Published: May 2019

Laura Esquivel's 1989 Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate, neither translated into English nor published in the United States until 1992, was both an American bestseller and the basis for an acclaimed motion picture. Interestingly, though, Esquivel's work also seems to be receiving glimmers of the type of critical attention generally reserved for less “popular” works. Two particular critical studies composed in English, one by Kathleen Glenn and the other by Cecelia Lawless, have been devoted entirely to Chocolate, and both of the scholar/authors grace the faculties of reputable American institutions of higher learning. As a student whose academic experience has been replete with elitist attitudes and expressions of disdain for anything that smacks of an appeal to the masses, I was intrigued by Chocolate for this very reason; in a world where scholarly boundaries seem unalterably fixed, a work that appears capable of crossing these rigid lines is, in my opinion, both rare and admirably refreshing. In my studies, I have often hoped for more communication between “popular” and “scholarly” literature; Esquivel's novel provides not only opportunities for this dialogue but for other cross-genre discussions as well.
Editor's Note
Authors: Carranza Miguel A.
Published: May 2019

This issue of the journal includes articles that focus on a variety of topics in the discipline of Ethnic Studies. In the first article Gabriel Haslip-Viera challenges scholars to reassess the theory of human development in the Western Hemisphere. Haslip-Viera presents a compelling argument that focuses on the basic claims and methods used by Afrocentrists to support their theory. His concluding section discusses the potential consequences of this theory on future relations among African Americans, Native Americans and Latino Americans.
Community Versus Assimilation: A Study in American Assimilation at Saint Joseph's Indian Industrial School
Authors: Shillinger Sarah
Published: May 2019

No govemment policy has had more of an impact on American Indians than the boarding school movement of the early to mid-twentieth century. This movement isolated American Indian children from their homes and communities and attempted to assimilate them into European-American society. This article studies the effects of this policy on children at the Saint Joseph's Indian Industrial School in Wisconsin. It uses oral history to recapture the voices and experiences of teachers and students. The use of oral history allows a comprehensive understanding of the cultural, social and academic atmosphere of the school.
Yoruba Girl Dancing and the Post-War Transition to an English Multi-Ethnic Society
Authors: Lock Helen
Published: May 2019

This paper exemplifies the insider/outsider binary in a nation's shift towards a multi-ethnic society. The writer gives insight into the African Diaspora within England in her exploration of Yoruba Girl Dancing.
Strategies of Resistance and Disengagement in an Ethnic Enclave: EI Barrio in Aurora, Illinois
Authors: Thornburg Jack
Published: May 2019

This paper is a case study of a small city undergoing a process of demographic and ethnic change in community, empowerment, and political participation. For the dominant ethnic group these changes are threatening, but resisting the Latino community that they fear tends to set in motion the very conditions that exacerbate the growing prevalence of poverty and the attendant problems of gangs, domestic violence, and school drop-out rates. For the Latino community the challenge to such resistance is through community organizing and bringing pressure upon the city for inclusion in the political structure to influence policy regarding these problems.
Editor's Note
Authors: Estrada Larry J.
Published: May 2019

This issue of the journal takes a comparative look at the intersection of schooling, language, identity, and public policy as they impact ethnic minority population groups both domestically and internationally. In the first article Amara Holstein examines the social and political fallout of the recent anti-bilingual education initiative in California. Claimed by many as being anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic, Holstein contends that this initiative falls within a broad, historical lexicon of nativist sentiment and backlash intended to disempower Hispanics and other linguistic minorities in the United States. Her analysis also focuses on the personal voices of California Hispanics and their ambivalency towards this particular initiative.
Languages and Postmodern Ethnic Identities
Authors: Wittmann Livia Käthe
Published: May 2019

Specific discourses of our mother tongue (which is not always our mother's tongue) are supposed to decisively constitute our subjectivity. These discourses which are constituting us and are available to us offer possible identities. These identities carry ethno-culturally-specific meanings, which are symbolised within and by spoken, written, and non-verbal language/s. Are languages given the same relevance when giving meaning to postmodern ethnicity, if one understands postmodern ethnicity as a “stance of simultaneously transcending ethnicity as a complete, self-contained system but retaining it as a selectively preferred, evolving, participatory system?” Multilinguality, as it may correspond with aspects of postmodern ethnicity, seems to imply an interaction between different languages with their distinct understanding of self and the world which manifests in a kaleidoscopic view, temporarily creating new constellations of meaning.
The Playing Ground of Childhood: Boyhood Battles in Américo Paredes', George Washington Gómez
Authors: Ayers Keller Delores
Published: May 2019

Although playing is generally viewed as a childhood universal—an expected and somewhat innocuous part of children's lives—Chicano writers often particularize play's universality by constructing the diverse grounds of childhood play as sites that encapsulate conflicting subject positions. Among the Chicano texts in which playing shares this complexity as a critical locus for the child protagonist is Américo Paredes' George Washington Gómez. Paredes employs narratives of childhood play in a dialectical pattern that elucidates his protagonist's inner and outer conflicts and that also evokes Ramón Saldívar's theory of Chicano literature. While Guálinto Gomez's playworlds reflect both the violence and discrimination that surround him in the real world and highlight his struggles with his dual American and Mexican identity, Paredes provides no synthesis for his protagonist's dialectical dilemma of doubleness.
Moving Mountains in the lntercultural Classroom
Authors: Martindale Vivian Faith
Published: May 2019

Today many Alaska Natives are seeking a higher education; however due to subtle differences in communication styles between the Native Alaskan student and Euro-American instructor, both students and educator frequently experience communication difficulties. This paper examines the differences in non-verbal communication, the assumption of similarities, stereotyping, preconceptions, and misinterpretations that may occur between Alaska Native and Euro-American cultures. University classrooms are becoming increasingly multicultural, and one teaching style may not be effective with all students. Those involved with education need to promote flexibility and awareness of cultural differences in order to achieve successful communication in the classroom.
Getting into the Game: The Trickster in American Ethnic Fiction
Authors: Lock Helen
Published: May 2019

Trickster novels, especially those by Gerald Vizenor and Maxine Hong Kingston, can be used to destabilize and undermine ethnic stereotypes. As many studies show, the trickster him/herself cannot be stable and thus resists the limitations of definition as the embodiment of ambiguity. Both insider and outsider, s/he plays with the whole concept of “sides” so as to erase the distinction between them. The trickster plays the game, including the game of language, in order to break and exploit its rules and thus destabilizes linguistic markers. Kingston and Vizenor use their novels to subvert the rules of the linguistic game and free perception from stereotypic rigidity. Perceptions of race and ethnicity are frequently codified in the form of stereotypes with which we are all familiar. Once established, they, of course, prove remarkably difficult to dismantle however false or misleading they might be with regard to the race or ethnicity in question; and thus they continue to exacerbate the social tensions with which we are equally familiar. Ethnic American literature has frequently addressed this issue; in this essay I intend to look at one narrative strategy which is specifically designed to question, challenge, exploit, and even manipulate perception.
Breaking the Rules: Innovation and Narrative Strategies in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters
Authors: Rivera Carmen Haydée
Published: May 2019

Conventional approaches to literary genres conspicuously imply definition and classification. From the very beginning of our incursions into the literary world we learn to identify and differentiate a poem from a play, a short story from a novel. As readers we classify each written work into one of these neatly defined literary genres by following basic guidelines. Either we classify according to the structure of the work (stanza; stage direction/dialogue; narrative) or the length (short story; novelette; novel). What happens though when a reader encounters a work of considerable length made up of individual short pieces or vignettes that include rhythm and rhyme and is framed by an underlying, unifying story line linking the vignettes together? Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? Why does it sound and, at times, look like a poem? To further complicate classifications, what happens when a reader comes across an epistolary format with instructions on which letters to read first: letters made up of one-word lines, poetic stanzas, or italicized stream of consciousness; letters that narrate the history of two women's friendship? Is this a novel or a mere collection of letters?
Transcending the ‘Tragic Mulatto’: The Intersection of Black and Indian Heritage in Contemporary literature
Authors: Smith Lindsey Claire
Published: May 2019

The supposed plight of multi-racial persons is widely depicted in modern American literature, including the works of William Faulkner, whose stories follow the lives of multi-racial characters such as Joe Christmas and Sam Fathers, who, reflecting characteristics of “tragic mulatto” figures, search for acceptance in a racially polarized Mississippi society. Yet more contemporary literature, including works by Michael Dorris, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Clarence Major, reference the historical relationship between African Americans and American Indians, featuring multi-racial characters that more successfully fit the fabric of current American culture than do more “traditional” works such as Faulkner's. While an outdated black-white binary still lingers in American perceptions of race, increasingly, racial identity is now informed by self-identification, community recognition, and acculturation. As a result, black and Indian characters, as well as multi-racial authors, provide varied and insightful glimpses into the complexity of America's racial landscape.
Race, Sex, and Redemption in Monster's Ball
Authors: Fisher Celeste , Wiebe Carole
Published: May 2019

In this paper, we explore the way that interracial relationships between blacks and whites come to be represented as problematic for mainstream audiences. By looking specifically at the film Monster's Ball (2001), we examine how race is used to identify and characterize our culture's standard protagonist, the white male, and at how white male sexuality is constructed through the black female. Particularly striking in this film is how the social and institutional structures that create and reiterate problems of race are used to characterize the movie's central protagonists, yet then evaded and submerged in the discourse of romance.
Thomas Braga's Portingales: A Celebration of Portuguese American Culture
Authors: Silva Reinaldo
Published: May 2019

Profoundly fascinated by and connected to the ancestral culture, Thomas Braga in Portingales (1981) believes he can best express his condition as a so-called hyphenated American if he expresses himself in English rather than in Portuguese. Fully aware that English, as opposed to Portuguese, will connect him with broader audiences so as to convey his ethnic experience, Braga's poems are subtle reminders to mainstream America of the enormous contributions of the peoples of Portuguese descent to the building of the United States of America.
Beauty, Borders and the American Dream in Richard Dokey's ‘Sanchez’
Authors: Hada Kenneth
Published: May 2019

Critics have pointed out discrepancies between what is commonly understood as the American Dream in the mainstream culture at large and the fictive representation of Chicanos or Mexican-Americans who attempt to appropriate the dream as their own. For example, Luther S. Luedtke explores the Chicano novel Pocho only to conclude that this novel confirms its protagonist as a “universal man” who “suffers an existential insecurity against which no community can protect him” (14). The existential plight demonstrated in the novel is heightened because of the distance between the historical and mythical origins of the Chicanos and the white mainstream culture which posits the American Dream in confusing and alien terms.
The Ethnic Impulse in Frank X. Gaspar's Poetry and Fiction
Authors: Silva Reinaldo
Published: May 2019

Although a compelling and award-winning voice in contemporary American literature, the work of Frank Xavier Gaspar (1946-) has not received the attention it deserves. Apart from an article by Alice R. Clemente,(1) to my knowledge, there are no other scholarly publications touching upon his writings, all of which published in the course of the last seventeen years. While his work appeals to all audiences in the United States of America and even abroad — Portugal in particular — his poems dealing with issues related to his ancestral culture and ethnic background are the ones which have sparked the attention of Portuguese Americans. Prompted by Clemente's pioneer article on Gaspar's poetry and prose, in this essay my goal is to touch upon quintessentially Portuguese American issues left unaddressed in her piece. Furthermore, while I view Gaspar as a native-born American writer who resists ethnic tags, his Portuguese American background provided him with relevant materials and — to a certain extent — the impulse for writing. This is evident in his first volume of poems, The Holyoke (1988), where “ethnic signs”(2) loom more forcefully compared to his most recent work, Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004). Although it is possible to detect traces of his ethnic background in all of his published works, in The Holyoke and Leaving Pico, however, these certainly strike the reader in a more forceful manner than in his other three titles.
Editor's Note
Authors: Scott Otis L.
Published: May 2019

At first glance the articles in this volume of ESR appear as disparate entities connected only by so much glue and binding materials as necessary to construct this volume. But this is not the case. Not that there must necessarily be a nexus between the pieces, but the fact of the matter is, that there are several points of conveptual convergence between the articles contained in this volume. It is also more than a little interesting that where there is subject matter convergence it occurs at research and instructional junctures long capturing the attention of ethnic studies teacher-scholars. The works included here again turn our attention to the important subjects relating to identity formation, the socialization processes of acculturation-assimilation-nationalism and how these dynamics effect our sense of who we are and our understanding of our individual and group place in this space called the United States.
In Passing: Arab American Poetry and the Politics of Race
Authors: Wardi-Zonna Katherine , Wardi Anissa Janine
Published: May 2019

Racial passing has a long history in America. In fact, there are manifold reasons for passing, not the least of which is to reap benefits-social, economic and legal-routinely denied to people of color. Passing is conventionally understood to be a volitional act that either situationally or permanently allows members of marginalized groups to assimilate into a privileged culture. While it could be argued that those who choose to pass are, in a sense, race traitors, betraying familial, historical and cultural ties to personhood,1 Wald provides another way of reading passing, or “crossing the line,” as a “practice that emerges from subjects' desires to control the terms of their racial definition, rather than be subject to the definitions of white supremacy” (6). She further contends that racial distinction, itself, “is a basis of racial oppression and exploitation” (6).
Migratory Movement: The Politics of Ethnic Community (Re) Construction Among Creoles of Color, 1920-1940
Authors: Jolivétte Andrew
Published: May 2019

This article considers the social and economic conditions under which Creoles of Color left the state of Louisiana from 1920-1940.1 Because Creoles in the years following 1920 were legally reclassified as black, many lost their land, social and legal rights, and access to education as well as the possibility of upward mobility to which they had previously had access when they were accorded the status of a distinct/legal ethnic group. Creole families had to make decisions about the economic, social, religious, and cultural futures of their children and the community as a whole. As a form of resistance to colonial and neocolonial rule, thousands of Creoles left Louisiana, following the pattern established by members of the previous generation who had anticipated the advent and implications of the new legal racial system as far back as the mid to late 1800s and had engaged in the first wave of migration from 1840-1890, moving primarily from rural ethnic enclaves to larger urban cities within the US and to international sites such as Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America where racial lines were more fluid (Gehman, 1994).
Reader Expectation and the Ethnic Rhetorics: The Problem of the Passing Subaltern in Who Would Have Thought It?
Authors: Stevenson Pascha A.
Published: May 2019

Mrs. Norval… hoped…Lola might be now all black or all white, no matter which, only not with those ugly white spots. - Who Would Have Thought It? 1872 (78) But these snowy, equable and smooth spots … sometimes occur amongst our own people. I have myself had the opportunity of observing two instances of this kind… The skin of each was brownish, studded here and there with very white spots of different sizes. - “Mulattos” The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1865 (220) As illustrated by these two excerpts, the “mixed blood” provoked in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, as it does in Marfa Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Mrs. Norval, a kind of tension, a sometimes explicit, often insidious fear of racial unreadability and its implications for white domination.
Tongues United: Polyphonic Identities and the Hispanic Family
Authors: Medina José
Published: May 2019

In this paper I will use the Bakhtinian notion of polyphony,1 of a choral dialogue of multiple and heterogeneous voices, to elaborate a pluralistic account of cultural identity in general and of Hispanic identity in particular. I will complicate and further pluralize the Bakhtinian notion by talking about the overlapping and criss-crossing dialogues of heterogeneous voices that go into the formation of cultural identities. My pluralistic view emphasizes that cultural identity is bound up with differences and opposes those homogeneous models that try to impose a unique articulation of collective identity on the members of a group. Although I will not explicitly discuss the complex relations between cultural identity and racial and ethnic identity,2 my pluralistic view underscores that racial and ethnic elements are crucial components of cultural identity and of its heterogeneous nature; and I oppose those contemporary views that talk about “post-ethnic” and “post-racial” identities, trying to purify individual and collective identities of racial and ethnic meanings.3
Resistance and Reinvention of the Subject in Jackie Kay's Trumpet
Authors: Gülçur A. Lâmia
Published: May 2019

In her work Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval claims that although inequities in material sources and subordination by race, class, nation, gender and sex continue to operate under the protection of law and order, a new kind of psychic penetration that respects no previous boundaries is evolving. She argues that “Mutation in culture, today, makes new forms of identity, ethics, citizenship, aesthetics and resistance accessible” (36.7).
W.E.B. DuBois's “The Comet” and Contributions to Critical Race Theory: An Essay on Black Radical Politics and Anti-Racist Social Ethics
Authors: Rabaka Reiland
Published: May 2019

No longer considered the exclusive domain of legal studies scholars and radical civil rights lawyers and law professors, critical race theory has blossomed and currently encompasses and includes a wide range of theory and theorists from diverse academic disciplines. Its most prominent practitioners, initially law professors and “left scholars, most of them scholars of color” employing the work of the breathtakingly brilliant African American lawyer, scholar, and activist Derrick Bell (2005) as their primary point of departure, borrowed from many of the political and theoretical breakthroughs of black nationalism, anti-racist feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. They also employed and experimented with new cutting-edge literary techniques and social science methodologies that shaped and shaded their work and burgeoning socio-legal discourse, ultimately giving it a fierceness and flair unheard of in the history of legal studies. Early critical race theorists' work acutely accented “the vexed bond between law and racial power” (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller & Thomas, 1995, p. xiii). The emphasis on race and power quickly led them to the critique of “white supremacy and the subordination of people of color,” not simply in the legal system, but in society as a whole (p. xiii).
Racial Profiling and the War on Terror: Changing Trends and Perspectives
Authors: Bah Abu B.
Published: May 2019

Minorities in the United States have often been treated unfairly by law enforcement agencies. Prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States, Blacks were the main victims of racial profiling. Since the terrorist attack, however, Arabs and Muslims are becoming the primary targets for profiling by law enforcement agencies. There are some remarkable similarities between the profiling of Blacks and the profiling of Arabs and Muslims. In both cases, the fundamental problems with racial profiling are that it violates the civil liberties of innocent people and denies minorities the equal protection of the law. The War on Terror has redefined racial profiling. It has not only led to a shift in the target population, but it has also changed the ways in which racial profiling is conducted.
Whiteness Studies and the Colonial Aesthetic: Western Popular Culture and the Representations of Race
Authors: Cserno Isabel
Published: May 2019

As I have said before, planters are not poetical; but, my heart; if I possessed this place, methinks while young morning blushed, or high noon slept, or gentle dewy evening made nature think and pause, I would stroll upon my terrace, or sit, three parts recumbent, on one of those old oak chairs with Hasting's coronet on it, and forget the world of strife and penury and pain, till I lapsed into a citizen of the other world of peace and plenty and joy!
Signing and Signifyin': Negotiating Deaf and African American Identities
Authors: Clark Heather D.
Published: May 2019

For individuals who are both African American and Deaf finding a place to belong is a process of navigating their many cultural identities. In this paper I explore the following questions: where do individuals who are African American and Deaf find and make community? To which communities do they perceive they belong? Is their primary identity African American, Deaf or something else? Does belonging to one community negate membership in another? Does the presence of African American Deaf individuals have an impact on either community or are they forced to create an entirely new one for themselves?
Canadian Multiculturalism Ideology: Mere Tolerance or Full Acceptance
Authors: Lewycky Laverne M.
Published: May 2019

September 11, 2001 will forever be etched in the memory of Canadians who were deeply affected by the events of that day. This cataclysmic occurrence had a pivotal place not only upon the private troubles of those directly related but also upon the public issues and the consequent public policies of all of us who may not have been as directly touched. Such a life-changing experience will impinge upon the politics of our entire nation. The terrorist act was a political statement at one level which must be addressed politically as well It is noteworthy, given this context of the terrorist attack in the nation to the South, that October 8, 2001 represented the thirtieth anniversary of the political declaration of multiculturalism as a public state policy within Canada What difference does the official policy discourse and ideology of multiculturalism make in the political response to the ethnocultural and racial diversity within and without its national borders?
Artisans and the Marketing of Ethnicity: Globalization, Indigenous Identity and Nobility Principle In Micro-Enterprise Development
Authors: Chandler Robin M.
Published: May 2019

As a constructed category of human difference, ‘ethnicity’ has given way to ‘culture’ in its shared genealogy in the new millennium. Public knowledge about such phenomena as ‘ethnic cleansing’, debates on immigration, and the use of ethnicity as both a dependent and independent variable in research and policy are central realities in the domestic and foreign policies of many nations. The social psychology of group affiliation, nationalism, and the use of ethnicity (as well as gender) in workplace diversity, or the deployment of ethnicity in electoral politics continues to perplex and complicate human social interaction.
“A Shplit Ticket, Half Irish, Half Chinay”: Representations of Mixed-Race and Hybridity in the Turn-of-the-Century Theater
Authors: Carter Gregory T.
Published: May 2019

Charles Townsend's 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison's stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O'Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is “key to this capital farce,” and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert's spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O'Wang, the main character's background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring.
Rifton Finns: An Ethnic Enclave in Ulster County, New York
Authors: Roinila Mika
Published: May 2019

When you begin to consider the Finns of New York State, there are two obvious foci that have received the majority of attention in the ethnic literature. The presence of some estimated 20,000 Finns in New York City during the 1920s provided a large population with its myriad cultural, religious and social organizations and activities. The heyday of the large Finnish population has passed, and as of 2000, a total of 3,466 Finns lived in New York City.1 This number remains the highest population within the state. Due to this large population size, much has been written about their existence, for example, in Brooklyn and Manhattan.2 A second significant concentration of Finns within the state has always been the Finger Lakes region in western New York State. Here, in cities and towns such as Van Etten, Spencer, Millport, and Ithaca, activities and organizations have existed for decades and have also received academic interest.3
Trends in Black-White Church Integration
Authors: Yang Philip Q. , Smith Starlita
Published: May 2019

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).
Inside the Image and the Word: the Re/membering of Indigenous Identities
Authors: Fachin Dina
Published: May 2019

By appropriating the power of writing of the phonetic Latin alphabet and recent visual technology, new generations of indigenous people from the Americas have been able to articulate and reinforce their own sense of identity from “within” their cultural constructs. In so doing, they have been shaping new narratives of indigenous adaptation and survival based on native ontologies and epistemologies that critically decolonize the homogenizing forces of national and global rhetoric. I argue that the texts under examination put forward ways to conceive and to know individual and communal identity that cannot be understood outside specific, ancient notions of territoriality and re/membering.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Education and Abolition
Authors: Baumgartner Kabria
Published: May 2019

Some thirty years before Harriet Ann Jacobs opened the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia in January 1864, one of her first students was her fifty-threeyear-old uncle, Fred. The seventeen-year-old Harriet appreciated her uncle's “most earnest desire to learn to read” and promised to teach him.1 As slaves, both teacher and student risked the punishment of “thirtynine lashes on [the] bare back” as well as imprisonment for violating North Carolina's anti-literacy laws targeting African Americans.2 Nevertheless they agreed to meet three times a week in a “quiet nook” where she instructed him in secret.3 While the primary goal for him was to read the Bible, this moment in Jacobs' slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl revealed her early commitment to African American literacy and education as well as her rejection of the laws of American slavery. In that moment, the vocations of education and abolition took root for Harriet Jacobs.
Nisei Politics of Identity and American Popular Music in the 1930s and 1940s
Authors: Asai Susan Miyo
Published: May 2019

Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.
Poetic Economics: Phillis Wheatley and the Production of the Black Artist in the Early Atlantic World
Authors: Zuck Rochelle Raineri
Published: May 2019

This essay reads Wheatley as a key participant in the shifting economic and emotional relationships between artists, audiences, and texts that we now associate with romanticism. To recover facets of the role that the black artist played in the romantic movement(s), I examine three “portraits” of Wheatley-the poetic spectacle managed by her promoters, the actual portrait that appeared as the frontispiece for her Poems on Various Subjects, and the portrait that Wheatley herself created through her poetry. These portraits chart the tensions that circulated around the figure of the black African artist 111 the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tensions between genius and “barbarity,” originality and imitation, exteriority and interiority, and artistic expression and commodification. These binaries have often characterized the terrain of Wheatley studies, marking opposing positions and points of contention. I argue for a different way of reading, one that sees the figure of Phillis Wheatley as produced through the interplay of all of these forces within the context of the early black Atlantic. Wheatley and her work exposed both the emphasis on “authentic” self-expression through art and the ways in which the mental life of the artist became available to the reader as a consumer product. She created a different vision of the black artist than that which commonly circulated in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, one that fused Christian discourse with romantic elements of imagination, Nature, and the poetic sublime, yet remained distant from and somewhat inaccessible to white readers.
Pedagogies of Race: The Politics of Whiteness in an African American Studies Course
Authors: Jones Regina V.
Published: May 2019

This paper evaluates students' arguments for a color-blind society to avoid discussions related to the continued existence of racism in USA culture. Relatedly, this writer finds that as an black woman her status as facilitator in the classroom is directly challenged, on occasion, and that race and gender play a primary role in students' perception of classroom material and how she is perceived. Classroom discussions related to historical texts reveal that structures of domination have slanted perception of black and white people in U.S. culture. Finally, a key to open dialogue about race and racism, primarily for white students, is to explain and demonstrate the invisibility of whiteness or white privilege in American society.
“We Are Joined Together Temporarily” The Tragic Mulatto, Fusion Monster in Lee Frost's The Thing with Two Heads
Authors: Ponder Justin
Published: May 2019

In Lee Frost's 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads, a white bigot unknowingly has his head surgically grafted onto the body of a black man. From that moment on, these two personalities compete for control of their shared body with ridiculous results. Somewhere between horror and comedy, this Blaxploitation film occupies a strange place in interracial discourse. Throughout American literature, the subgenre of tragic mulatto fiction has critiqued segregation by focusing on the melodramatic lives of those divided by the color line. Most tragic mulatto scholarship has analyzed overtly political novels written by African American writers from the Reconstruction Era or Harlem Renaissance, and examining these overtly political texts has produced valuable ways to understand American racism's harsh reality. Beyond this focus on reality, however, The Thing with Two Heads is a valuable contribution to the field of tragic mulatto studies because its focus on the fantastic plot of a black/white conjoined twin provides opportunities to theorize race in ways that more reality-bound works cannot. This article explores how this horror-comedy articulates different discourses regarding interracialism, conjoined twins, and monstrosity in ways that reveal much about American ideas about race, selfhood, and identity.
Dressed to Cross: Narratives of Resistance and Integration in Sei Shônagon's The Pillow Book and Yone Noguchi's The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
Authors: Seethaler Ina Christiane
Published: May 2019

The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period [794-1185]. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in “authorial crossdressing” to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. It is especially the portrayal of what Marjorie Garber has delineated as a “category crisis” that links Japanese medieval writing and early fictional accounts by Japanese American authors. This article demonstrates that cross-dressing originates in moments of personal crisis and that its practice is sustained by the anxiety of cultural dislocation. The parallel identified between The Pillow Book and The American Diary—both texts largely ignored by academia—promises to clarify further early Japanese immigrants' experimentation with their bodies, citizenship, and other markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity.
The Dear Diane Letters and the Bintel Brief: The Experiences of Chinese and Jewish Immigrant Women in Encountering America
Authors: Cai Hong
Published: May 2019

This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, both Chinese and Jewish women shared many common experiences, such as mother-daughter conflict and identity crisis, and both of them faced a difficult challenge in assimilating into American life.
Scarlet-Letter Politics: The Rhetoric of Shame in the Campaign to Unseat President Barack Hussein Obama
Authors: Mendible Myra
Published: May 2019

This essay considers the politics of racial shaming as deployed against Barack Obama, arguing that it targeted “black” and “foreign” bodies as threats to the “American” body politic.
The Geopolitical Context of Chamorro Cultural Preservation in Guam, U.S.A.
Authors: Diaz Maria-Elena D.
Published: May 2019

An unincorporated Pacific Island territory of the United States, Guam has been under American rule since 1 898. While proudly “Chamorro,” the descendants of indigenous islanders have been American citizens since 1 950. U.S. foreign policy, Americanization of island institutions, immigration flows from Asia and Micronesia, and economic uncertainty present challenges to the perpetuation of Chamorro culture-a syncretic blend of indigenous, Spanish, and American influences that has endured through centuries of foreign domination. As a gateway from the East to the United States and a frequent destination for Micronesian immigrants from the Compacts of Free Association, Guam regularly receives immigrants from Asia and other Micronesian islands. Many immigrants arrive on Guam to fill labor shortages as professionals or construction workers, while others arrive with limited resources and skills that don't easily transfer across cultures. Adding to this mix, a major U.S. military build-up is underway to transform Guam into a forward base in the Pacific. This article provides a case study of Guam through an overview of historical influences on Chamorro culture, a description of the island's contemporary multicultural society, and a discussion of current geopolitical and social forces impacting Chamorro culture in the land “where America's day begins.”
Ethnicity and Impressions of Personality Using the Five-Factor Model: Stereotyping or Cultural Sensitivity?
Authors: Cooper Andrea Kay , Evans David Chin
Published: May 2019

The current research investigates whether communities use ethnicity as a cue when forming personality impressions of others. Past research has shown that dress, smiling, hairstyle, and even facial symmetry of targets produce systematic differences in personality impressions across the domains of the Five Factor model of personality. We investigated whether the stated or apparent ethnicity of groups and individuals also produce stereotypic impressions of personality. This study compared impressions across members and non-members of the target groups and examined “cue utility” i.e. whether impressions of the groups agreed with aggregated self-impressions by group members. In all, the results clearly suggest that people utilize ethnicity as a cue when forming impressions of the personalities of groups and individuals, and although those impressions are exaggerated consistent with stereotype theory, they confer some utility in interpersonal perceptions across cultures. Stereotypes are a strategy used to interpret the complex social environment in the absence of more specific information. When that information is available, perceptions of others become more refined and accurate.
From Modern Rock to Postmodern Hard Rock: Cambodian Alternative Music Voices
Authors: Saphan LinDa
Published: May 2019

Cambodian modernity was driven by the political agenda of the Sihanouk government beginning in the 1950s, and Cambodian rock and roll emerged in the 1960s in step with Sihanouk's ambitious national modernization project. Urban rockers were primarily upper-class male youths. In. the postcolonial era rock and roll was appropriated from abroad and given a unique Cambodian sound, while today's emerging hard rock music borrows foreign sociocultural references along with the music. Postmodern Cambodia and its diaspora have seen the evolution of a more diverse music subculture of alternative voices of hard rock bands and hip-hop artists, as well as post-bourgeois and post-male singers and songwriters.