American Studies

Heavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying "excessive" styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship.

A leading authority's panoramic history compares the experiences of immigrant-ethnic groups, African-Americans, and Native Americans to each other and in relation to the national political culture.

Asian American Youth covers topics such as Asian immigration, acculturation, assimilation, intermarriage, socialization, sexuality, and ethnic identification. The distinguished contributors show how Asian American youth have created an identity and space for themselves historically and in contemporary multicultural America.

Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing on Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles from 1900 to 1945, George J. Sánchez explores the process by which temporary sojourners altered their orientation to that of permanent residents, thereby laying the foundation for a new Mexican-American culture. Analyzing not only formal programs aimed at these newcomers by the United States and Mexico, but also the world created by these immigrants through family networks, religious practice, musical entertainment, and work and consumption patterns, Sánchez uncovers the creative ways Mexicans adapted their culture to life in the United States. When a formal repatriation campaign pushed thousands to return to Mexico, those remaining in Los Angeles launched new campaigns to gain civil rights as ethnic Americans through labor unions and New Deal politics. The immigrant generation, therefore, laid the groundwork for the emerging Mexican-American identity of their children.

Today as in the past there are many cultural and commercial representations of American Indians that, thoughtlessly or otherwise, negatively shape the images of indigenous people. JolivZtte and his co-authors challenge and contest these images, demonstrating how Native representation and identity are at the heart of Native politics and Native activism. In portrayals of a Native Barbie Doll or a racist mascot, disrespect of Native women, misconceptions of mixed race identities, or the commodification of all things 'Indian', the authors reveal how the very existence of Native people continues to be challenged, with harmful repercussions in social and legal policy, not just in popular culture. The authors re-articulate Native history, religion, identity, and oral and literary traditions in ways that allow the true identity and persona of the Native person to be recognized and respected. It is a project that is fundamental to ethnic revitalization and the recognition of indigenous rights in North America. This book is a provocative and essential introduction for students and Native and non-Native people who wish to understand the images and realities of American Indian lifeways in American society.

Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. When you think of African American history, you think of its heroes--individuals endowed with courage and strength who are celebrated for their bold exploits and nobility of purpose. But what of black villains? Villains, just as much as heroes, have helped define the black experience. Ranging from black slaveholders and frontier outlaws to serial killers and gangsta rappers, Hoodlums examines the pivotal role of black villains in American society and popular culture. Here, William L. Van Deburg offers the most extensive treatment to date of the black badman and the challenges that this figure has posed for race relations in America. He first explores the evolution of this problematic racial stereotype in the literature of the early Republic--documents in which the enslavement of African Americans was justified through exegetical claims. Van Deburg then probes antebellum slave laws, minstrel shows, and the works of proslavery polemicists to consider how whites conceptualized blacks as members of an inferior and dangerous race. Turning to key works by blacks themselves, from the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits--controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary. Ultimately, Van Deburg brings his story up-to-date with discussions of prison and hip-hop culture, urban rioting, gang warfare, and black-on-black crime. What results is a work of remarkable virtuosity--a nuanced history that calls for both whites and blacks to rethink received wisdom on the nature and prevalence of black villainy.

How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era. Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture. Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history. In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority. Eyerman explores how the American identity was, and is still being established, through both historical and more recent events, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the election of a Black president, the Charlottesville confrontation, and the violent conflict at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He further shows how each event revitalized the trauma narratives stemming from the nation's founding tensions, mobilizing social forces around the idea of white superiority and white consciousness. Tracing the historical contexts and social conditions under which individuals and groups move through this process, the author also looks forward at the prospects of the ideology of white supremacy as a political force in the United States.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The struggle toward Native American self determination has been a long and difficult one. Beginning with the Washinton State fish-ins and the Red Power movement of the 1960's, Native Americans have become more proactive regarding their treaty rights and tribal sovereignty. Over the past twenty years, Native Americans have embarked upon educational reform, cultural revitalization, economic development, and protection of their resources. A new generation of Indian leadership has emerged to respond to the challenges facing Native communities and their survival. This book examines this Native American political and cultural resurgence and contemporary Native American-Anglo relations in the United States and Canada. Each chapter in the volume has been written by a scholarly authority in the field. Contributors include: Thomas McGuire, Gary Anders, Curtis Berkey, Gregory Campbell, Teresa LaFramboise, Ward Churchill, Vicki Page, C. Matthew Snipp, Gary Sokolow, Michael Moore, and Ralph W. Johnson. A brief overview of each of the areas of native policy proceeds each chapter. With a comprehensive bibliography of Native American literature, a glossary of Native American terms, and an index, the book will be valuable in library reference collections and in courses on Native Americans, race and culture, and public policy.

America's suburbs have been transforming. The conventional story of suburbs as bastions of white, middle-class homeowners no longer describes the suburbs of America's cities. Today they house a more typical cross-section of the nation--rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. Stories of everyday suburban life, in the process, have taken on new inflections. Nowhere are these changes more vivid than in Los Angeles. In this suburban metropolis and global powerhouse, lily white suburbs have virtually disappeared, and over two-thirds of the County's suburbs have become majority minority. Examining this vanguard of change from the postwar to the present, The New Suburbia follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. They faced a choice: would they remake the suburbs, or would the suburbs remake them? In places like Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, suburbanites faced the challenges of living together in difference. Historian Becky Nicolaides explores a range of community experiences, from internal resegregation to suburban poverty, an embrace of law-and-order culture to police brutality, friendly neighbors to social withdrawal. In some communities, diverse residents continued longstanding habits of exclusion and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. In others, they embraced more inclusive, multicultural suburban ideals. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained--low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and families seeking the good life. An authoritative work based on a half-century of quantitative data and unpublished oral histories and interviews, The New Suburbia explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.

When Pocahontas, America's first "ethnic" heroine, laid her head over John Smith's to save him from her father, she also unknowingly lay down certain themes that would permeate America's female ethnic literary tradition and culture from that moment on. Using the figure of Pocahontas as a representative symbol or story in the American cultural imagination, this is the first study to examine American women's fiction--from Our Nig by Mrs. H.E.W. Wilson, the first novel by a black woman, to the writings of Anzia Yezierska, Gertrude Stein, and Toni Morrison--in terms of gender and ethnicity, terms that Dearborn finds essential to our understanding of American culture. Pocahontas left no "authentic" written record of herself, a fact that Dearborn uses to launch her wide-ranging discussion of the problems of authenticity, authority, and genre that plague the ethnic female literary tradition. She then goes on to consider the various elements of the Pocahontas story, such as generational conflict, renunciation of one's ethnic origins, and intermarriage, that resurface in American women's fiction as dominant ethnic themes in American culture. Finally, Dearborn suggests that American women writers, in taking ethnicity as an integral part of the American identity, can perhaps best portray what it has meant to be a woman and an outsider in American culture.

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please. As Black people around the world live a racial identity that is not shed, in a cultural moment of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book asks how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both dangerous and a space for finding cultural allies. Featuring the work of some of the visionaries of Hip-hop theater including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch, this book explores the work of groundbreaking Hip-hop theater and performance artists who have engaged Hip-hop's Blackness through popular performance. The book challenges how we understand the performance of race, Hip-hop and Blackness in the age of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. In a cultural moment where racial identity is performed through Hip-hop culture's resistance to the status quo and complicity in maintaining it, Hodges Persley asks us to consider who has the right to claim Hip-hop's blackness when blackness itself is a complicated mixtape that offers both consent and resistance to transgressive and inspiring acts of performance.

In contemporary Indian Country, many of the people who identify as "American Indian" fall into the "urban Indian" category: away from traditional lands and communities, in cities and towns wherein the opportunities to live one's identity as Native can be restricted, and even more so for American Indian religious practice and activity. Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves explores a possible theoretical model for discussing the religious nature of urbanized Indians. It uses aspects of contemporary pantribal practices such as the inter-tribal pow wow, substance abuse recovery programs such as the Wellbriety Movement, and political involvement to provide insights into contemporary Native religious identity. Simply put, this book addresses the question what does it mean to be an Indigenous American in the 21st century, and how does one express that indigeneity religiously? It proposes that practices and ideologies appropriate to the pan-Indian context provide much of the foundation for maintaining a sense of aboriginal spiritual identity within modernity. Individuals and families who identify themselves as Native American can participate in activities associated with a broad network of other Native people, in effect performing their Indian identity and enacting the values that are connected to that identity.

This new, enlarged edition of an influential book originally published in 1972 as The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnicsextends the author's wise and generous view of ethnicity. Its aim "is to raise consciousness about a crucial part of the American experience: to involve each reader in self-inquiry. Who, after all, are you? What history brought you to where you are? Why are you different from others?" But the point of such inquiry is civility: "The new ethnic consciousness embodied in this book delights in recognition of subtle differences in the movements of the soul. It is not a call to separatism but to self-consciousness. It does not seek division but rather accurate, mutual appreciation." This new edition contains six new essays by the author, including the acclaimed "Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective." New, too, is Novak's comprehensive introduction, bringing the argument up to date. Novak describes how and why ethnicity has become a prominent issue in American politics. He also sharply denounces the current ideology of "multiculturalism" as a disfiguration of genuine ethnicity. "Multiculturalism is moved by the eros of Narcissus" Novak writes, "the new ethnicity is driven by the eros of unrestricted understanding." When the book first appeared, Time said that "Novak has attacked the American Dream in order to open up a possible second chapter for it." Newsweek called it "a tough-minded, provocative book which could well signal an important change in American politics." This new edition adds crucial distinctions for those seeking an intelligent path through such current-day mystifications as "multiculturalism" and "diversity." Twenty-five years ago, Novak's argument led the way in focusing on families, neighborhoods, and other "mediating institutions" of civil society. It is an argument critical to a realistic sense of national community.