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Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap

Gilda L. Ochoa

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and ... More

Academic Profiling focuses on the schooling experiences and relationships between the two fastest growing groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latinas/os. At a time when politicians and pundits debate the sources of an achievement gap, Academic Profiling turns our attention to students, teachers, and parents to learn about the opportunity and social gaps within schools. In candid and at times heart-wrenching detail, students in a California public high school share stories of support and neglect on their paths to graduation. Separated by unequal middle schools and curriculum tracking, students are divided by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. While those in an International Baccalaureate Program boast about socratic classes and stress release-sessions, students outside of such programs bemoan unengaged teaching and inaccessible counselors. Labeled “the elite,” “regular,” “smart,” or “stupid,” students encounter differential policing and assumptions based on their abilities. These disparities are compounded by the growth in the private tutoring industry where wealthier families can afford to spend thousands of dollars to enhance their children’s opportunities, furthering an accumulation of privileges. However, in spite of the entrenchment of inequality in today’s schools, Academic Profiling uncovers multiple forms of resilience and the ways that students and teachers are affirming identities, creating alternative spaces, and fostering critical consciousness. As the story of this California high school unfolds, we also learn about the possibilities and limits of change when Gilda L. Ochoa shares the research findings with the high school.Less

The American Dream in Vietnamese

Nhi T. Lieu

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ... More

Using research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, this book explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. The text claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry. The book examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and websites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. It shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity. This text demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, the book finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.Less

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (ed.)

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in ... More

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is an eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party. For all its cultural and historical interest, this story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, the text tells of how Haywood grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers Union, supported protests in Chicago against Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985.Less

Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State

Kumarini Silva

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized ... More

Brown Threat makes a critical intervention in U.S based race studies. The book positions a category of ‘brown’ identification (along side identity) as a form of organizing race and racialized hierarchies in contemporary culture, especially in the wake of September 11. Here, brown is seen as both a product of historical xenophobia and slavery in the United States, and as a newer form of ongoing racism tied to notions of security and securitization. In order to illustrate this process, each chapter maps various junctures where the ideological, political and mediated terrain intersect, resulting in both an appetite for all things ‘brown’ by U.S. consumers, while at the same time various political and nationalist discourses and legal structures conspire to control brown bodies (immigration, emigration, migration, outsourcing, incarceration) both within and outside the United States. The book explores this contradictory relationship between representation and reality, arguing that the representation acts as a way to mediate and manage the anxieties that come from contemporary global realties, where brown spaces, like India, Pakistan, and the amalgamated Middle East, pose significant economic, security, and political challenges to the United States.Less

Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity

John Hartigan Jr.

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists ... More

Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.Less

The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California

Wendy Cheng

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At ... More

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At a moment in which Asian Americans and Latinas/os are becoming a significant presence in American suburbs, such dynamics illustrate the increasingly relevant role of middle-income, majority-nonwhite spaces to understanding racial formation in the twenty-first century. In particular, the development and assertion of an emergent multiracial, nonwhite identity points to the social, cultural, and political possibilities we might find in the rapidly increasing number of “majority-minority” suburbs in the United States to challenge the reproduction of white privilege and racially exclusive notions of belonging. In its conceptualization of regional racial formation, this is the first work to explicitly link the importance of place and place-making to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential concept of racial formation. The main audience for this book will be scholars and students in ethnic studies, American studies, urban and suburban studies, geography, sociology, California and Los Angeles studies.Less

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections ... More

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections between Coleman’s murder and an online war of words and music he was having with another Chicago rapper in a rival gang. This book points out how common this type of incident can be when rap groups form as extensions of gangs. Gangs and rap music, it argues, can be a deadly combination. Set in one of the largest underground music scenes in the nation, this book takes readers into the heart of gangsta rap culture in Chicago. From the electric buzz of nightclubs to the sights and sounds of bedroom recording studios, the book presents gripping accounts of the lives, beliefs, and ambitions of the gang members and rappers with whom the author spent six years. A music genre obsessed with authenticity, gangsta rap promised those from crime-infested neighborhoods a ticket out of poverty. But while firsthand experiences with gangs and crime gave rappers a leg up, it also meant carrying weapons and traveling collectively for protection. Street gangs serve as a fan base and provide protection to rappers who bring in income and help to recruit for the gang.Less

A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i

Hokulani K. Aikau

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their ... More

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. This book gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion. Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the Church. This book traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the Church as a “chosen people”—even at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the Church were being codified. The book shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.Less

Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout

Lynn Mie Itagaki

Racial Burnout: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and the Crisis of Civil Racism examines cultural responses to the riots through the aesthetics and politics of the post-civil rights era and argues that ... More

Racial Burnout: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and the Crisis of Civil Racism examines cultural responses to the riots through the aesthetics and politics of the post-civil rights era and argues that this historical event interrupts the rhetoric of civil racism: the maintenance of civility at the expense of racial equality. As a manifestation of structural racism, civil racism includes the active, though often unintentional, perpetuation of discrimination through one’s everyday engagement with the state and societyLess

Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks

Katharine Capshaw

Civil Rights Childhood shifts critical attention towards the qualities in black children's lives that received photographic attention during their day but that have faded from memory of the civil ... More

Civil Rights Childhood shifts critical attention towards the qualities in black children's lives that received photographic attention during their day but that have faded from memory of the civil rights movement, such as childhood joy, pleasure, and creativity. Drawing on photographic theory and black cultural studies, the project examines a variety of children's photographic books, including texts by prominent authors like Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and recovers books by lesser-known black writers and artists. The project studies texts emerging from the documentary tradition of the 1930s, lengthy historical narratives that include photographs, books that conjoin photographic images with other visual media, and photographic picture books for the very young. By considering books that represent the struggle for citizenship to black children, the project sheds new light on the ongoing attempts by photographers and writers to intervene in stories of civil rights that ignore child involvement or emphasize child passivity. This project enables new recognition of the role of representation to advancing social justice and determining progressive race relations. Recuperating this affirmative perspective on youth during the civil rights movement complicates and extends understanding of the role of photography to integration and civil rights efforts; it permits a more expansive awareness of black child social and political experience in the wake of Brown v. the Board of Education; and it reveals the pivotal role of civil rights representation to contemporary children's perspectives on race relations.Less

Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

Grace Kyungwon Hong

This book utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyse works of cultural production by people of color as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary ... More

This book utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyse works of cultural production by people of color as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is first and foremost a structure of disavowal enacted as a reaction to the successes of the movements for decolonization, desegregation, and liberation of the post-World War II era. It does so in order to posit that racial, gendered, and sexualized violence and inequity are conditions of the past, rather than the very foundations of contemporary neoliberalism’s exacerbation of premature death. Neoliberal ideologies hold out the promise of protection from premature death in exchange for complicity with this pretense. The writings and archival materials of the late Barbara Christian, Death Beyond Disavowal and other author’s works find the memories of death and precarity that neoliberal ideologies attempt to erase. This books treatment of neoliberalism expands upon the typical definitions of neoliberalism in order to describe it as first and foremost a structure of erasure, to center race, gender, and sexuality, and to posit cultural production as an effective rejoinder to neoliberalism’s violence against people of color. Furthermore, this book situates women of color feminism, often dismissed as narrow or limited in its effect, as a powerful diagnosis of and alternative to, such violence. Thus, it situates culture and ideology as political economic forces, and argues for the importance of women of color feminism to any critical engagement with contemporary neoliberalism.Less

From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption

SooJin Pate

Since the 1950s, more than 100,000 Korean children have been adopted by predominantly white Americans; they were orphans of the Korean War, or so the story went. But begin the story earlier, as this ... More

Since the 1950s, more than 100,000 Korean children have been adopted by predominantly white Americans; they were orphans of the Korean War, or so the story went. But begin the story earlier, as this book does, and what has long been viewed as humanitarian rescue reveals itself as an exercise in expanding American empire during the Cold War. Transnational adoption was virtually nonexistent in Korea until U.S. military intervention in the 1940s. Currently it generates $35 million in revenue—an economic miracle for South Korea and a social and political boon for the United States. Rather than focusing on the families “made whole” by these adoptions, this book identifies U.S. militarism as the condition by which displaced babies became orphans, some of whom were groomed into desirable adoptees, normalized for American audiences, and detached from their past and culture. Using archival research, film, and literary materials—including the cultural work of adoptees—this book explores the various ways in which Korean children were employed by the U.S. nation-state to promote the myth of American exceptionalism, to expand U.S. empire during the burgeoning Cold War, and to solidify notions of the American family.Less

Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity

Michael Hames-García

In seemingly exhaustive arguments about identity as a category of analysis, we have made a critical error—one that this book sets out to correct in this revisionary look at the making and meaning of ... More

In seemingly exhaustive arguments about identity as a category of analysis, we have made a critical error—one that this book sets out to correct in this revisionary look at the making and meaning of social identities. We have asked how separate identities—of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—come to intersect. Instead, the book proposes, we should begin by understanding such social identities as mutually constituting one another. Grounded in both theoretical and political practices—in the lived realities of people’s experience—this book reinvigorates identity as a key concept and as a tool for the pursuit of social justice. The text draws on a wide range of examples to show that social identities are central to how exploitation works, such as debates about the desirability of sexual minority identities in postcolonial contexts, questions about the reality of race, and the nature of the U.S. prison crisis. Unless we understand precisely how identities take shape in relation to each other and within contexts of oppression, he contends, we will never be able to eradicate discrimination and social inequality. By analyzing the social interdependence of identities, the book seeks to enable the creation of deep connections of solidarity across differences.Less

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction

Diana Rebekkah Paulin

This book examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century dramatic and literary enactments played in the constitution and consolidation of race in the United States. The text ... More

This book examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century dramatic and literary enactments played in the constitution and consolidation of race in the United States. The text investigates how these representations produced, and were produced by, the black-white binary that informed them in a wide variety of texts written across the period between the Civil War and World War I—by Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Dixon, J. Rosamond Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, William Dean Howells, and many others. The book’s “miscegenated reading practices” reframe the critical cultural roles that drama and fiction played during this significant half century. It demonstrates the challenges of crossing intellectual boundaries, echoing the crossings—of race, gender, nation, class, and hemisphere—that complicated the black-white divide at the turn of the twentieth century and continue to do so today. The book reveals how our ongoing discussions about race are also dialogues about nation formation. As the United States attempted to legitimize its own global ascendancy, the goal of eliminating evidence of inferiority became paramount. At the same time, however, the foundation of the United States was linked to slavery that served as reminders of its “mongrel” origins.Less

Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature

Juliana Chang

This book claims that literary representations of Asian American domesticity may be understood as symptoms of America’s relationship to its national fantasies and to the “jouissance”—a Lacanian term ... More

This book claims that literary representations of Asian American domesticity may be understood as symptoms of America’s relationship to its national fantasies and to the “jouissance”—a Lacanian term signifying a violent yet euphoric shattering of the self—that both overhangs and underlies those fantasies. In the national imaginary, according to the text, racial subjects are often perceived as the source of jouissance, which they supposedly embody through their excesses of violence, sexuality, anger, and ecstasy—excesses that threaten to overwhelm the social order. To examine this argument that racism ascribes too much, rather than a lack of, humanity, the text analyzes domestic accounts by Asian American writers, including Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Suki Kim’s The Interpreter. Employing careful reading and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the book finds sites of excess and shock: they are not just narratives of trauma, but they produce trauma as well. They render Asian Americans as not only the objects but also the vehicles and agents of inhuman suffering. And, claims the text, these novels disturb yet strangely exhilarate the reader through characters who are objects of racism and yet inhumanly enjoy their suffering and the suffering of others.Less

Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934

Melissa N. Stein

Measuring Manhood describes how race became the purview of science and the processes by which race was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political ... More

Measuring Manhood describes how race became the purview of science and the processes by which race was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonance. It tells the story of an overlapping, interdisciplinary group of scientists who asserted their relevance and authority by offering expert advice America’s most pressing issues. These scientists often used gender and sex difference to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference, but the mechanisms by which they did so constantly shifted according to what was at stake in that specific historical moment. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their conclusions about human difference naturalized socio-political difference—and hierarchy—in America. For these scientists, the physical body both reflected and determined the character of the social body. This book is also concerned with how the public received such ideas and how they shaped the way real people were treated. Accordingly, it examines a variety of sources, both textual and visual, to interrogate racial scientists’ engagement with social and political issues as well as the incursion of scientific thought into political culture.Less

Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens: The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s

Christina Gerken

This book focuses on the watershed political events of 1995-96. During this period, President Bill Clinton signed into law three pieces of legislation that have had a significant impact on the lives ... More

This book focuses on the watershed political events of 1995-96. During this period, President Bill Clinton signed into law three pieces of legislation that have had a significant impact on the lives of immigrants: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the Personal Responsibility Act (PRWORA), and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Taken together, these laws have significantly altered the rights and responsibilities of immigrants in this country. My work argues that these two years are of particular importance for the history of U.S. immigration. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and governmentality, this project analyzes the discursive strategies that created, shaped, and upheld a race-specific image of a “desirable” immigrant. My interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis is located at the intersection of linguistics, cultural studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory. This book explores the content and the social implications of the immigration discourse, drawing on extensive textual analysis of diverse sources including congressional debates, committee reports, and articles from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Houston Chronicle. Using these sources, I argue that government debates, media discourse, and public perception were part of a larger regime of knowledge/power that continually produced and reinforced the neoliberal ideal of a responsible, self-sufficient subject. Concomitantly, my research demonstrates that despite this attempt to foreclose the terms of debate, the mid-1990s discourse on immigration was characterized by a productive tension between its underlying neoliberal assumptions and other often contradictory values and objectives.Less

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

Kim TallBear

Native American DNA is not simply found in bodies, both living and dead, and in hi-tech laboratories. Drawing from history, genome science, ethnography, textual and policy analysis, TallBear shows ... More

Native American DNA is not simply found in bodies, both living and dead, and in hi-tech laboratories. Drawing from history, genome science, ethnography, textual and policy analysis, TallBear shows how the scientific object is forged through social and material processes. Scientists like all of us yearn for knowledge of human origins. Genealogists buy genetic ancestry tests hoping to get proof of an Indian in the family tree. U.S. tribes use parentage tests to confer membership. Vestiges of 19th-century race science mix with 20th-century multi-culturalism and molecular knowledge to re-script Native American identities in the 21st century. A transition is afoot from blood- to gene-talk. The risk is that Native American sovereignty and claims to land and resources based in law, sometimes implemented through old-fashioned notions of blood, will be undermined. Many scholars critique Native American blood as a racist idea. But TallBear argues that the turn to new genetic identities, perceived by many as scientifically robust, is even more risky. She argues for indigenous peoples to govern and engage proactively with genome research in order to protect their rights.Less

Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low

C. Riley Snorton

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, ... More

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture that repudiates openly gay identities. In both cases, down-low narratives depict black men as sexually dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and contaminated. This book traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “glass closet,” the text advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle and speculation. Through close readings of news, music, movies, television, and gossip blogs, the book explores the contemporary genealogy, meaning, and functions of the down low. The book examines how the down low links blackness and queerness in the popular imagination and how the down low is just one example of how media and popular culture surveil and police black sexuality. Looking at figures such as Ma Rainey, Bishop Eddie L. Long, J. L. King, and Will Smith, it contends that down-low narratives reveal the limits of current understandings of black sexuality.Less

Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

Jodi Melamed

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This story portrays the postwar racial break as a transition from white ... More

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. This story portrays the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference. Following the institutionalization of literature as a privileged domain for Americans to get to know difference—to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to race—the text focuses on literary studies as a cultural technology for transmitting liberal racial orders. It examines official antiracism in the United States and finds that these were key to ratifying the country’s global ascendancy. It shows how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism made racism appear to be disappearing, even as they incorporated the assumptions of global capitalism into accepted notions of racial equality. Yet this book also recovers an anticapitalist“race radical” tradition that provides a materialist opposition to official antiracisms in the postwar United States—a literature that sounds out the violence of liberal racial orders, relinks racial inequality to material conditions, and compels desire for something better than U.S. multiculturalism.Less