Racial Imagination and the American Dream

Racial Imagination and the American Dream PDF Author: Charles P. Henry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000936414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Although the phrase "the American Dream" dates from the 1930s, the concept or idea of the American Dream is as old as the country. The values proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed (and extended) in the Gettysburg Address have been continuously promoted by every American president. Moreover, they form the basis of our national collective narrative as expressed through both elite and popular culture. The American Dream is intrinsically tied to the American Creed and American Exceptionalism. It is the foundation of our national identity, the glue that holds together our individual aspirations. Yet until the mid-twentieth century, the American Dream excluded African Americans. We as a nation—as an imagined community—could not imagine an integrated, multiracial society with Blacks and Whites living together as equals. By examining the lives of the only three African American Nobel Peace Prize winners, we can see how their lives were shaped by the American Dream, and how their success was used to deny the structural racism that prevented others from achieving the American Dream. Ralph Bunche as a role model of academic and technical expertise, Martin Luther King, Jr., as a model race leader, and Barack Obama as a political leader provide a window on the changing meaning of the American Dream. In conclusion, Haiti is presented as a failed example of an attempt to export the American Dream in the form of American Exceptionalism, and racial reparations are reimagined as a radical democratic project aimed at true global integration and justice.

Racial Imagination and the American Dream

Racial Imagination and the American Dream PDF Author: Charles P. Henry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000936414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although the phrase "the American Dream" dates from the 1930s, the concept or idea of the American Dream is as old as the country. The values proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed (and extended) in the Gettysburg Address have been continuously promoted by every American president. Moreover, they form the basis of our national collective narrative as expressed through both elite and popular culture. The American Dream is intrinsically tied to the American Creed and American Exceptionalism. It is the foundation of our national identity, the glue that holds together our individual aspirations. Yet until the mid-twentieth century, the American Dream excluded African Americans. We as a nation—as an imagined community—could not imagine an integrated, multiracial society with Blacks and Whites living together as equals. By examining the lives of the only three African American Nobel Peace Prize winners, we can see how their lives were shaped by the American Dream, and how their success was used to deny the structural racism that prevented others from achieving the American Dream. Ralph Bunche as a role model of academic and technical expertise, Martin Luther King, Jr., as a model race leader, and Barack Obama as a political leader provide a window on the changing meaning of the American Dream. In conclusion, Haiti is presented as a failed example of an attempt to export the American Dream in the form of American Exceptionalism, and racial reparations are reimagined as a radical democratic project aimed at true global integration and justice.

Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism PDF Author: Jonathan Tran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197587909
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.

The Racial Imaginary

The Racial Imaginary PDF Author: Claudia Rankine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934200797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Frank, fearless letters from poets of all colors, genders, classes about the material conditions under which their art is made.

Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You PDF Author: Celeste Ng
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143127551
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bustle, and Time Our New York The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream PDF Author: Robert C. Hauhart
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000781569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume. The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

I Got There

I Got There PDF Author: JT McCormick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781619615564
Category : Minorities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Stakes Is High

Stakes Is High PDF Author: Mychal Denzel Smith
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1568588720
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future. The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize. In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present. There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.

Freedom Dreams

Freedom Dreams PDF Author: Robin D.G. Kelley
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 080700703X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The 20th-anniversary edition of Kelley’s influential history of 20th-century Black radicalism, with new reflections on current movements and their impact on the author, and a foreword by poet Aja Monet First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve. Focusing on the insights of activists, from the Revolutionary Action Movement to the insurgent poetics of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Kelley chronicles the quest for a homeland, the hope that communism offered, the politics of surrealism, the transformative potential of Black feminism, and the long dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. In this edition, Kelley includes a new introduction reflecting on how movements of the past 20 years have expanded his own vision of freedom to include mutual care, disability justice, abolition, and decolonization, and a new epilogue exploring the visionary organizing of today’s freedom dreamers. This classic history of the power of the Black radical imagination is as timely as when it was first published.

The Racial Complex

The Racial Complex PDF Author: Fanny Brewster
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367177706
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race, Fanny Brewster revisits and examines Jung's classical writing on the theory of complexes, relating it directly to race in modern society. In this groundbreaking exploration, Brewster deepens Jung's minimalist writing regarding the cultural complexes of American blacks and whites by identifying and re-defining a psychological complex related to ethnicity. Original and insightful, this book provides a close reading of Jung's complexes theory with an Africanist perspective on raciality and white/black racial relationships. Brewster explores how racial complexes influence personality development, cultural behavior and social and political status, and how they impact contemporary American racial relations. She also investigates aspects of the racial complex including archetypal shadow as core, constellations and their expression, and cultural trauma in the African diaspora. The book concludes with a discussion of racial complexes as a continuous psychological state and how to move towards personal, cultural and collective healing. Analyzing Jung's work with a renewed lens, and providing fresh comparisons to other literature and films, including Get Out, Brewster extends Jung's work to become more inclusive of culture and ethnicity, addressing issues which have been left previously unexamined in psychoanalytic thought. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be of great importance to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, sociology, politics, history of race, African American studies and African diaspora studies. As this book discusses Jung's complexes theory in a new light, it will be of immense interest to Jungian analysts and analytical psychologists in practice and in training.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream PDF Author: Robert C. Hauhart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000385523
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
What do we mean by the American dream? Can we define it? Or does any discussion of the phrase end inconclusively, the solid turned liquid—like ice melting? Do we know whether the American dream motivates and inspires or, alternately, obscures and deceives? The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream offers distinctive, authoritative, original essays by well-known scholars that address the social, economic, historical, philosophic, legal, and cultural dimensions of the American dream for the twenty-first century. The American dream, first discussed and defined in print by James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931), has become nearly synonymous with being American. Adams’s definition, although known to scholars, is often lost in our ubiquitous use of the term. When used today, the iconic phrase seems to encapsulate every fashion, fad, trend, association, or image the user identifies with the United States or American life. The American dream’s ubiquity, though, argues eloquently for a deeper understanding of its heritage, its implications, and its impact—to be found in this first research handbook ever published on the topic.