Postethnic America

Postethnic America PDF Author: David A Hollinger
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786722282
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Sympathetic with the new ethnic consciousness, Hollinger argues that the conventional liberal toleration of all established ethnic groups no longer works because it leaves unchallenged the prevailing imbalance of power. Yet the multiculturalist alternative does nothing to stop the fragmenting of American society into competing ethnic enclaves, each concerned primarily with its own well-being. Hollinger argues instead for a new cosmopolitanism, an appreciation of multiple identities -- new cross-cultural affiliations based not on the biologically given but on consent, on the right to emphasize or diminish the significance of one's ethnoracial affiliation. Postethnic America is a bracing reminder of America's universalist promise as a haven for all peoples. While recognizing the Eurocentric narrowness of that older universalism, Hollinger makes a stirring call for a new nationalism. He urges that a democratic nation-state like ours must help bridge the gap between our common fellowship as human beings and the great variety of ethnic and racial groups represented within the United States.

Postethnic America

Postethnic America PDF Author: David A Hollinger
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786722282
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sympathetic with the new ethnic consciousness, Hollinger argues that the conventional liberal toleration of all established ethnic groups no longer works because it leaves unchallenged the prevailing imbalance of power. Yet the multiculturalist alternative does nothing to stop the fragmenting of American society into competing ethnic enclaves, each concerned primarily with its own well-being. Hollinger argues instead for a new cosmopolitanism, an appreciation of multiple identities -- new cross-cultural affiliations based not on the biologically given but on consent, on the right to emphasize or diminish the significance of one's ethnoracial affiliation. Postethnic America is a bracing reminder of America's universalist promise as a haven for all peoples. While recognizing the Eurocentric narrowness of that older universalism, Hollinger makes a stirring call for a new nationalism. He urges that a democratic nation-state like ours must help bridge the gap between our common fellowship as human beings and the great variety of ethnic and racial groups represented within the United States.

American Post-Judaism

American Post-Judaism PDF Author: Shaul Magid
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253008026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness

America Classifies the Immigrants

America Classifies the Immigrants PDF Author: Joel Perlmann
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674425057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Joel Perlmann traces the history of U.S. classification of immigrants, from Ellis Island to the present day, showing how slippery and contested ideas about racial, national, and ethnic difference have been. His focus ranges from the 1897 List of Races and Peoples, through changes in the civil rights era, to proposals for reform of the 2020 Census.

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674265815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1129

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Book Description
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

America's Banquet of Cultures

America's Banquet of Cultures PDF Author: Ronald Fernández
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313002487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The melting pot is a myth, according to Fernandez, who shows that the United States is and always has been a banquet of cultures. As he argues, the best way to deal with the more than 20 million new immigrants since 1965 is to accept, recognize, and eagerly explore the differences among the American people. Fernandez seeks to forge a positive national consensus based on two building blocks. First, the nation's many ethnic groups can be a powerful source of unprecedented economic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Secondly, the nation's many ethnic groups offer a way to erase the black/white dichotomy which, masks the shared injustices of millions of European, Asian, African, Native, and Latino Americans. This is a provocative analysis of how we arrived at our current ethnic and racial dilemmas and what can be done to move beyond them. Scholars and students of American immigration and social policy as well as concerned citizens will find the book equally rewarding.

In the Space of Theory

In the Space of Theory PDF Author: Matthew Sparke
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816631902
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
How is the meaning of the hyphen in “nation-state” changing in the context of globalization and proliferating political struggles? How can we investigate the transformation of the nation-state by marking the normally unmarked hyphen in “geo-graphy”? Debunking deterritorialization both as a discourse and as an antiessentialist abstraction, Matthew Sparke offers answers to these questions by examining the contemporary geographies of the United States and Canada. In the Space of Theory details the territorial implications of the Iraq war, NAFTA, welfare reform, constitutional reform, cross-border regional development, and the legal battles of First Nations. In using antiessentialist arguments to elucidate the complexity of these developments, Sparke seeks to ground and critique postfoundational theory itself. He shows how the postfoundational arguments of Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri obscure politically important processes of reterritorialization at the same time they deterritorialize diverse theoretical assumptions about the nation-state. Engaged with theory and grounded in close study of cultural, political, and economic change, In the Space of Theory explores the geographies of struggle that at once underlie and undermine the hyphen in contemporary nation-states. Matthew Sparke is associate professor of geography and international studies at the University of Washington.

Transnational America

Transnational America PDF Author: Everett Helmut Akam
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742521988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The "melting pot" is one of the most cherished images in US culture, but does it really tell the whole story? Too often there is tension between the sense of American community and the demands of American diversity. The uniqueness of the many American ethnicities provides the roots of identity, yet recognizing those differences often makes Americans feel isolated from the whole. In this discussion, Everett Akam relies on the neglected tradition of cultural pluralism to argue that unity and individuality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each is a vital source of American identity. He demonstrates that Americans need to acknowledge that they share much in common as Americans, while never forgetting that what sets them apart forms as great a part of who they are.

The Contours of America’s Cold War

The Contours of America’s Cold War PDF Author: Matthew Farish
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452901120
Category : Atomic bomb
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description


All New, All Different?

All New, All Different? PDF Author: Allan W. Austin
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477318992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Winner, John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2019 MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020 Taking a multifaceted approach to attitudes toward race through popular culture and the American superhero, All New, All Different? explores a topic that until now has only received more discrete examination. Considering Marvel, DC, and lesser-known texts and heroes, this illuminating work charts eighty years of evolution in the portrayal of race in comics as well as in film and on television. Beginning with World War II, the authors trace the vexed depictions in early superhero stories, considering both Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks. While the emergence of Black Panther, Black Lightning, Luke Cage, Storm, and other heroes in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a cultural revolution, the book reveals how nonwhite superheroes nonetheless remained grounded in outdated assumptions. Multiculturalism encouraged further diversity, with 1980s superteams, the minority-run company Milestone’s new characters in the 1990s, and the arrival of Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American heroine, and a new Latinx Spider-Man in the 2000s. Concluding with a discussion of contemporary efforts to make both a profit and a positive impact on society, All New, All Different? enriches our understanding of the complex issues of racial representation in American popular culture.

American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race

American Exceptionalism and the Remains of Race PDF Author: Edmund Fong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317642783
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In contemporary American political culture, claims of American exceptionalism and anxieties over its prospects have resurged as an overarching theme in national political discourse. Yet never very far from such debates lie animating fears associated with race. Fears about the loss of national unity and trust often draw attention to looming changes in the racial demographics of the body politic. Lost amid these debates are often the more complex legacies of racial hybridity. Anxieties over the disintegration of the fabric of American national identity likewise forget not just how they echo past fears of subversive racial and cultural difference, but also exorcise as well the changing nature of work and social interaction. Edmund Fong’s book examines the rise and resurgence of contemporary forms of American exceptionalism as they have emerged out of contentious debates over cultural pluralism and multicultural diversity in the past two decades. For a brief time, serious considerations of the force of multiculturalism entered into a variety of philosophical and policy debates. But in the American context, these debates often led to a reaffirmation of some variant of American exceptionalism with the consequent exorcism of race within the avowed norms and policy goals of American politics. Fong explores how this "multicultural exorcism" revitalizing American exceptionalism is not simply a novel feature of our contemporary political moment, but is instead a recurrent dynamic across the history of American political discourse. By situating contemporary discourse on cultural pluralism within the larger frame of American history, this book yields insight into the production of hegemonic forms of American exceptionalism and how race continues to haunt the contours of American national identity.