Browse

For over two decades, the media have chronicled escalating participation in family history prompted by, among other things, the aging of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, the growing availability of digital genealogy sites and archives, and a burgeoning interest in racial and ethnic history and culture of the sort inspired by the airing of the historical drama miniseries Roots forty years ago. Alternate Roots is the first book to critically address a wide array of media-related institutions, texts, technologies, and practices of family history readily encountered in the new millennium, including genealogy-themed television series, books, documentaries, websites, family photos and civil records, social media interactions, genealogical institutions, “roots” tourism, and genetic ancestry testing services capitalizing on the 2003 mapping of the human genome. These objects of inquiry present unique and pressing issues for critical investigation in terms of economic and privacy concerns as well as ethnicity, race, and hybrid identities. Judiciously interweaving her own genealogical journey involving ethnic, racial, classed, and gendered identities pertinent to her southern Italian and Italian American family history throughout the multifaceted examination of critical objects, Christine Scodari unearths pivot points of thought and action in the performance and representation of family history that can be adapted by others and facilitated by digital media. This alternate roots strategy, an expansive approach to family history, enables practitioners to venture beyond genetic definitions of kinship, their own ancestral history, and the struggles of those sharing their affiliations, and to interrogate genealogical media and related commodities and activities accordingly.

This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the colour line. The emergence of Blasian celebrities and the analyses of these stars acknowledges that to understand what and who is a Blasian means to first understand hegemonic notions of both Blacks and Asian/Americans. Contextualized against those dominant discourses Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Multiracial people are just as capable as monoracial people of upholding hierarchies of identity, as well as dismantling those hierarchies. Thus, in this book Blasians do not escape race, or erase race, but they do deconstruct normative instantiations of identity. The presence, mobility, and utility of these multiracial celebrities within both U.S. and global racial schemas simultaneously realize and complicate potential alternatives to racial and racist paradigms. These mixed race stars draw attention to how risible and absurd the biological and cultural premises for racialization truly are, and demonstrate potential alternatives for affiliation that do not rely on genetic material.

In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. This book concentrates on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct. In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central. The book lays out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. The book gauges not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.

The Construction of Whiteness is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examines the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (i.e. social, cultural, political, and economic) that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. In truth, whiteness has rarely been understood outside of academic circles as a problem to be examined, questioned, or interrogated. This is because the ubiquity of whiteness—its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible—makes it the very epitome of the social and cultural mainstream in America. Yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and structures of inequality in this country necessitate a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. The essays in this collection seek to do just that; that is, interrogate whiteness as a social construction, thereby revealing the underpinnings of narratives that fosters white skin as the ideal standard of beauty, intelligence, and power. The essays in this collection examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a standard anthology for introducing the critical study of race to a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will necessarily appeal to those with scholarly orientations in African and African American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies, Legal Studies, etc. This collection, therefore, makes an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies, broadly conceived, in its multifaceted connections to American history and culture.

This volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise, while looking specifically at the extent to which contemporary church responses to race-consciousness and post-racial-consciousness enable churches to advance an accurate public accounting of the social implications of race. Contributors examine Christian institutional and intellectual frameworks within the U.S. and South Africa, focusing mainly on post-movement contexts within the two countries—meaning essentially since 1968 in the U.S. and since 1994 in South Africa. Central to the inquiry is whether churches operate from analytical frameworks, leadership approaches, and programmatic emphases that realistically and usefully grapple with race. Overall, the volume provides little support for the idea that a post-racial era has dawned, or soon will, within the U.S. and South Africa. The volume does lend support, however, to calls for liberating persons and institutions from imprisoning racial constructions, whether imposed from outside one’s group or from inside, while wrestling with the tensions between racially-grounded approaches that account for black suffering and racially-transcending approaches that point (theologically and anthropologically) beyond the socially-constructed self.

This book provides an understanding of the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which Asian American and African American cultural formation occurs. Through the interpretation of labor department documents, popular journalism, and state discourses, the book historicizes the formation of both the construction of black “pathology” and the Asian “model minority.” Beginning with the Moynihan Report and journalistic reports about Asian Americans as “model minority,” black and Asian men were racialized together, as if “racially magnetized.” Through the concept of racial magnetism, the book examines both dominant and emergent representations of Asian and African American masculinities as mediating figures for the contradictions of race, class, and gender in post-civil rights U.S.A. The post-civil rights era names this specific race for U.S. citizenship and class advantage, when massive Asian technocratic immigration and decline of African American industrial labor helped usher in a new period of laissez faire class struggle and racial realignment. While the state abandoned social programs at home and expanded imperial projects overseas, state discourses posited that the post-civil rights moment was a period of imminent racial danger because Black Power and the Asian American Movement challenged the understanding that social equality through civil rights had been achieved. The book studies both the dominant discourses that “pair” African American and Asian American racialized masculinities together, and it examines the African American and Asian American counter-discourses—in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures—that link social movements and cultural production as active critical responses to this dominant formation.

The question of how relations between marginalized groups are impacted by their common and sometimes competing search for equal rights has become acutely important. Demographic projections make it easy now to imagine a future majority population of color in the United States. This book sets forth some of the issues involved in the interplay among members of various racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Robert S. Chang initiated the Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation Project and invited the book's author to collaborate. The two brought together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines to engage a set of interrelated questions confronting groups generally considered minorities. This collection strives to stimulate further thinking and writing by social scientists, legal scholars, and policymakers on inter-minority connections. Particularly, scholars test the limits of intergroup cooperation and coalition building. For marginalized groups, coalition building seems to offer a pathway to addressing economic discrimination and reaching some measure of justice with regard to opportunities. The need for coalitions also acknowledges a democratic process in which racialized groups face significant difficulty gaining real political power, despite such legislation as the Voting Rights Act.

This book attempts to shift focus away from why black youth are “problematic” to explore what their daily lives actually entail. The book focuses on the small community of Hamilton, Alabama, to investigate what it is like for a young black person to grow up in the contemporary rural South. What the book finds is that the young people of Hamilton are neither idly passing their time in a stereotypically languid setting, nor are they being corrupted by hip hop culture and the perils of the urban North, as many pundits suggest. Rather, they are dynamic and diverse young people making their way through the structures that define the twenty-first-century South. Told through the poignant stories of several high school students, the book reveals a group that is often rendered invisible in society. Blended families, football sagas, crunk music, expanding social networks, and a nearby segregated prom are just a few of the fascinating juxtapositions. The book uses personal biography, historical accounts, sociolinguistic analysis, and community narratives to illustrate persistent racism, class divisions, and resistance in a new context. It addresses contemporary issues, such as moral panics regarding the future of youth in America and educational policies that may be well meaning but are ultimately misguided.

Since 2004, the Baby Doll Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans has gone from an obscure, almost-forgotten practice to a flourishing cultural force. The original Baby Dolls were groups of black women, and some men, in the early Jim Crow era who adopted New Orleans street-masking tradition as a unique form of fun and self-expression against a backdrop of racial discrimination. Wearing short dresses, bloomers, bonnets, and garters with money tucked tight, they strutted, sang ribald songs, chanted, and danced on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph feast night. Today’s Baby Dolls continue the tradition of one of the first street women's masking and marching groups in the United States. They joyfully and unabashedly defy gender roles, claiming public space and proclaiming through their performance their right to social citizenship. Essayists draw on interviews, theoretical perspectives, archival material, and historical assessments to describe women’s cultural performances that take place on the streets of New Orleans. They recount the history and contemporary resurgence of the Baby Dolls while delving into the larger cultural meaning of the phenomenon. Over 140 color photographs and personal narratives of immersive experiences provide passionate testimony of the impact of the Baby Dolls on their audiences. Fifteen artists offer statements regarding their work documenting and inspired by the tradition as it stimulates their imagination to present a practice that revitalizes the spirit.

In this ethnography of a destroyed town in southern Missouri’s Bootheel region, authors David Todd Lawrence and Elaine J. Lawless examine two conflicting narratives about the flood of 2011—one promoted by the Corps of Engineers that boasts the success of the levee breach and the flood diversion, and the other gleaned from oral narratives collected from the displaced Pinhook residents, stories that reveal a lack of concern on the part of the government for the destruction of their town. Receiving inadequate warning and no evacuation assistance during the breach, residents lost everything. Many still seek restitution and funding for relocation and reconstruction of their town. The authors’ research traces a long history of discrimination and neglect of the rights of the Pinhook community, beginning with migration from the Deep South to the southern-most counties in Missouri, through purchasing and farming the land, up to the Birds Point levee breach. Their stories relate what it has been like for the former residents of this stable African American town to be displaced dispersed in other small towns, living with relatives and friends while trying to negotiate the bureaucracy surrounding Federal Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Agency assistance. Ultimately, the stories of displaced citizens of Pinhook reveal a strong African American community, whose bonds were developed over time and through shared traditions, bonds that will persist even if the town is never rebuilt.