Arab Americans and Ethnic Studies

Meeting Asian/Arab American StudiesThinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S. Sunaina Maira (bio) and Magid Shihade (bio) I am the witness of the massacre I am the victim of the map I am the son of simple words . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, from "Poem of the Land"1 Speak, your lips still have their liberty Speak, still yours is the spoken word . . . Speak, for the truth is alive even now Speak, say all you wish you had said. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from "Speak" (1941)2 Why link Asian and Arab American Studies? Why should we speak of Arab American studies in Asian American studies, or have a conversation in ethnic studies about points of convergence and divergence between these two areas? Is it in order to recognize an emerging ethnic studies field in the U.S., with all the limitations that a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism entails? Is it to extend a comparative ethnic studies approach that is increasingly transforming Asian American studies while raising questions about the definition of ethnic and racial boundaries? In our view, the answer is all of these, but much more. We argue here that speaking of Arab and Asian [End Page 117] American studies in the same breath is ultimately valuable because it illuminates a broader and more urgent issue: the need to develop a fuller analysis of U.S. empire. The meeting of Asian American and Arab American studies has been increasingly highlighted in discussions after 9/11 as it has become apparent that Asian American—particularly South Asian—and Arab American communities as well as Muslim Americans more generally, have similar experiences as targets in the "war on terrorism" waged by the United States. The question of how to produce intellectual and political knowledge to respond to the everyday crisis of empire is urgent at this particular moment, but we want to point out that it has always been so—the conjuncture between Asian/Arab American studies helps to situate U.S. empire in a much longer historical trajectory that links movements in, and out of, Asia and the Middle East. Imperial power operates by obscuring the links between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas strategies of economic restructuring and political domination. This link between the domestic and global fronts of empire can be exposed only if we expand our frame of analysis to consider the ways in which categories of subjects such as "Asian American" and "Arab American" are positioned in relation to U.S. empire. Ethnic studies has focused in large part on documenting, understanding, and challenging the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries as they intersect with other axes of domination, such as gender, sexuality, and class, within the nation. However, there has also been a movement in Asian American studies to acknowledge the transnational dimensions of Asian communities and histories, on the one hand, and the paradoxes and pitfalls of a multiculturalist identity politics, on the other. So the meeting of Arab/Asian American studies highlights the question of borders, and the political and epistemological work of boundaries in shaping our understanding of power and resistance. It helps us to locate the issue of ethnic and racial borders within the larger frame of U.S. empire, and to understand that the question facing Asian American studies today is how to intellectually and institutionally confront imperial, not just national or ethnic, politics. This has always been the challenge for ethnic studies, which has often remained confined within a national frame. [End Page 118] The purpose of linking Asian and Arab American studies is not to colonize Arab American studies within an ever-expanding rubric of pan-Asian ethnicity, but to do the opposite: to challenge the ever-expanding borders of an imperial project that operates through direct as well as proxy wars, neo-colonial occupation, and client states. Ultimately, it is for Arab Americanists themselves to decide where they want to be situated in the academy and how Arab American studies should be introduced into the curriculum. Research on Arab Americans is growing and gaining more academic recognition through new faculty hires and programs, though it continues to occur in...

Reviewed by: POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies Kamala Visweswaran POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies.” Edited by Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University, 1997. The journal Positions was founded in 1993 with the objective of providing “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” Its mission statement identified intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late 20th century as central concerns, and asked its readers to reflect on how these transformations might recast priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. It is therefore in keeping with the intellectual tradition already established by the journal, that a special edition on “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies” explores emerging relationships between Asian and Asian American studies. [End Page 308] Positions, over the last few years, has published groundbreaking articles on questions of colonialism and modernity in East Asia, and explored the distinct perspectives post-structuralist and postcolonial theory might bring to area studies. This issue of the journal asks what ethnic studies might bring to area studies, and conversely establishes the importance of linking ethnic studies to critical area studies, or more particularly, of linking the contradictory, but mutually constitutive relations between Asians and Asian Americans. Guest editors Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe make it clear that such a relationship must account for “the long history of dissymmetry between the fields...the differences in their institutional locations, and the large gaps between the subjects and knowledges posited by each field” (viii). Yet they also establish the necessity of forging such a relationship. They remind us that Asian Americans are formed simultaneously within U.S. national and global frameworks. The return of (Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) immigrants to the imperial center means that their racialization under terms of the U.S nation-state can’t be understood without understanding histories of colonialism and capitalist development in Asia. Such an approach disrupts the master narrative of becoming a national citizen for Asian American subjects, and productively recasts the relationship of Asian American studies with American studies. This special issue of Positions is, therefore, a timely and important collection of essays that significantly contributes to, and expands upon national discussions about the shape of Asian American studies east of California, reflected in other edited collections over the last decade: Gary Okihiro’s Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies (1988), Shirley Hune’s (1990) Asian Americans; Comparative and Global Perspectives, and Robert Lee and Lihbin Shao’s (1994) Building Blocks for Asian American Studies: Proceedings of the 1992 East Of California Asian American Studies Conference. Thus, Kim and Lowe tie the emergence of theoretical “new formations” in Asian American studies to “new immigrations”— by which is meant not only the inclusion of more recent post-1965 immigrant groups such as Koreans, Indians, and Vietnamese, but the multiple, back and forth migrations of such groups resulting from U.S imperial and economic policies. They identify and enumerate four major pressures (ix) that shape the questions to be posed as part of these new formations: 1. the ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring of global capitalism that employs ‘mixed production’ and ‘flexible accumulation’ and permits the exploitations of Asian workers both in Asia and the United States; [End Page 309] 2. the changed demography of the Asian American population as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which increased and diversified Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South Asian communities in the United States; 3. the colonial and neocolonial role of the United States in the Asian states from which these new Asian American communities emigrate; and 4. the failure of citizenship and civil rights to guarantee equality of opportunity and resources to poor, racialized and gendered communities in the United States. Editors Kim and Lowe have done an excellent job of laying out the parameters of this new relationship by including articles that address the politics and dynamics of the new immigration. Essays by Peter Kiang and Anuradha Advani reaffirm the field’s historic focus on community studies by examining relationships between community groups...

Journal Article Response to Jonathan Freedman Get access Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Cathy J. Schlund-Vials University of Connecticut Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 37, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 45–46, https://doi.org/10.1353/mel.2012.0025 Published: 01 June 2012

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires:Native American Literary Studies in Europe Deborah Madsen (bio) It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and research programs in Native studies. The institutional conditions under which Native literary studies takes place in a European context give rise to four primary methodological approaches, which I address below: national (though not necessarily tribal nationalist), multiethnic, universal, and postcolonial. European scholars of Native American literary studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative "American studies" approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their groundbreaking book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). It is to these claims that my title gestures while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American literature, and in scholarly publications are used as "the basis for the cynical absorption into the 'melting pot,' pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice" (Why I Can't 96). 1 The category of "Native" is effectively "melted" into another category of cultural experience (with the attendant loss of Indigenous identities, historical experiences, and claims to justice), whether this is the universalizing canon of "literature" per se or, more specifically, a national American (settler) literature, a national [End Page 353] canon of minority "multiethnic" literature that fails to distinguish adequately between Indigenous and migrant literary production, or a transnational "postcolonial" canon. As Wolfgang Hochbruck predicted back in 1991, "creating new reservations for minority literatures would eventually create new problems" (51). It would seem that this problematic time has come. Consequently, Cook-Lynn's insight guides my critique here of some of the directions in which Native American literary studies is currently moving in Europe. If the term "Native" is a simulated category that brings together under a homogenizing banner the rich diversity of Native tribal cultures, so too is the term "Europe." Much of what I have to say about the current state of Native American studies in Europe is focused upon the United Kingdom and on scholarship written in English. Dynamic research cultures in the field of Native studies flourish across continental Europe in very different institutional and nonacademic contexts. A long history of "Indianism" or Native American "hobbyism," for example, helps to promote Native American studies in countries like Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland. Additionally, Europe is, and has been, an important international forum for Native artists, scholars, and activists. Native people have, of course, been visiting Europe since the sixteenth century. As Naila Clerici reminds us, "Native Peoples know the importance of being heard abroad: in Europe they find an audience fascinated by their cultures and rarely biased for economic or political reasons" (7). Clerici may be overstating the claim to political acceptance; Joëlle Rostkowski, in her account of the failure of Deskaheh, the Cayuga chief of the Iroquois Confederacy, to garner international recognition of the conflict between his community and the Canadian nation-state, underlines the refusal of the League of Nations to acknowledge his tribal nation as a sovereign state engaged in an international conflict with another sovereign state (Canada). However, Rostkowski concludes her account with the reminder: Deskaheh paved the way for future generations. The interest in international organizations that Native Americans have demonstrated goes back to the first contacts he established within the League of Nations. In the 1930s, an Iroquois delegation went back to Geneva and was again disappointed by the result of its visit. But some Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee remained convinced that international [End Page 354] organizations could be of some assistance to Indians. The Iroquois were among the first tribes who expressed an interest in the United Nations and, in 1949, they sent a delegation to the opening of...

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 294 broader political tensions between black freedom and gay rights efforts, but he displays again the personal empathy that moved him to action in Montgomery decades before. Given the contours of this astonishing life, one sometimes wishes for more from A White Preacher’s Message. Graetz is no prose stylist and the book occasionally devolves into somewhat plodding lists of people and events. Nor does the author give much substantive insight into his theology . Did Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr—Graetz’s fellow GermanAmerican Protestants—shape him as they shaped King and so many others ? These pages do not say, but the possibilities are intriguing. In 1952, when Graetz was a seminary student, Tillich published The Courage to Be (New Haven, 1952), his classic statement of religion’s existential power in a world of Cold War anxiety. In the same year, Niebuhr brought out The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), which highlighted the ideological contradictions in the nation’s past. Either title would be fitting for this book, a tale of amazing courage in a nation defined, then and now, by the bitter ironies of prejudice. JOSEPH KIP KOSEK George Washington University Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s. By Simon Hall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 267 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-8122-1975-9. In May 1961 Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the abortive United States–sponsored invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba. “Unless we as a nation . . . go back to the revolutionary spirit that characterized the birth of our nation,” he asserted, “I am afraid that we will be relegated to a second-class power in the world with no real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity” (pp. 8–9). Four years later, as the United States began to escalate its military efforts to thwart the revolutionary struggle in Vietnam, Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) opposed the war in Southeast Asia by explaining, “our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America” (p. 22). The civil rights struggle from which King and Moses emerged helped spawn the antiwar movement, and many of its key leaders were veterans of the battle for black freedom. Yet the organized peace movement consisted mainly of whites, despite considerable black opposition to the war. Why this was so provides the focus of Simon Hall’s book. O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 295 Hall traces the largely unsuccessful attempts between 1965 and 1971 by black and white antiwar advocates to forge an interracial coalition against the Vietnam debacle. He covers familiar ground in portraying how voter registration workers in Mississippi became increasingly radicalized in the early 1960s as a result of the failure of the federal government to offer them protection from racist attacks by public officials and private terrorists. One civil rights worker explained: “I learned from the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, that you needed revolution and that there was no other way” (p. 22). SNCC’s experience in working with local people in Mississippi—what Hall refers to as the “organizing tradition,” a phrase borrowed from Charles Payne—set them apart from moderate black leaders who operated at the national level. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and National Urban League campaigned for racial justice among politicians in Washington and counted President Lyndon Johnson as their most important ally. Their strategy paid off in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With their eyes strictly on advancing the civil rights cause, they rejected criticism of Johnson’s handling of Vietnam. When King broke away from this position and vigorously decried the war in 1967, he lost favor with the White House and with moderate black civil rights leaders. While moderates remained silent, black radicals were among the first to condemn the Vietnam War. Although black militants such as Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Gwendolyn...

Reviewed by: Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies ed. by Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith Susan Savage Lee Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith, eds. Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 390 pp. Paper, $30.00. In Alternative Contact, Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith have compiled a volume that draws attention to Indigeneity across geographical borders as well as the compartmentalized disciplines of academia. The [End Page 263] contributors to this volume seek to challenge the boundaries of their own fields of specialization such as American, ethnic, Indigenous, Asian American, and postcolonial studies by emphasizing "alternative contact," or contact apart from narratives heavily centered upon European/ Indigenous binaries. By "search[ing] for that renewal of thought 'from and for the margins' of Indigenous spaces" (3), the contributors make possible a transnational approach, with Indigeneity as its main perspective. Having removed the "first contact" narratives as the traditional opening into their argument, the authors off er academics in a variety of disciplines an opportunity for the reconsideration of such loaded terms as "imperialism" and "globalism." The impetus for Alternative Contact is the seemingly inherent connection between Indigeneity and the dominant culture so apparent in contemporary scholarship, particularly when investigating the eff ects of colonization and modernization. However, the contributors to this work suggest that by removing the binary of dominant/marginalized and focusing instead on the areas of alternative contact between Indigenous peoples, new critical possibilities emerge for scholarship as well as political activism. At the same time, by analyzing the intricacies of alternative contact, scholars can take these new perspectives and reapply them to the dominant/marginalized argument, thus complicating previous scholarship pertaining to Indigenous peoples. The authors achieve their goals in a variety of ways, but key to their argument is the connection between politics, race, law, identity, and economics at once, rather than unpacking one field at the expense of another. Judy Rohrer, for example, in "Attacking Trust: Hawai'i as a Crossroads and Kamehameha Schools in the Crosshairs," explores how racial identity becomes a legal problem through the concept of a "color-blind" ideology. The color-blind ideology in question pertains to the whites (haoles) living in Hawai'i who desire to send their children to the Kamehameha Schools, schools that are only meant for the Kanaka Maoli. According to Rohrer, when white parents turned to lawsuits as a means of gaining entry into the Indigenous schools, they explained that the Kanaka Maoli were ignoring what it means to be Hawaiian by employing "segregationist" tactics. The reality of the situation involves many years of discrimination against the Kanaka Maoli by whites, thus making it necessary for Indigenous Hawaiians to initiate their own schools in order for their children to have the same opportunities as white children. [End Page 264] Rohrer suggests that the lawsuits against the Kamehameha Schools are the most recent endeavor by whites to "erase" or "vanish" Indigenous culture. Furthermore, the color-blind ideology discussed in Rohrer's essay can be applied to other Indigenous people outside of Hawai'i whose cultural survivance faces stagnation because of a pejorative ideology masked in positivist terms. Andrea Smith's "Decolonization in Unexpected Places: Native Evangelicism and the Rearticulation of Mission" examines an often-discussed topic through a new lens: the missionization of Native peoples. Smith recognizes that Indigenous people worldwide have suff ered the eff ects of missionization; however, many Native Americans in the United States turn to evangelicism as a means of decolonization. Because of this, Smith positions Native evangelicals as theorists rather than as objects of study in order to produce an ethnography that accounts for the advantages and pitfalls of Native evangelical communities. In this way, Smith, much like the other contributors to this volume, approaches topics such as decolonization and Native "authenticity" by avoiding overly simplistic binaries. JoAnna Poblete Cross's "Bridging Indigenous and Immigrant Struggles: A Case Study of American Samoa" provides a well-needed crossover between Indigenous and Asian American studies. Poblete Cross links an Asian immigrant struggle with Indigenous Samoans through the topic of labor. While Poblete Cross recognizes that the intent of each group diff ers, she gracefully...

The Scholars Who Sat by the Door Jacqueline Stewart (bio) Fifty years ago, the academic study of African Americans and the cinema was something of a double negative. Before film studies was institutionalized within the academy, issues of black representation, spectatorship, and filmmaking (if considered at all) surely seemed too marginal and sociologically oriented to warrant scholarly consideration alongside efforts to theorize the cinema's aesthetic nature and distinctiveness. And before African American studies was formalized in response to black student activism of the late 1960s, the history of blacks and film must have appeared to be self-evidently trivial, paling in comparison to the foundational work of documenting black social struggle and enumerating black contributions to American society. As in all early film writing, it was a diverse group of critics, journalists, and artists who penned the first explorations of "the Negro in [End Page 146] Film," laying the groundwork for scholarly studies that would emerge decades later. Beginning in the mid-1910s, sharp critiques of mainstream and black-audience "race movies" were penned by commentators in the African American press; with the coming of sound, optimism about the emergence of a genuinely "Negro cinema" was expressed by contributors to the British journal Close Up; in the wake of World War II, a taxonomy of persistent black stereotypes from stage to screen was outlined by British critic Peter Noble; and the social progress signaled by a late-1940s cycle of "negro tolerance" films was met with skepticism by Ralph Ellison and V. J. Jerome.1 These writers—black and white, on both sides of the Atlantic—spoke from different cultural and professional backgrounds, and with varying degrees of methodological rigor. But in their efforts to address the significance of race in film history and aesthetics, and the significance of the cinema in African American experiences, they shared a concern to speak on behalf of African Americans who had long suffered misrepresentation and marginalization by the dominant film industry. So by the time the Society of Cinematologists (SOC) was founded in 1959 to "give film study some visibility and dignity," numerous tensions already existed that would continue to test the legitimacy of scholarly inquiries at the intersections of race and cinema over the next half century.2 The tendency to examine the content of "minority" images through lenses of social analysis and political critique (e.g., the negative function of stereotyping), for example, threatens to overshadow medium-specific questions about the cinema as a unique art form. New methodologies are required not only to work within and across multiple fields that are comparatively "new" (African American studies, Latino/Chicano studies, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, comparative race studies, cultural studies, visual culture, media studies, film studies), but also to situate the study of film among other, older lines of inquiry (literary studies, art history, cultural history). And, perhaps thorniest of all, who is "qualified"—by disciplinary training, research experience, and/or racial, cultural, political affiliation—to do such work? Though it is not clear that the SOC founders ever discussed these matters explicitly, we can see in the organization's more recent history that issues of race strike at the core of questions about how to define and practice film studies as an academic discipline. In this brief look at how principles of social and intellectual pluralism have been linked with aspirations for racial diversity within the Society (a discussion that deserves many more paragraphs and perspectives than I can offer here),3 I want to suggest that "minority" [End Page 147] subjects—human and scholarly—continue to occupy liminal spaces in the field, and productively so. For it is the ways in which race pulls our attention toward the "outside"—to the realms of the social and political, to other disciplines, to extra-academic constituencies—that encourage film studies to examine itself, to inspect and redraw its boundaries, to "mic check" and discover who is listening. To make my own position clear: the recruitment and cultivation of scholars of color and scholarship on race must continue to be an organizational and fieldwide priority. But the success of these efforts should be measured not only by the validation of race...

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

A & Q 11 6 Works Cited Blyth, Mark. 2006. “Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science.” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4: 493–­ 98. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations , and Area Studies during and after the Cold War.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, 261–­ 302. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Hero, Rodney E. 2016. “American Politics and Political Science in an Era of Growing Racial Diversity and Economic Disparity.” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1: 7–­ 20. Jaschik, Scott. 2010. “Should Political Science Be Relevant?” Inside Higher Ed, no. 8. Johnson, Chalmers, and E. B. Keehn. 1994. “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies.” The National Interest, Summer, 14–­22. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 2005. “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” PerspectivesonPolitics 3, no. 1: 5–­14. Schmitter, Philippe C. 2009. “The Nature and Future of Comparative Politics.” European Political Science Review 1, no. 1: 33–­ 61. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. “Still Blowing in the Wind: The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science.” Daedalus 126, no. 1: 253–­87. The Study of Asian American Politics in the United States Janelle S. Wong Is there a place for ethnic studies, and specifically Asian American studies, in political science? Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary field that places race and racialization at its center. It strives to understand the ways in which racial categories are created and maintained and their consequences for representation, resource allocation, and identity. As such, the concerns of ethnic studies overlap with the concerns of political science and the study of governance, the state, and the institutionalization of social and economic power. Ethnic studies scholarship would argue, for example, that political institutions and the distribution of social and economic power reflect state-­supported racial formations. Hence ethnic studies has advanced the concept of “the racial state” (Omi and Winant 2014). Asian 12 A & Q American studies is a subfield of U.S. ethnic studies, focusing on the experience of members of the Asian diaspora residing in the United States. Over the course of my career, I have come to believe that there is, in fact, an important place for Asian American studies in political science. Importantly, Dr. Don Nakanishi, a Harvard-­ trained political scientist (PhD, 1978), played a central role in establishing both the subfield of Asian American politics and the multidisciplinary field of Asian American studies . He did this both through research and through institution building. For example, he was on the Executive Board of the Asian Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association, eventually receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the association’s Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and he served for twenty years as the director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the oldest and largest Asian American studies center in the nation. Nakanishi’s research and field development created intellectual connections across political science and Asian American studies. In 1976, for instance, Nakanishi and several other scholars of the Asian American experience published a series of essays in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Gee 1976). In this collection, several authors documented and analyzed the participation of Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Chinese immigrant communities in the United States in leftist and nationalist movements. The authors emphasized the development of a distinct Asian immigrant politics in the United States informed by both international affairs in the immigrants’ countries of origin and the deep discrimination that Asian immigrants were facing in their daily lives in the United States in the era of Asian exclusion. In a chapter in this volume titled “Minorities and International Politics,” Nakanishi (1976) forwarded a critique of the traditional political science international relations literature with a claim that while it addressed inequalities between nation-­ states, it failed to consider the fact of white supremacy. Similarly, he critiqued the literature on race relations in the United States because it failed to take into account power differentials between the United States and the home countries of Asians in the United States. Over the course of the next forty years, the study of international politics, comparative politics...

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

Reviewed by: Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen Hsinya Huang Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $75.00 hc. $25.00 sc.336pp. In Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Chadwick Allen develops methodologies for global Indigenous literary studies by challenging us to think beyond the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states and to focus on Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationships instead. He reorients understandings of transnationality and indigeneity through juxtaposition of diverse Indigenous texts and, in so doing, provides significant impulses, especially in the fields of Native American and comparative Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and global cultural studies, which affect the practice and transformation of intellectual work in global/transnational American studies as well as Indigenous studies. In an earlier article, titled “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?,” which he rewrote as the introduction to Trans-Indigenous, Allen reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a “vertical binary” (2012a, 3) that subordinates Indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model that Allen calls “trans-Indigenous,” we need “to see [Indigenous texts] on their own complex and evolving terms” (3). In this full-length monograph, Allen prioritizes [End Page 195] “the global Indigenous” (2012b, xvii) by juxtaposing Indigenous texts from Native North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and Australia. The point is to engage these texts into close conversations and to “acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts” (xiv): Allen investigates Indigenous roots in terms of global routes. Trans-Indigenous configures different channels of crossing. It crosses over different fields of inquiries and offers impressive multiperspectivism, which it terms “scholarship across” (xix). It transcends the grids of genre, form, and media and highlights distinct Indigenous aesthetics that mix poetry, photography, sculpture, carving, textile, and live performance, etc.—“making across” (xxii). The language employed transgresses English-centered ideology, for English and Indigenous languages are engaged on equal terms—“reading across” (xxvi). The authors investigated display complex and diverse identities and connections that are not only tribal, intertribal, and transnational, but also “significantly and increasingly trans-Indigenous” (xxxiii)—“identities cross” (xxxi). And, finally, there are complex and innovative patterns of design, thinking, knowledge systems, theories, and intersections, which are marvelously woven to contribute to the trans-Indigenous scholarship—“patterning across” (xxxiii). In addition to the introduction, there are five chapters organized into two parts. The two chapters in part 1, “Recovery/Interpretation,” focus on Indigenous methodologies in order to light new avenues toward a comprehensive understanding of comparative Indigenous studies. They demonstrate how recovering and reclaiming Indigenous texts that have been consigned to oblivion would necessarily reorient and redirect methods of Indigenous literary interpretation. Allen reflects from the vantage point of his intellectual commitment to American Indian literatures, cultures, and scholarship. He sets out to re-vision “The Indian Today,” the Fall 1965 special issue of Midcontinent American Studies, within contemporary international perspectives. The aim is to interrogate how the settler colonialism practiced within the US may be related to US imperialism at large and to “various manifestations of colonialism” (xxxiii) around the globe, thereby setting up the ground for comparative studies of settlers’ dominance and Indigenous struggles in the transnational context. Part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” enacts multiple modes of trans-Indigenous juxtaposition across tribes and beyond nations. Allen is keen on revealing the dynamic power of various texts and, by providing careful and thoughtful close readings of Indigenous literature, art, and technology, he reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archives from North America, Hawai‘i, Australia, and New Zealand and engages them into productive conversations. He begins with three readings of N. Scott Momaday’s brief poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” and associates it with Plains Indian pictographic discourses, and retrieves multimedia events of Native American storytelling. In so doing, he aims to intertwine Indigenous poetics and aesthetics for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. Using Momaday’s poem as an entry point, in the next chapter he stages multiple juxtapositions of diverse Indigenous texts across historical and geographical [End Page 196] boundaries and across genres and media...

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz Dolph Briscoe IV Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 322. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West [End Page 248] is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.) African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day. In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African [End Page 249] Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality. Dolph Briscoe IV Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association