Comparativism, Ethnicity and the United States: A Diasporic History of the Americas

Abstract

WHILE MANY PRACTITIONERS OF AMERICAN STUDIES EXPRESS THE importance of rethinking nation-state and its basic social constructions by recasting our object of study as the Americas, there remains a series of divides between U.S.-based and Latin American and Caribbean projects, ethnic studies and works on imperialism, and scholarship on race and other social formations. This impasse emerges from curious simultaneity of theoretical excesses of transnationalism and a scholarly timidity around different standards for research. How exciting, then, to read Rachel Buff's new book, Immigration and Political Economy of Home, which offers a fruitful, if unexpected, juxtaposition of West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis to create a point of entry into very question of how we might devise new projects on the Americas that are intrinsically transnational and transcultural. In exploring construction of social formations in two different U.S. urban spaces, Buff establishes a refreshingly expansive geography for production of migrant identity. In some ways an account of multiple yet symbolically connected pan-ethnicities, this book specifically illuminates significance of borders in everyday cultural