The Sticky Intimacies of Jammin’

This solo performance text visits an experience of a Vietnamese American woman reclaiming voice. The text situates itself in the racial and ethnic dis course on identity, particularly assumptions on sexual and feminine iden tity. The text brings the Vietnamese American female body to a site for criti cal examination of these discourses.

Okie Outlaws and Dust Bowl Fugitives: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Discourses of Ethnicity and Race

A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. DIANE NL NELSON. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 428 pp. A straight-forward summary of Diane Nelson's book would describe it as being about Maya and Maya cultural rights activism, bodies and body politics, la mujer maya, a gringa anthropologist, and discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and nation in Quincentennial Guatemala. All this would be at least a partially accurate representation of what Nelson calls her -partial' ethnography and what could also be described as life (and love-sexuality and erotics are also [un]covered) in the time of colera, this last term used in the sense of an intense emotional response to a hurt, such as a finger in a wound. However, since her early days of solidarity work in Guatemala, Nelson has come to understand the fluid nature of issues, labels, borders, and bodies and thus writes of a methodology of fluidarity: a practice and analytics that combine solidarity-being partial to, as in on the side of, the people I work with-with an acknowledgement of how partial, how incomplete, my knowledge and politics have to be (p. 31). What this means is that a mere list of topics covered hardly scratches the surface of what Nelson accomplishes in this serious and playful, wideranging and masterfully argued body of work. Rather, Nelson states that identity is formed through (p. 41) and points to Maya activists' notion of formacion, with the sense of being made by practices of (p. 349). Her own articulation of the issues helps form her subjects in new, sophisticated ways and inform her audience in the process. No matter how much it might seem like a closed corporate community, the state is hardly a traditional anthropological fieldsite. However, Nelson's years of experience working in a variety of locales and with a wide range of people have enabled her to make contact with many of the natives. As a recent college graduate in 1985 she engaged in solidarity work that introduced her to government elites and other professionals in the capital, refugees of the violence in Mexico, and people whose power and positions were in between those extremes. She went on to conduct research in the Development Poles, translate for Rigoberta Menchu, and otherwise expand her circle of contacts, all of which has provided her with a multitude of candid voices speaking articulately and complexly on subjects that are often painful even when they are funny. Within the frame of her work on Maya in/and the state, she devotes significant attention to four topical complexes: gender (including Rigoberta Menchu jokes, with their sick/funny humor, and la mujer maya-the Maya woman-understood as prosthetic for Maya/Guatemalan culture); state-level institutions (for example, the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy, with their politics of culture); the nexus of the Maya/local, the nationstate/national, and the world-system/international (for example, the struggle for ratification of the United Nation's ILO Convention 169 and technotraditional Maya-hackers); and the body (whether the wounded body of the gringa suspected of baby snatching, the unwound body of the Rigoberta Menchu in jokes, or the bodywork that goes into mestizaje). These themes are interpenetrated and interwoven with theoretical considerations (and in effect do not exist without their theoretical frames) having to do with the construction of power and identities, the nature of labels and attitudes, the inter-relatedness of productivity and repression, and the struggle to make sense of it all. This semiotic struggle lies at the heart of Nelson's project and is the site where her theoretical/ethnographic concerns are most powerfully pronounced with her writing. Nelson's fluidary analysis pushes beyond the solid, certain takes on the world and the binary oppositions so breezily offered up as descriptions of social reality into a territory where contradictions necessarily coexist and understanding is always partial because it is endlessly coming-into-being. …

This chapter is an inquiry into the paradoxes in discourses of ethnicity and race as well as of diversity and inclusion, centering on current movements in higher education. It aims to problematize the essentialized racial structure in American social discourses while re-evaluating academic institutions’ approaches to diversity. With a focus on Asian American students, it employs student narrations and statistical evidence to underline the neglected aspects of the heterogeneity, hybridity, and marginalization of “Asians.” The complex diversity among “Asians” and their ambiguous positionality provide insights into the challenges and paradoxes of our conceptions and practices of ethnicity, race, and diversity in general. On the one hand, I argue about the risk of prevalent practices that, to varying degrees, reconsolidate the black-white dichotomy; as they constantly strengthen disparities between the two races under the premises of the homogeneity within each category, they exclude the experiences of non-black minorities in social spheres. On the other hand, I challenge the disjuncture of diversity in theory versus in practice. While calling for a multiracial coalition to practice diversity and inclusion, I underscore the salience of unbiased perspectives in pedagogical approaches, in which, interethnicity and multiraciality are promoted, as hybrid identities beyond race are recognized. This de-Eurocentric approach ultimately aims to undermine racial essentialization and white supremacy.

Family therapy literature has emphasized the importance of examining contextual variables in supervision. This study explored how the talk of race, ethnicity, and culture is accomplished within the supervision session using conversation analysis. Conversation analysis is a naturalistic and descriptive methodology that examines patterns across naturally occurring conversations. The results indicated that the participants accomplished four domains of talk that involved the discourse of race, ethnicity, or culture. These domains included contextual markers, self of the therapist issues, cross cultural issues in the therapeutic relationship and cultural issues affecting the supervisory relationship. Implications for supervision and future directions are discussed.

The role of a teacher dictates that they provide a variety of instruction to meet content area, individualized, and group needs; facilitate, monitor, record, assess, and evaluate the learning goals of each child; manage classroom actions and activities; handle the needs of students; and walk in the shoes of children. This chapter examines whether the combination of critical pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy would aid in the development of transformative educators who could teach culturally and linguistically diverse children. It seeks to broaden the theoretical and practical underpinnings of critical pedagogy, multiculturalism, race, and ethnicity, and culturally responsive pedagogy as a prelude to racial and ethnic discourses in urban teacher education. African American women scholars and educators have been articulating their experiences in the academy, particularly the linkages between multiculturalism, race, and critical pedagogy. African American female in-service teachers implemented critical pedagogy to help children transform their lives.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga situates itself within a tradition of vampire narratives, or a “vampire canon,” constituted by a wide range of texts including novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and films like the South Korean Thirst (2009). Meyer’s series consequently invites comparisons to the existing body of work, while creating its own disruptions and possibilities within that larger body. In this chapter, we trace some of the racial and ethnic discourses in the Twilight series. We will demonstrate how, much like Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, Isabella Swan operates as a type of ethnographer—she is almost scientific in her observations of the vampire and werewolf cultures in which she finds herself immersed, and she is compelled by the Pacific Northwest like Harker is drawn into the mysterious “East”—both of which are problematically rendered as nearly mystical, especially in the depiction of Native/native peoples.

The spa, understood here as a resort town offering guests a salubrious retreat into an environment simultaneously natural and urbane, operated over much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth as a transnational social space, a heterotopia in which visitors could enjoy a social environment where the rules of society were relaxed and boundaries eased, yet hardly erased. Yet distinctions between groups remained important, while others were excluded entirely. Broad cultural patterns emerged across national boundaries in this period, in Britain, France, German lands or the United States, tempered by local peculiarities of inclusion and exclusion. This paper seeks to explore how hospitality and exclusion were defined and negotiated at Saratoga Springs, New York. Founded around 1800 as an attempt to establish a resort of culture and refinement, Saratoga in its rise to prominence in the nineteenth century sought in some ways to graft class-based European patterns onto a society that saw itself as more open and egalitarian. Instead, in the second half of the nineteenth century it established limits based less in the boundaries of class than in the discourses of race, ethnicity and settler colonialism that endured well into the twentieth. To explore the transnational context, this paper draws comparisons to the German spa of Baden-Baden, a prominent and cosmopolitan destination that, like Saratoga, rose from obscurity to prominence during the same period and served as a site where elites gathered and negotiations of inclusion and exclusion took place outside the English-speaking world. This choice is intentional to highlight the diffuse and truly transnational nature of the culture of spa hospitality in this period.

American Studies Over_Seas I: Narrating Multiple America(s) is a contribution to the ongoing debate in the field of American Studies in its most recent turn—Transnational American Studies—a paradigm shift in the discipline which runs counter to a consensus version of U.S. history and culture. The essays highlight the dissenting narratives in the study of "America" as a mindscape, multivocal and varied in its discourses of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. They also evidence the interrelation of the United States with Europe and examine how society, history, literature, and art intersect, providing alternative ways to comprehend the current geopolitical and cultural mindset on both sides of the Atlantic. These are interdisciplinary and diverse texts, authored by both senior leading scholars and promising younger researchers. The volume will benefit students and scholars of international American Studies, interdisciplinary and multicultural studies in history, sociology, modern languages literatures and cultures, cultural studies, comparative literatures, identity and ethnic studies, among others. It will also be of interest to researchers of American studies, transatlantic and transoceanic studies, diasporas and related fields of history, literature, art, and politics, as well as to the general reader with a background in the social sciences and the humanities.

This article explores theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for re-evaluating literary curricula and reading practices in contemporary school classrooms. Data from a study of students' responses to reading international literature in a multi-ethnic urban Canadian high school and conversations with South African high school students on their reading preferences ground this discussion of how students and teachers can cross borders constructed within discourses of race, gender, and ethnicity. Drawing on postcolonial literary theory, critical theory, and reader response theories, the article considers the questions, concerns, and dilemmas that emerge when students begin to deconstruct misrepresentations of "others" in literary texts and acknowledge challenges to their perceptions of self.

This multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Adoptees SPEAK Instagram feed examines how Korean adopted persons create a counterpublic of adoption which recenters the adoption narrative around the agency and identity of adopted persons. First, thematic analysis was conducted to determine dominant themes within the captions. Then, transitivity analysis of the feed’s captions was paired with image analysis. Findings supported the dominant theme of Being an Adopted Person and illustrate how contributors’ use of material processes in text, as well as gaze, distance, and visual metonymy establish adopted persons as the subject of a complex and ongoing adoption narrative. The resulting counterpublic challenges mainstream discourses about adoption as child-rescue and representations of adoptive persons as passive subjects. Through verbal and visual metonymy which complexified historic discourses of adoption, the adopted persons in Adoptees SPEAK (re)positioned themselves within discourses of race, ethnicity, power, language, and social action. This study outlines how marginalized individuals and groups can use language and self-images to reclaim their identities and linguistic agency while simultaneously engaging in social action.

Discourses of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Education

Discourses of race and ethnicity

Discourses of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Education: Trends in Research

Book Reviews 133 An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930. By Shirley J. Yee. Temple University Press, 2011, 256 pages, $27.95 Paper. Reviewed by Roger White, Whittier College Dispelling the notion that ethnic communities existed largely in isolation , Shirley J. Yee’s An Immigrant Neighborhood is a detailed, meticulously researched and well-written social history of the communities of Lower Manhattan during a unique period in American history (1865– 1930). The narrative is engaging, as the author deftly employs personal stories, which are told using information that appears, in many instances, pieced together from fragments, to motivate discussions of larger issues ranging from friendship to business relations to interracial marriage. The writing style will appeal to both academics and non-academic readers alike. Yee’s focus is “to explore the social and economic conditions under which people participated in the simultaneous development of co-ethnic and interracial/interethnic relations in their daily lives” (4). Yee’s contribution is substantial in that it offers rich details of day-to-day life that run counter to a more general, more naive view of interracial and interethnic relations during the period that includes isolation and sequestration. Yee sets out “to illuminate how they negotiated their understandings of “difference” (and similarities) in everyday life” (27). The author’s “they” includes “working-class people, reformers, police, and tourists” of the time, among others. The notion of immigrant communities living separately from one another and from the native-born whites and African Americans is quickly dispelled. Repeatedly, and effectively, the author makes a point of the extensive interactions between members of different races and ethnicities . Coincidentally, Yee accomplishes a broader, more general, but no less important, objective. During the period covered, the American identity —in terms of what race, ethnicity and gender roles meant—underwent a sustained and pronounced transformation. Yee acknowledges the broader implications when she writes, “Within this process of change, however, discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality have continued to frame the ways in which ordinary people form individual and group identities and construct families and communities” (175). 134 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY It is easy to heap praise upon Yee for her efforts. Even so, the book is not without its shortcomings. In addition to the Introduction and Conclusion, there are five chapters that comprise the book. The chapters often appear as independent works related to a common topic and that seem to be organized, as best as possible, to produce a manuscript. Yee begins the book by focusing on the personal relationships established and maintained by members of the immigrant and native-born communities. Emphasis is placed on the extent to which interethnic and interracial interaction was commonplace. This is followed, in the second chapter, by a wonderful discussion of how business relations were fomented between merchants and customers of different ethnicities and races. Chapter three blends the themes of the first two chapters, as Yee drives home the point that relationships were established and nurtured both as a matter of want and, at times, out of need. The focus of chapter four is the anti-vice movement in relation to the communities of lower Manhattan, and chapter five details the role of religion among and between the communities. The first three chapters fit together quite well. Likewise, the final two chapters fit well together. The difficulty lies here: the two parts of the work fit together poorly. This leaves the book feeling somewhat disjointed; it is as though there are two smaller works (or five short pieces) merged. The concluding section works to tie the pieces together, and does so fairly well, but it is insufficient to remedy the larger shortcoming. All criticism aside, however, as a reader I find myself contemplating the number of similar stories, from other locales and/or time periods, that are waiting to be told. In this respect, Yee’s book provides a brief glimpse into a rich American history; yet one more contribution, perhaps unintended in this case, that is made by this work. This book will be of interest to scholars of New York as well as local historical societies. The writing style is such that the...