Ethnic Memory Research Articles

Chinese Diasporic Women’s Writing, Gender and Identities

This article analyzes Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts . how she constructs a Chinese diasporic feminist identity via autobiographical, familial, and ethnic collective remembrance. In analyzing this memoir, this article is concerned with how gender, identity and memory are interrelated and how they are performed in the Chinese diaspora in America. In rereading the memoir for personal, familial and collective remembrance practices, this essay suggests that Kingston conveys three mnemonic traces: memory as archeological excavation and memory as continuous revision and retranslation; memory as a tool to challenge and to subvert traditional gender ideology; and the relation between memory and storytelling, in which Kingston equates memory and voice with storytelling and silence with oppression. Kingston uses memory narratives as a strategic method to question traditional system of gender identities, roles and expectations. She excavates cultural and familial stories or collective memories, and then revises or retranslates them to understand her place and identities in America and in the Chinese diaspora. Kingston is conscious that the process of recovering, retranslating, and transmitting personal, familial, and ethnic collective memory is always fractured, negotiated, and a product of struggle. Hence it destabilizes constructions of identity and community formation along with knowledge production. Kingston notes that women are frequently the transmitters of memory . personal, familial, cultural, and collective. through their storytelling. This article illustrates that ethnic collective memory, like cultural identity, is a site of heterogeneity and difference, where some memories can perpetuate homeland and diasporic patriarchy while other memories can provide more liberating narratives for women and young girls. The Woman Warrior is an attempt to rewrite both Chinese diasporic memory by challenging its sexism and the national official memory of the United States by pointing to its history of gender inequality, racism, and Orientalism.

Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (review)

Anastasia Karakasidou, Wellesley CollegeThe recent violence in the Balkans has perplexed foreign analysts. The mainstream interpretation conjured images of the violent Balkan man and blamed atrocities on inherent national maladies. A few historical constructivist voices contextualized the violent events in world politics and emphasized how the peoples of the Balkans lived within or on the margins of empires. They consumed the images of aggression and brutality assigned to them by the West. Struggles to create a sense of collective identity outside of that domineering framework have been futile. Vampire Nation joins these constructivist voices, but offers a unique deconstruction of nationalism through a detailed textual analysis of the metaphor. Longinovic tells us how in 2007, a year after Slobodan Milosevic's death, a man visited his grave and planted a stake in the ground, a metaphorical second killing of sorts, making certain that the will never come back to haunt the living again. The culture and its connection to bloody Balkan history has indeed begged for an interpretation.Tomislav Longinovic grew up in Yugoslav Belgrade and has a unique perspective on society: not quite a detached ethnographer, nor a fully national participant, he critiques his own upbringing and writes an insightful analysis of the character of the nation. He chooses his informants from a wide range of fields and from throughout Balkan history, and analyzes a myriad of texts, films, plays, and orations. Although the work is reflexive, it is free from the insufferable self-reflections of the Western observer seeking local acceptance. The author is well-known from his previous writings on the metaphorical image of the vampire, but Vampire Nation is the first of his works that takes the leap into nationalism and stands as a critique of violence. The is a mythical creature with origins in the 17th century Balkans, and was well embedded in the magic and mysticism of daily life along with witches and werewolves. The was the worst demonic being of all, however, with an unsurpassed lust and thirst for blood. The stories circulated widely in western Europe as well, as did the images of the Slavs as the European other. On the far edges of civilized lands, these fearful people were perceived to be as violent as the magical creatures they themselves feared. The image of the Serbian vampire is rooted in these early European cosmologies: the Serbs are a backward, ancient people that feast on blood and fear the light of civilization. The Serbs, as Longinovic argues, had little choice but to conform to this assigned identity. They embraced it, but the Serbian vampire for internal consumption is quite different: he is a heroic figure, an individual who spills blood for the nation.Once with their own empire, the Serbs coexisted with the Byzantine Empire, but fell to Ottoman hands in the 14th century. Destabilized and without a territorial permanent base, the Serbs did not fully unite as a national collectivity until the rebellions against Ottoman rule in the early 19th century. The memory of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo united the Serbs and it was transformed into a mythical bloody battle between the invading Ottoman army and the Principality. The battle set up an ethnic memory of Orthodoxy against Islamic invaders and the defeat was considered to be a great loss for national and pride.Serbia became a republic within socialist Yugoslavia after World War II, but the cultural strength of the Serbs put them in an advantageous position within the Federation. Serbia was accused of having controlling interest in Yugoslavia, especially when leader Slobodan Milosevic became president of the ailing Federation. In 1991 Yugoslavia ceased to exist and the Yugoslav wars erupted, giving way to ethno-religious conflicts involving genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, internment camps, mass graves, and torture. …

Ethnic Memory and Space: Legends of Zhuge Liang in Southwest China

AbstractIn recent Western and Chinese scholarship on discourses of ethnicity in south-west China, there has been an emergent interest in the mechanism of memory and forgetting in relation to formations of ethnicities and frontier space. In Southwest China, perhaps no figure has been more important than Zhuge Liang, a famous strategist during the Three Kingdom Period (220–280 AD), whose Nanzheng (Southern Expeditions) military operation left many legends among ethnic minorities in the region, often associated with the origins of a multiplicity of place names and cultural attributes. However, in the melodrama of ethnic unity after 1949, Zhuge Liang has been championed as a benevolent figure whose ethnic policy successfully transformed the historically volatile southwestern minority regions and brought them into the fold of the Chinese nation. Based on archives and oral interviews, this paper examines the twists and turns in official and indigenous interpretations of Zhuge Liang's legacies in southwest China. It analyses oral traditions of Zhuge Liang in the Tibetan border city of Kangding as well as in Yi and Han places. The paper intends to highlight individual and specific aspects related to the construction of frontier space and memory in conjunction with the negotiation and contestation of visions of local and official histories.

The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation

In the early 1980s the Guatemalan army decimated the Achí Maya villages in the valley of Rabinal because they had opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam that was going to destroy their homes and their livelihoods. This article uses the villagers’ demands for reparations as a way to explore issues that link ethnic historical memory to a notion that we could label as ‘postmemory’, or, better yet, ‘postmemorializing’, a sort of restitutional justice that goes beyond a more conventional understanding of what historical memory is. I argue that postmemorializing includes not only a sense of preserving the historical memory of ‘originary terror’, but adds to it a demand for economic reparations. Moreover, it extends its mantle to broader ethical issues of human dignity and a demand for the recognition of ethnicized subalternized subjects bearing alternative epistemologies and ways of thinking.

Argentina chiama Italia: Friuli risponde

Normal 0 14 false false false IT X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Tabella normale; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The study analyzes the migratory waves from Friuli which, from the 1870s up to the post-World War II years, extensively moved towards Argentina, settling in the areas around the cities of Santa Fe, Cordoba, Entre Rios, Chaco and Buenos Aires, but reaching also regions as far away as Patagonia. The accurate and well diffused net of the Fogolār Furlan, besides its function as friendly society, also provides to the promulgation of ancient traditions and mores among the new generations, transmitting on to them the cultural, linguistic and ethnic memory of the motherland. Epistles, tales, novels and poems form a paideia which is thus constantly being enlivened, eveng among those who assumed Argentinian nationality or were born in the country. Of utmost interest is, therefore, the resulting literary corpus , representing as it does a renewed search for identity in the form of a dialogue with the world, extending itself well beyond the contingency of boundaries and transmitting the universal essence of logos.

Ethnic migration and memory: disputes over the ethnic origins of Japanese Brazilians in Japan

Research on Japanese Brazilian migration to Japan has followed most ethnic migration studies in assuming a conceptual opposition between an ‘official’ view held by the Japanese government's immigration policy, which conceives Japanese Brazilians as culturally close to the Japanese, and an ‘informal’ view held by Japanese Brazilians themselves, which maintains they are closer to Brazilian culture. I argue that, although the tension between the official and informal views is certainly important, it should not be reduced to a contrast between national cultures. This becomes clear when we examine the way Japanese Brazilians living in Japan organize commemorations related to the memory of their Japanese ancestors' past migration to Brazil. In this case, official and informal discourses do conflict, but this tension focuses not so much on the opposition between Japanese and Brazilian culture, but on how different representations of the past affect the current status of Japanese Brazilians in Japan.

“Québex”: Post-Nations, Translations, and Other Cases of Multiple Identity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Yes, like myself. For a more detailed account of this kind of fragile ethnic memory, both within and beyond the limits of French-Canadian New England, see Larkosh. 2. As we stop here before this horizontal line that also serves as a border (i.e. 45° N), let me pause for a moment as well in order to make my intentions as clear as possible, especially for those who remain skeptical of the usefulness of theorizing such cultural and linguistic crossings by way of an admittedly personalized introduction. Such on-the-ground lived experience as narrated here serves to underscore the fact that, in spite of the continuing (and yes, often exclusive) emphasis on the received linguistic variants, literature and culture of “France proper,” in the overwhelming majority of French/Francophone studies programs, both here and in other supposedly Anglophone North American universities, it will never be enough to diminish the undeniable and ineffaceable proximity of this neighboring Francophone place, one that persists both outside, alongside, and inside the U.S. That which is closest and most present to question these institutionalized divisions quite often remains institutionally distanced, while that which is presumably “more important,” however “further away,” is prioritized and thus brought closer (whether the literary and cultural patrimony of “France proper,” or even that of an emergent, supplemental and equally selective “Francophonie”: i.e. with Québec, strangely enough, all-too-often absent from it). Then again, I claim no exemption, as I too have emerged from this institution like so many others, complete with a good measure of its cultural baggage, awareness of institutional divisions, “key” French texts, along with their supposed translations and quotations (Derrida's seminal essay “Living On/Borderlines” is only the first of a long list of unavoidable “foreign debts” impossible to pay here). No wonder that at times it is my own French-Canadian immigrant background, combined with related readings “in a language called French,” that appears to be the lighter of my two Francophone valises. All the same, I have to ask whether it is still our all-too-accessible and porous cultural and linguistic border with Québec that may actually remain more of a source of institutional discomfort than the by-now naturalized corpus (no matter whether it appears to be in translation or not) of French literature and theory in the U.S. university. In “Living On/Borderlines,” Derrida still speaks to this translingual passage, by way of James Hulbert's brilliantly “unfinished” translation: “What this institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with [toucher à; also “touch,” “change,” “concern himself with”] language and, paradoxically, an ideal of translatability that neutralize this national language. Nationalism and universalism. What this institution cannot bear is a transformation that leaves intact neither of these two complementary poles” (76). It is thus precisely this sort of precarious maneuvering of between these co-dependent and still firmly entrenched institutional discourses of nationalism and universalism, as well as their presumably “original” and “translated” languages, that unavoidably finds itself continued here. 3. Many will also recall how Roland Barthes had already subjected such totalizing conceptions of a universalized “Man” and “his” world to intense scrutiny in his 1957 work Mythologies, both in the final essay “Le mythe aujourd’hui” and even more specifically in the chapter entitled “La grande famille des hommes,” in which both French and American models of universal humanity intertwine and are thus revealed in their incompleteness by way of two parenthetically inserted critiques of U.S. institutional racism and French colonialism: “(mais pourquoi ne pas demander aux parents d’Emmet Till, le jeune nègre assassiné par des blancs, ce qu’ils pensent de la grande famille des hommes?)” (175); “(demandons aussi aux travailleurs nord-africains de la Goutte d’Or ce qu’ils pensent de la grande famille des hommes)” (176). In this context, it is strange that out of all the pavilions and other structures built on the Île Ste.-Hélène for presumably universal exposition, two remnants stand out: Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, once the U.S. pavilion and now, stripped of its shiny plastic coating in a subsequent fire, a Canadian environment museum called the Biosphere; and the immense stainless steel “stabile” sculpture by the US artist—yes, raised in France—Alexander Calder, with the patently universal and deceptively simple title: “L’Homme,” later moved to a far-off corner of the fairgrounds. Forty years later, though, it is these incomplete (and “American”-designed) representations of Man and his World, ironically enough, that, although redesigned and repositioned, are still standing here.

Minorities remember more: The effect of social identity salience on group-referent memory

Research on the group-reference effect has confirmed that social identities can affect memory, but few studies have explored the role of identity salience in this effect. Two experiments were designed to fill the gap. In Experiment 1 Tibetan students at one predominantly Han Chinese university showed high ethnic identity salience and better memory for trait adjectives encoded in reference to Tibetans than in reference to Han Chinese. In Experiment 2 Tibetan students at one Tibetan-majority university demonstrated low ethnic identity salience and no differences were found between memory performance under Tibetan-referential processing and Han-referential processing conditions. In comparison, Han participants did not show high ethnic awareness or an ingroup-reference effect in either experiment, due to membership of an ethnic majority (Experiment1) and lack of inter-ethnic contact (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that high salience is a prerequisite for social identities to facilitate memory.

Sanctifying Ethnic Memory and Reinforcing Place Attachment: Cultural Identity, Sacred Place, and Pilgrimage in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan

On November 8,1908, the Our Lady of Assumption Church was opened in the Hungarian Catholic community of Kaposvar, Saskatchewan (located 4 km south of the present-day town of Esterhazy). Nearly a century later, the focal point of the early farming district remains an important commemorative site in eastern Saskatchewan for descendants of the pioneers who settled in the Kaposvar district under Count Paul d'Esterhazy's 1886 Hungarian colonization initiative. Centred on the church grounds, commemorative celebration and an annual pilgrimage have served as important agencies of cultural retention for local Hungarian-Canadians. This paper explores the evolution of cultural identity in the former ethnic enclave of Kaposvar and reveals the role of a traditional religious pilgrimage in reinforcing identity forming place attachment.

Paul's Contestation of Israel's (Ethnic) Memory of Abraham in Galatians 3

This essay proposes an explanation for the prominent role of Abraham in Galatians 3. While the view of existing scholarship that Paul is responding to a case being made by his opponents is accepted, there are difficulties with the current proposals. Paul's opponents are not likely to have invoked Abraham as part of a theological case, or because of his connection with circumcision or with blessings. An explanation is needed which focuses on the question of Abrahamic descent in the totality of its dimensions. By adopting aspects of theories of ethnicity, social identity and, above all, collective memory, it is argued, firstly, that Abraham was central to the ethnic identity and collective memory of first century Judeans and that Paul's opponents were offering his converts the exalted status of Abrahamic descent as a reward for becoming Judeans through circumcision. Secondly, Paul's argument in Galatians 3 represents a fundamental contestation of this memory. He formulates a counter-memory for installation in the hearts and minds of his audience. He does this by arguing that the ‘seed’ or descendants of Abraham to whom God had made promises were not Judeans but rather Christ and those who were one with him in baptism. Thus he wrenches the prize that was Abraham from the Judeans and lodges it among his mixed congregations of non-Judean and Judean Christ-followers. The audacity of Paul's enterprise is evident in his leaving no room for Judeans who had not found faith in Christ to be Abraham's descendants, a radical position from which he would later withdraw in Romans 4.

Sweatshop: the history of an American idea

Arguing that sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of language, verbal and pictorial, in which sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how sweatshop has become intertwined with invented sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about the shop. Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent worst expression of an unregulated global economy.

Mentor and Friend: Yusef Komunyakaa as Teacher

I can pin down a precise moment when the arc of my life was nudged into a different trajectory—a deflection that leads inexorably to who I am now: poet, professor of poetry writing, coordinator of a creative writing program, editor at the North American Review. That precise moment was when Yusef Komunyakaa said to me, in his university office, as we looked over some of my early verse, "These poems are fine, but why don't you write about being Filipino?" Before Yusef said that, I had been a Ph.D. student at Indiana University who wanted to write a scholarly critical dissertation on the fiction of John Gardner or else Faulkner. After Yusef said that, I bluffed my way into David Wojahn's graduate poetry workshop, entered IU's MFA program (on my third try), and after finishing the MFA, eventually completed the Ph.D., writing my dissertation on Vietnam-veteran poetry. (I'm a Vietnam-era veteran, and Yusef is a Vietnam veteran.) Let me rewind the story a bit. I was an associate instructor (read "TA") in one of those research-university first-year literature classes, with a professor lecturing to the entire group and grad students running small discussion sections. Our supervising professor had invited a visiting professor to read and discuss his poems in our "big lecture." That poet was Yusef Komunyakaa. The poems Professor Komunyakaa read that day concerned the Vietnam War. I was drawn in by the surrealist quality of the verse and also by his understated style of reading, but most strongly by his themes. Not only am I a US Army veteran, I am the brother, son, and grandson of combat vets (two of them career soldiers). What this poet was presenting so intimately was the heritage of my own family: three generations of US Army vets during two world wars and the Vietnam War. I approached Professor Komunyakaa at the end of that class and blurted out something about how touched I was and that—I cringe a little at the thought of it now—I also wrote poems. He was very generous in that conversation and asked me to drop some of my work in his department mailbox, then come and see him during his office hours in a week or so. The poems I slipped into his box were years old, dating back to a Yeats class I had taken, in which I had been inspired to write poems about Troy and Greek mythology. I don't recall now exactly which poems I showed Professor Komunyakaa, but perhaps the batch also included one or two written to try to impress young women when I was single. (Alas, misspent youth.) [End Page 505] A week later, I'm in Professor Komunyakaa's office. We're looking at my poems, where he's circled unnecessary words and perhaps written a phrase or two below one poem or another. And then he speaks and changes my life. * * * Another vivid memory I have of Yusef Komunyakaa is blue. Intense electric blue. Blue right out of deep sky on a cloudless summer day. But that blue wasn't in the sky. And Yusef wasn't in that scene. He was halfway around the world, Down Under. The blue I'm talking about was in a Romare Bearden collage Yusef left with me while he traveled in Australia. The real thing. A signed work of art. What I didn't know at the time, but which I intimately understand now, is that by asking me to be the caretaker of this irreplaceable art piece, Yusef was teaching me. I was learning something about how visual art can convey racial and ethnic memory and history (learning how to answer Yusef's question, "Why don't you write about being Filipino?"). Yusef could easily have put that Bearden into storage, perhaps in a facility that could have given it archival-level security. Instead he gave it to me to keep, and by looking...

Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, "Whiteness," American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America

This essay examines the politics of memory associated with the construction of an "American Hellenic" identity by AHEPA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association) in the context of Post World War I American nativism. It examines AHEPA's assimilationist politics in relation to two dominant narratives about American national identity at the time, (a) political/cultural nationalism, and (b) racist nationalism. It shows that although political/cultural and racist nationalisms were incompatible in their expressions of Americanism, they worked dialectically to make race a crucial consideration in the immigrant quest for national belonging. Thus AHEPA's assimilative politics of national inclusion entailed more than political and cultural conformity; it required a narrative of its racial fitness to American "whiteness." A politics of memory was instrumental for AHEPA's inclusion in the racialized nation. AHEPA sought to exclude ethnic memories that were deemed incompatible with the imperative of "white" American republicanism.

Ethnic Identity, Memory and Political Behaviour: The Case of Turkish-Speaking Pontian Greeks

This article examines the relationship between ethnic identity and political behaviour, focusing on a case-study of a specific ethnic group, the Turkish-speaking Pontian Greeks, during the years 1920–2000. The Turkish-speaking Pontians were Orthodox Christians, coming from the Black Sea region, who arrived as refugees in Greece after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne between Greece and Turkey in 1923. In the post-Second World War period, Turkish-speaking Pontian Greeks identified themselves politically with parties of the Right. In the interwar years, however, their identity was based on a strong rejection of both royalism and the Right. This article investigates which factors contributed to this change. Previous studies have indicated the importance of the linguistic factor in shaping the political consciousness of these populations. This article attempts a different approach.

"Our Alien Neighbors": Coping with the Depression on the Lower East Side

"Our Alien Neighbors" and Citizenship By the mid-1990's, following the fall of Communism, American politicians began to focus more and more on perceived internal threats to civil order. Immigrants have often been easy targets for fears of reformers. The battle cry of the most recent wave of welfare reform has been the conviction that to dismantle welfare will rid urban areas of poverty and to require citizenship will rid cities of their foreignness. The persistence of poverty and foreignness in urban America has long plagued reformers. Half a century ago, as the welfare state was itself being constructed, the persistence of poverty and of immigrants' ways took center stage for debates among policymakers and social welfare advocates. On the Lower East Side during the Depression immigrants themselves, mostly Jews and Italians, coped with the economic crisis by utilizing traditional strategies for survival. By the onset of the New Deal most of these strategies had proved insufficient. New Deal policymakers and social welfare advocates brought relief, but only to those deemed worthy. The deserving poor were those who agreed to relinquish certain behavior associated with slum living and forego an attachment to foreign ways. During the Depression immigrants faced difficult challenges and had to make difficult choices. On the Lower East Side during the Depression the emerging official culture and the rooted local immigrant culture clashed. The relationship between official and ethnic culture is little understood. But John Bodnar has argued that it was during the New Deal era that the American nation-state succeeded in distorting many expressions of ethnic culture, and American culture became nationalized. 1 During the 1930's government power on the state and local level exploded. On New York's Lower East Side that meant federal funds became available for the first time in history for public projects. [End Page 209] Tenements were razed, highways built, and pushcarts removed. But along with the creation of the welfare state came a crackdown on aliens and "alien" culture. Monies would be available to clean up the slums if immigrants modified and sanitized their behavior as well. A stark division does not always exist between official culture and ethnic culture. Certainly, East Siders wanted better living conditions but not necessarily at the expense of being told how to behave. Some, particularly older East Siders, resisted breaking ties of "descent" from ethnic culture. 2 The large number of Jews who had already left the Lower East Side by the time of the Depression was more ambivalent. Even as they celebrated their assimilation into the American mainstream, many waxed nostalgic about the "good old days of poverty." Now outsiders, their memories tempered the reality of the conflicts raging on the East Side; sometimes these memories may have caused ex-East Siders to play a more active role as they attempted to mediate the conflicts. They looked back to the East Side as a lieu de memoire, a site of memory, but also celebrated their ascent of the ladder from rags to riches. On pilgrimages back to the East Side members of the Grand Street Boys Association, for example, returned to celebrate their escape from the ghetto but looked back to an idealized past. 3 Ethnic memory colored the debate then as it does now. Yet despite reinventions and drastic change, the Lower East Side remained an immigrant neighborhood throughout the Depression. Historiographic literature of the Lower East Side underestimates the tenacity of an ethnic and working-class lifestyle throughout the 1930's. Historians of the Lower East Side experience, like those of the immigrant experience in general, stress the relative rapidity of assimilation and the disappearance of the immigrant Lower East Side. 4 Between 1920 and 1930 the Lower East Side lost 40 percent of its population. 5 Yet despite this exodus, in 1930 the Lower East Side was still 39 percent Jewish. Italians comprised the other major ethnic group. [End Page 210] Well...

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala

Tourism, ethnic memory and the other-directed place

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race. (Frederick Jackson Turner ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, 1893) Throughout the years, descendants of the original settlers have carefully nurtured their Swiss customs, and today the village welcomes all visitors with the warmth of Old World charm and Swiss hospitality. (Promotional brochure, New Glarus, Wisconsin, 1993)

Tourism, ethnic memory and the other-directed place

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race. (Frederick Jackson Turner ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, 1893)Throughout the years, descendants of the original settlers have carefully nurtured their Swiss customs, and today the village welcomes all visitors with the warmth of Old World charm and Swiss hospitality. (Promotional brochure, New Glarus, Wisconsin, 1993)

Memories of recent ethnic conflict and their relationship to social identity.

To examine ethnic memory and ethnic identity, two cohorts of Northern Irish university students in 1984 and 1995 were first asked to classify themselves in terms of being British or Irish. They were then shown 12 video clips of political events in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1980 and asked to date each clip. Then they indicated on a rating scale how that particular event made them feel in terms of being Irish or British. Baseline ethnic identity was virtually identical in both cohorts. In both years, performance on the memory task was at above-chance levels although performance declined from 1984 to 1995. There was, however, no direct relation between baseline identity and memory performance.

Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures

The fourteen insightful essays in this timely volume focus on the different ways in which ethnic American writers use memory as a device to redefine history and culture, to validate both a personal and a collective identity, and to shape narrative. The contributors articulate how the works of diverse American writers of African, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, South Asian, Jewish, and Native American descent chart memory's forays into language, narrative, and identity. The cultural and political realities of race and ethnicity in American life - as refracted through memory and imagination - give a special meaning to the identity crisis of hyphenated Americans. In examining the complicated issues of cultural memory, the contributors pay attention to historical conditions, hegemonic discourses, and differences of gender, class, and region. Some of the essays consider a single writer, while others adopt a comparative approach. Some are multi-disciplinary, drawing on insights from anthropology or semiotics, while others provide close textual analysis. Rather than providing systematic coverage of major ethnic writers of all ethnic literatures, Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures demonstrates the broad range of suggestive and provocative approaches that may be employed in studying the traces of memory in language and narrative. In their introduction, the editors have provided a valuable backward glance at how issues of race and ethnicity have come to be acknowledged as central to current literary debates. This group of critical essays not only approaches issues of memory, narrative, and cultural politics in defining the complex realities of American ethnicityand cultural identity, but also focuses on the roles of time and orality in validating both historical and narrative experience. This collection also addresses the ways in which immigrant or racial memory filters through the expanding net of language and consciousness, at the same