Identity In America Research Articles

Religion and National Identity in America and Europe

America and Europe have had very different religious experiences, and these differences have continuing consequences. In America, the preponderance of Reform Protestantism gave rise to religious and political pluralism, a religious marketplace, and the continuing vitality of the churches. In Europe, the dominance of state churches gave rise to the eventual rejection of these churches and religions when the traditional political and social authorities were rejected, particularly by the Generation of 1968. However, Europe’s extreme secularization has rendered it confused and ineffective in dealing with the new religious challenge posed by Muslim immigrant communities.

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

Immigrant Motherhood and Transnationality in Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Twentieth Century & Contemporary Section. This article argues that Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake offers motherhood as a site of agency for negotiating a transnational identity for the postcolonial female subject in diaspora. Lahiri shows how traditional gender roles – often considered subordinate in the postcolonial context in their appropriation by nationalist agendas – can be read as a source of empowerment when translated into the context of middle class immigrant life in America. The Namesake depicts the cultural and national fluidity offered by this status: the immigrant mother, a central character in this novel, is able to preserve the Indian traditions that link her to her homeland while simultaneously benefiting from the privileges afforded by American citizenship in order to ensure a successful future for her American-born children. An Indian matriarch living in the suburbs of Boston, she does so through the careful negotiations she makes for her family on a daily basis in response to the often conflicting demands of traditional Bengali culture and the pressure to become an assimilated American. Although in the context of Western feminism it may seem contradictory that it is through the role of wife and mother that a subjectivity which transcends any fixed national identity is achieved, this reading of Lahiri's novel is informed by the arguments of transnational feminists who resist any essentializing understanding of female emancipation. This article concludes that immigrant women from the so-called ‘third world’ need to be understood not only in the context of their particular national histories, but also through the manner in which they appropriate these histories in forging individual identities in America. Lahiri's The Namesake provides the occasion for such a discussion within ethnic American literary studies, especially as this field continues to engage with postcolonial and transnational paradigms.

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (review)

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (review)

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (review)

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (review)

Rewriting the Diaspora: Images of Eastern Europe in the Bialystok Landsmanshaft Press, 1921-45

Jews are often summoned as the model diasporic group in the academy, but few understand how the concept of diaspora actually informed Jewish immigrant identity in early-twentieth-century America. Both popular folklore and scholarship portray Jewish life, culture, and identity as shaped exclusively by Jews' diasporic mentality rooted in their dispersal from the Land of Israel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe reshaped Jews' understanding of exile and diaspora. Using a transnational lens, this article examines the newspapers created by one group of East European Jewish immigrants, all of whom hailed from the city of Bialystok in northeastern Poland, focusing on immigrants' depictions of Eastern Europe and their imagined relationship to it. Through a close reading of the pages of the Bialystoker Stimme (The Voice of Bialystok), a newspaper launched in New York in 1921 and read throughout the world, I argue that the depictions contained in these Yiddish newspapers belie the standard, static view of Jewish diasporic identity in America. Some East European Jews saw America as exile and themselves as still anchored in the crucible of Eastern Europe—fundamentally challenging long-standing notions of how Jews conceptualized the state of being in exile prevalent in scholarship in Diaspora studies and American Jewish history.

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865

What happened to Abraham?: reinventing the covenant in American Jewish fiction

What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction examines the ways in which contemporary American Jewish writers reinvent and reconfigure stories of the Hebraic covenant as a way of conceiving, negotiating, and redefining Jewish identity in America. In attempting to locate a place for Jewish identity at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, American Jewish writers look to an imaginary memory to reengage a defining, central Jewish history that has, post-World War II, become diluted in American culture.

German-Jewish Identities in America

Book Review| January 01 2005 German-Jewish Identities in America German-Jewish Identities in America, Christof Mauch and Joseph Salmons. Melissa R. Klapper Melissa R. Klapper Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2005) 24 (2): 129–130. https://doi.org/10.2307/27501582 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melissa R. Klapper; German-Jewish Identities in America. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2005; 24 (2): 129–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27501582 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2004 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Les États-Unis Ont-Ils Besoin D'Alllés?: Les États-Unis et leurs alliés Européens de la guerre froide à L'Irak

LES ETATS-UNIS ONT-ILS BESOIN D'ALLIES? Les Etats-Unis et leurs allies Europeens de la guerre froide a l'Irak Jean-Yves Haine Paris: Payot, 2004. 379pp, euro21.00 paper (ISBN 2-228-89809-0)Judging from the frenetic pace of the Bush administration's transatlantic diplomacy during the early months of 2005, we might be tempted to conclude that Washington has answered in the affirmative the question JeanYves Haine poses in his ambitious study of US foreign policy: America does need allies, especially if they happen to be located in Europe. How Washington should have come to this judgement (if that is indeed what it has done) provides the theoretical and historical storyline of this book.This is a very impressive work, but also an unusual one. The two qualities are related. Haine demonstrates a mastery of the theoretical and historical writing on America and NATO that is little short of breathtaking. All manner of international relations and foreign policy theory are on display here, from the most structuralist assessments of alliance dynamics associated with Kenneth Waltz to micro-level theorists exploring every nook and cranny of the cognitive mechanisms of sentient (or otherwise) decisionmakers. Although the book is primarily about alliance choices in American foreign policy, anyone in need of being brought quickly up to speed on the major currents of international relations theory, past or present, would be well-advised to keep this va de mecum close to hand. This is a tour d'horizon that also manages to be a tour de force.I use the French accolade advisedly, for this gets us to what is so unusual about Maine's work. It is rare to encounter, in French, a work so wellsteeped as is Haine's in the major elements of transatlantic theoretical and cultural discourse-at least in European French circles, for Quebeckers who write in that language are quite at home in the kind of debates one encounters in a transatlantic epistemic community whose major geographic points of reference are Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the United States, and Canada. By contrast, with some very few (but notable) exceptions, works on American foreign policy that get published in France tend to be either descriptive or judgemental, usually both-and so powerful is the urge to decry whatever it is that Washington is found to be up to that the descriptive merits tend to get lost in the passion and rhetoric of denunciation. It was not always thusly when French scholars wrote about American foreign policy and international relations, as anyone familiar with the work of the great Raymond Aron will know. And it is with Aron in mind (indeed, as mentor) that Haine sets out to show why America has made the kind of alliance choices it has since the founding of NATO after the Second World War.Just as with Aron, it is hard to pigeon-hole Haine, as at times he evinces the sort of prudential wisdom that could easily lead to his being regarded a classical realist, yet at other times he can appear to be an out-and-out social constructivist. By and large, he takes guidance, as did Aron, from Max Weber, and for Weberians the epistemological challenge is to try to get inside the heads of decision-makers and understand, from their point of view, the menu of choice that confronted them.So why did Washington decide, after the second World War, to take the unprecedented step of forging a permanent, multilateral, and entangling alliance with Europeans, of all people? And why did Washington work so assiduously, once the Soviet threat (and Union) had vanished, to keep in existence an organization that many, including many so-called realists, expected to wither and die, deprived as it was of its enemy? For Haine, it has a lot to do with America's identity as a liberal democratic country whose security and defence choices would necessarily be coloured by its self-conceptualization. …

Doing race and class

This essay argues that race is constructed not only by the conventions of social categorization, but also by the norms of social behavior. In analyzing the evolution of the American concept of race, it discusses Haynes’s Red Lines, Black Spaces; Jackson’s Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America; Pattillo-McCoy’s Black Picket Fences; and Rockquemore and Brunsma’s Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America.

Rethinking Manhood and Intimacy

John Ibson.Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. 237 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $32.95. The old adage a picture is worth a thousand words immediately comes to mind when discussing the Smithsonian's new book Picturing Men. Its author John Ibson brings two important strengths to his enterprise: first as an avid collector of photographs of men in groups of two or more; and second, as an academic in the American Studies Program at California State, Fullerton. In his first role Ibson has assembled photographs from the 1860s through his cut-off date of 1950. (Interestingly, almost all of the images are from his extensive private collection.) He argues persuasively that these photos are representative, and the images do range across social class—from working-class men to middle- and upper-class figures; across age groups—from youths to men in their twilight years; across racial lines—although men from different groups almost never pose together in the same photograph; and where documentation is possible, across regions. Ibson's central argument is that men from the mid-nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century, were far more comfortable showing affection for one another—holding hands, sitting on one another's laps, lying together on a blanket, to name a few examples—than men are today in the modern era. It is in his role as scholar that Ibson raises the volume beyond the facile curiosity of a coffee table book; along with the many photographs, his text presents a thorough and careful review of the current literature on men's history in the United States during these years. When brought together, this historical context and the many striking images of men displaying an intimacy no longer extant produces a clear confirmation of recent trends in the historiography. Without question, the book has clarified my own thinking of men's history, masculinity, and sexual identity in America's past. In his preface the author states, "the very meaning of men's relationships with each other has changed so much, as have the cultural boundaries regarding one man's physical (as well as verbal) expression of affection for another man" (pg. xi). Further, the opening pages explain that the book does not strive to be [End Page 526] a work of gay history—i.e., intent on recovering lost male sexual relationships—but serves rather to reconstruct and illustrate a sexual system that sometimes allowed for such intimacy. As Ibson's work stresses repeatedly, a cultural artifact such as a photograph necessarily had a very different meaning for someone in 1853 than it would for another in 1953—these two people would approach the image with two very different sets of cultural baggage. All too often we as historians have failed to fully appreciate this important distinction. In each chapter he presents, illustrations of the studio photograph, staged pageant photographs, team photos, and informal snapshots, the author again and again charts a transition from a nineteenth-century world where male intimacy was the norm to one resembling our own where such bonds came to be suspect. Significantly, the early photos reveal a world where men and women truly lived in separate spheres; men were far more likely to have their photograph taken with a male friend than with a female one—or often even a spouse. Many of the photos are located in the all-male sites where men of all social classes spent so much time: saloons, clubs, the YMCA, hunting, on the job, military locations, and, of course, sports teams. Even in the few photos presented where women are included, it is striking that the men hold one another's hands and remain physically separated from the fairer sex. Ibson wisely chooses to discuss these intimate reminders of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century male romantic friendships not as prototypes of our modern homosexuals, but as common relationships, more the norm than...

Religious Pluralism in Twenty-First-Century America: Problematizing the Implications for Orthodoxy Christianity

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century.

Held Captive by the Irish: Quaker Captivity Narratives in Frontier Pennsylvania

During the eighteenth century, an estimated , Presbyterians of Scottish descent emigrated to America from Ulster. Sometimes called “Ulster Presbyterians,” sometimes called “Scots-Irish,” this transatlantic “people with no name,” as historian Patrick Griffin has called them, defined their identity in America through “movement, reformed Protestantism, and Britishness.”1 Even more important to the construction of Scots-Irish identity was the way that this group of emigrants related to people of color in the American colonies. The Scots-Irish—despite being remembered as an exceptional class of Irish immigration by their descendents—are, indeed, sharers in the larger story of how the Irish became white in America.2 The story of “how the Irish became white,” as Noel Ignatiev’s influential study terms the process, centers around the experiences of nineteenth-century Irish Catholic immigrants to American cities and their interactions with African Americans. A similar story may be told of eighteenth-century Ulster Presbyterian emigrant settlers on the frontiers and their interactions with American Indians. The nineteenth-century Irish settled in the cities among African Americans, and the eighteenth-century Scots-Irish likewise found themselves in the backcountry among American Indians. Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants

Religious Pluralism in Twenty-First-Century America: Problematizing the Implications for Orthodoxy Christianity

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century.

Jewish Identity in America: Structural Analyses of Attitudes and Behaviors

Data from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey are utilized through facet theory technique seeking to determine the interrelationships between different components, both behavioral and attitudinal, of Jewish identification. For different typologies of Jewish identity, including the "enlarged" Jewish population, "core" Jews, and "Jews by religion," we have found a coherent structure of areas, each of which includes several identificational variables in close proximity one to another. This is manifested in the partition of the space into several regions. Similarly, the structure of American Jewish identification attests to a rather clear distinction between the two major modes of attitudes and behaviors. The different sub-groups within the Jewish population share a common denominator of the total composition of Jewish identification. Identifying the was Jews conceptualize and organize the multivariate array of their group belonging can lay a better foundation for an evaluation and interpretation of trends in Jewish identification and its determinants. We suggest that this methodological approach be applied to other, non-Jewish, groups thus providing a useful insight into the internal structure of their specific identificational components; this will contribute to furthering the understanding of the nature of religiosity and ethnicity in present-day America.

German-Jewish Identities in America (review)

German-Jewish Identities in America (review)

Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining America's Borders with Musical Orientalism

The music of Tin Pan Alley has proven an extremely rich source for investigations of race, ethnicity, and identity in America, most clearly with respect to Jewish American identity-making and the cultural history of black/white racial relations. The existence of a large body of Asian-themed Tin Pan Alley songs suggests, however, that other important trajectories involving the construction of ethnic and racial identity have been overlooked. To illuminate the role of music in molding ideas of Asia and Asian America, this essay focuses on the song "Chinatown, My Chinatown" by lyricist William Jerome and composer Jean Schwartz, offering detailed accounts of its origin, its 1910 Broadway debut, its presentation as sheet music, and its extensive performance history. By caricaturing local Chinatowns as foreign, opium-infested districts within U.S. borders, the song exemplifies turn-of-the-century musical orientalism as it was directed toward a local immigrant community. Yet the popular standard continues to resonate today in performance, recordings, film, television, cartoons, advertising, and the latest entertainment products. To account for the song's enduring cultural impact, this essay traces its history across diverse performance contexts over the last century.

The sounds of place: music and the American cultural landscape

This study explores how the nation's landscapes have inspired American classical music composers over the centuries. Situating her study within the broader context of literary and visual arts traditions, the author examines how celebration of place in music reflects and defines America's identity.