Decolonizing Schomburg

Revised and expanded, the second edition of this uniquely comprehensive two-volume anthology of many of the most significant documents in American intellectual history offers new selections from a diversity of authors; an extensive chronology connecting several hundred important books and essays with events in American and European intellectual, cultural, and political history; and updated bibliographies and headnotes. The anthology makes readily available substantial selections from the writings of prominent American thinkers, ranged chronologically from the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to the present. Designed for easy use by a wide range of readers, it is an invaluable reader for anyone interested in intellectual history, American history, American studies, or American literature. Volume I (to 1865) now offers new selections by Sarah M. Grimke, Horace Bushnell, and Louisa S. McCord, and Volume II (1865-present) now offers new selections by Charles Hodge, Henry Adams, George Santayana, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, H.L. Mencken, John Crowe Ransom, Meridel Le Sueur, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Whittaker Chambers, Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich, Evelyn Fox Keller, Richard Rorty, and Michael Walzer.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Contributors

Published in Rodica Mihaila and Irina Grigorescu Pana, eds., Transatlantic Connections: Essays in Cultural Relocation (Bucharest: Editura Integral, 2000), 13–25. Cultural Translation and the Discourse of Transnationalism in American Studies RODICA MIHĂILĂ On the threshold of a new millennium, the redefinition of America in the post–Cold War, globalized and computerized world of this last decade has increasingly been done at the level of a transnational system grounded in the new permeability of borders and in the seemingly declining power of the nation‐state. Reflecting the growing consciousness of globalization especially after the collapse of communism, transnationalism marks a new orientation in American Studies scholarship, which places cultural analysis and identity making in a global context. Yet, given its mobility and apparent resistance to theory, American Studies hasn’t fully and systematically explored this new orientation. Many eyes are already scrutinizing the horizon of the post‐national, post‐ethnic and cosmopolitan world of the future, but, as the revival of nationalism in ex‐communist countries has recently demonstrated, nation‐state is not likely to demise soon. This makes transnationalism an extremely challenging area of investigation. My inquiry into the discourse of transnationalism in American Studies attempts to identify a transnational paradigm in the evolution of the field over the past decade and to posit transnationalism as a model of cultural analysis to be successfully applied to the investigation of “transatlantic connections.” The transnational paradigm may prove particularly relevant when transatlantic connections involve the post‐communist Other, generally neglected by the US American Studies theorists. The discourse of transnationalism, which has marked the new orientation of American Studies scholarship in the 1990s, emerged in American intellectual history in relation with issues of national identity raised by World War I and the outburst of nativism and European nationalism associated with it. Among them, definitions of the

Civilization, or American Studies, to American scholarship is multior interdisciplinary scholarship. While the impossible ideal is the study of American culture as a unified whole, a selective history of the movement will indicate important achievements. Analysis from the point of view of the Sociology of Knowledge will point out how and why various ideological groups disapprove of interdisciplinary research and indeed of any approach but their own. I conclude with a discussion of prospects and my own evaluation. Though our cultural nationalism began early, American programs emerged only after World War I. Southern and Puritan colonists, the founding fathers of the republic, creative writers, historians, and foreign observers had all asserted the distinctive features and results of the American experience. Finally, when the United States became a world power and American poets and novelists became leaders of modernism, American programs developed. Unhappy with the low place of American literature and history in the curriculum and the way the subjects were taught, Ivy League professors began new interdisciplinary programs, centered in humanistic departments. Significantly the new titles, History, the Arts, and Letters at Yale (1933) and the History of American Civilization at Harvard (1936) tell that that humanities and high culture were dominant. Nevertheless, the first dissertations opened new doors. The first at Yale, A. Whitney Griswold's The American Cult of Success (1937), developed ungenteel aspects of the American character. Henry Nash Smith's first Harvard American dissertation of 1940, published in 1950 as Virgin Land, besides promoting the myth-symbol school of literary interpretation, used the Crockett almanacs and dime novels of popular culture to identify American hero types. While Yale's development turned toward intellectual history and Harvard produced major literature-centered works like F. 0. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, it was the Yaletrained Tremaine McDowell who built up the myth-centered Minnesota

This book investigates the extent to which various scholarly labels are appropriate for the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Louis Menand wrote, “Holmes has been called a formalist, a positivist, a utilitarian, a realist, a historicist, a pragmatist, (not to mention a nihilist).” Each of the eight chapters investigates one label, analyzes the secondary texts that support the use of the term to characterize Holmes’s philosophy, and takes a stand on whether or not the category is appropriate for Holmes by assessing his judicial and nonjudicial publications, including his books, articles, and posthumously published correspondences. The thrust of the collection as a whole, nevertheless, bends toward the stance that Holmes is a pragmatist in his jurisprudence, ethics, and politics. The final chapter, by Susan Haack, makes that case explicitly. Edited by Seth Vannatta, this book will be of particular interest to students and faculty working in law, jurisprudence, philosophy, intellectual history, American Studies, political science, and constitutional theory.

In the US American Studies scholarly community, the last thirty years have produced significant changes: changes in the demographics of our practitioners that are marked by the rise of women and members of US minority groups (racial, sexual, and ethnic) to the highest levels of leadership in the American Studies Association (ASA) and the move of scholarship addressing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual issues to the center of the field. New specialties have emerged to appear on the programs at conferences, too, including disability, performance, and border studies, and there has been a passionate embrace of popular culture as well. A concern with social class remains present, more often invoked than investigated, but it is still part of our scholarly concerns. More slowly, an acknowledgement of the transnational dimensions of US lives and of scholarship regarding the United States produced outside the United States is emerging.Methodologically and theoretically, our work has changed too: myth and symbol studies have given way to work influenced by (among others) feminist theories, critical race studies, cultural studies, the new historicism, deconstruction, sexuality studies, poststructuralism, and postnationalist, postcolonial, and transnationalist concerns.What we haven't done is move substantially closer to the social sciences. For all the invocation of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field/method/ discipline/antidiscipline (fill in the blank) in the United States, it remains deeply social historical and literary, even if the notion of a literary text has been stretched to include comic books, films, fashion, even sport. It is interdisciplinary, yes, but within a restricted yet unarticulated and largely unexamined scope of allowability-within the humanities.1 It hasn't always been this way. The unique legacy of the now-defunct program in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania long stood for excellence in integrating social science and humanistic approaches. But this model never became the dominant one. It is time for a rigorous reconsideration of this issue.In this article, I argue that we should actively restructure our research, training practices, and institutional formations to more fully integrate the qualitative social sciences, and especially ethnography, into our work. To do so will not only enlarge our constituencies and readerships, but also enable us to better investigate key issues close to the epistemological and political heart of so much American Studies work: the ways in which social hierarchies and social formations shape and are shaped by the lived experiences of those living in or engaging with the United States as a geopolitical entity or cultural imaginary. I hope to help generate a substantial debate within our field about why ethnography is not a central or even defining practice in American Studies scholarship, although some scholars and some programs are supporting this trend and its institutionalization. What intellectual and field formation legacies might have kept it from becoming central? How might we work intellectually and institutionally to change that, as I think we should?To persuasively make a case for this transformation within American Studies, I must do several things. First, I want to demonstrate and document the startling degree to which such an absence actually exists in arenas such as publishing and training explicitly denoted as part of the contemporary American Studies scholarly community. I will then consider some of the reasons why this absence might still prevail twenty-five years after John Caughey first called on us in the pages of the American Quarterly (AQ) to move in that direction.2 Second, I want to argue explicitly for what can be gained by investing our time, intellectual energy, financial resources, and institutional priorities to make the social sciences, and especially ethnography, more central to our practices. …

Thought, Culture, and Politics in Black Women’s History Chana Kai Lee (bio) Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds. Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xii + 320 pp. Notes and index. $27.95. Sherie M. Randolph. Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xi + 328 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Tanisha C. Ford. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xv + 272 pp., Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (cloth); $28.99 (e-book). Women in Africa and its diaspora have always produced knowledge across time and in various contexts, both as organic intellectuals and as those formally tied to knowledge industries such as the academy. Codifying a black women’s intellectual history field, though, has ramifications for all disciplines: an over-representation of black women as “doers” without sufficient consideration of their history of ideas leaves allied fields insufficiently conceived and entire disciplines underdeveloped. Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women includes fifteen scholarly essays assembled to situate black women’s experiences within a history of ideas generally. The editors foreground the generative influence of grand historical experiences such as slavery, colonization, and segregation. When black women have produced knowledge, what has been the content and the process? According to the editors, the result is an “intellectual history ‘black-woman-style,’ an approach that understands ideas as necessarily produced in dialogue with lived experience and always inflected by the social facts of race, class, and gender” (p. 4). An avowed turn toward black women’s intellectual history is at once old and new. In discrete places, scholars have long examined the history of black women’s ideas, especially in literary criticism, and have noted the intellectual and political value of doing so.1 The editors here make no false or exaggerated [End Page 491] claim to originality in this sense. Their target is a disciplined and coherent recognition of the “modestly documented” world of black women’s “intellectual labors” throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean (p. 3). In pursuing this goal, they aim to bring “new visibility” to the relatively neglected world of black women’s knowledge production and, as others have done, expose “the fragile and sometimes false nature of analytic categories,” particularly the binaries of place: public and private, academic and non-academic (p. 5). As with other anthologies compiled by multiple editors, the result is mixed: some essays make a more direct connection to the volume’s clearly stated aims while others are less successful. The standout essays raise critical questions and present superb examples of how to produce black women’s intellectual history. In her marvelous essay, “Phillis Wheatley, a Public Intellectual,” Arlette Frund unfurls the life and work of the captive slave and internationally renowned author in ways that take us well beyond Wheatley as an icon re-discovered in the twentieth century. Placing her in the proper political and intellectual context of the eighteenth century, Frund deftly explores Wheatley’s complex subjectivity and analyzes in clear, precise language the impressive political reasoning that Wheatley used to challenge preeminent Enlightenment thinkers of her day, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Her poems and letters circulated widely, and their contents ranged from musings on everyday life to reflections on death and loss to incisive analyses of profound political questions. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and of Edward Said’s conception of intellectuals, Frund maintains that Wheatley was unquestionably a public intellectual (p. 50). Wheatley’s work challenged state authority by insisting on notions of egalitarianism and liberty that were expansive and humanitarian in aim and scope. She reflected critically on capture, slavery, and separation while condemning slave owners’ hypocrisy. In the truest sense, Wheatley was, in Frund’s words, an Atlantic World philosophe, a “founding figure and premiere practitioner of an intellectual history of black women” (p. 50). Frund’s essay is a useful model for black women’s intellectual history. Among other outstanding essays in...

CÉCILE ACCILIEN is the chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and a professor of African and African Diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University, Georgia.LISETTE ACOSTA CORNIEL is an assistant professor of Latin American studies in the Department of Race and Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.GISELLE LIZA ANATOL is a professor of English at the University of Kansas, Lawrence and the outgoing president of the international Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars.ELIZABETH ARANDA is a professor of sociology and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida. A native of Puerto Rico, she has dedicated herself to documenting the lived experience of migration and to share (im)migrants’ stories through her research and teaching. Her research addresses migrants’ emotional well-being and their adapting to challenges posed by racial and ethnic inequalities and legal status. Email: earanda@usf.eduREBECA BLACKWELL is a sociology PhD candidate at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the areas of social psychology and social communication. She studies emotions in society, cultural understandings of health, disability, and migration. Some of her previous work includes social issues in Venezuela, her native country, and Peru, her adoptive home for five years. She comes from a background in translation work and linguistic research back in Venezuela. Email: rblackwell@usf.eduSARAH A. CLUNIS is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and received her PhD in art history in 2006 and a master's in art history in 2000 from the University of Iowa. She is the curator of the African Collections and director of academic partnerships at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, having previously worked as the director of the Xavier University Art Gallery, supervisor of the art collection team, and assistant professor of art history at Xavier University in Louisiana. She specializes in the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora from traditional to contemporary. Clunis has also published in national and international magazines and journals. Her work examines gender, race, and migration in multiple contexts. She is currently the project curator for the Helis Foundation John Scott Center at the Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, developing a permanent exhibition titled Dancing at the Crossroads, an organic development of her professional and scholarly trajectory. Clunis continues to work on multiple projects on the visual culture of Afrofuturism and diversity and inclusion in the arts.SABINE LAMOUR is an international sociologist trained in France and Haiti. Currently, she is completing a research project that explores the role of the evangelical in the political context. Since 2005, she has been working with Haitian women's organizations as a feminist activist and an independent consultant at both urban and rural levels. Since 2017, she has been the national coordinator of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA)and has taught courses at l'Université d’État d'Haïti (UEH) since 2012. She is interested in topics such as gender, sexualities, slavery, family dynamics in the Caribbean, and Haiti's political system. In 2018, Lamour copublished Déjouer le Silence: Contre-discours sur les Femmes Haïtiennes and has published articles in Chemins critiques; Women, Gender, and Families of Color; and Revue internationale des études du développement.LAURA LOPEZ MARTINEZ received a bachelor of arts degree from the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia. She also holds a master's in history and literature from the Columbia University. Currently, she is finishing her second year as a PhD student in modern languages at Swansea University, Wales. Her thesis is a comparative study of the works of two Caribbean writers: Edwidge Danticat and Hazel Robinson, through the lens of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. Lopez Martinez's research explores issues such as language and identity, gender, and the relationship between human beings and nature.ALEXANDRIA MILLER is a PhD student in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research interests include Africana feminisms, Caribbean studies, Black women's intellectual history, and cultural studies.ALESSANDRA ROSA is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at University of South Florida. As a Puerto Rican, she has dedicated her teaching, research, and service to fostering diversity, equity, and justice. Her research centers on social movements, internet activism, education, Puerto Rican studies, postdisaster migration studies, emotional well-being, and discourse analysis. Email: amrosa1@usf.edu.

Reviewed by: Latina/o Studies by Ronald L. Mize Kane Ferguson (bio) Ronald L. Mize, Latina/o Studies. Polity Press, 2019. Pp. 172. Part of the Short Introductions Series by Polity Press, Ronald Mize’s Latina/o Studies casts the field’s current debates against a historical accounting of its development. This monograph serves as a comprehensive guide to both students and scholars who are interested in the growth of the discipline, as well as the historical foundations that inform ongoing debates. As it is significantly easier for individuals to remain connected to a homeland in the “post-1965 migration” (8) era, a major theme of this text is transnationalism and its relationship with neoliberalism, nativism, and globalization. Divided into eight chapters, the work traces the veins of Latina/o studies from several perspectives. Chapter 1 concentrates on terminology, beginning with government deployment of the term “Hispanic” on census forms in the 1970s to the emergence of “Latino” as a shortened version of “Latinoamericano.” During the 1990s, concern over the term’s visible masculinity was voiced, and more inclusive language such as Latin@ (2000s), Latinx (2010s), and most recently, Latinidad(es), has since emerged. Through a discussion of national origin and lived experiences, Mize confronts (im)migration and transnationalism and complicates conceptualizations of a panethnic Latina/o identity. Chapter 2 chronicles the trajectory of US and Latin American history, focusing on the legacy of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism that continues to inform Latina/o studies research and scholars. This includes the US-Mexico War, the Spanish American War, and US political and military involvement in Latin American nations (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala), as well as revolutionary and proindependence figures. Similarly, the chapter describes historical immigration patterns to, and destinations within, the US and traces US political movements such as the Chicano and Boricua civil rights movements (1960s and 1970s), the sanctuary movements (1980s), and the immigrant rights movements (2000s). In chapters 3 and 4, Mize pushes back on scholarship that overrepresents Mexican American culture and thought by unpacking the complexity of Latina/o studies through a detailed account of the preceding area studies. Specifically, chapter 3 concentrates on the simultaneous but separate inauguration of Chicano studies in the Southwest and Puerto Rican studies in the Northeast, which arose amid the civil rights movement as well as in response to earlier scholarship that relied upon and perpetuated stereotypes of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. The focus of chapter 4 broadens to illustrate the “plurality of Latina/o and Latin American experiences” (59). It introduces the rise of other Latina/o area studies such as Central American studies, Cuban American studies, Dominican studies, and South American studies through theorizations of a Latino political consciousness (59). However, Mize is quick to clarify that Latina/o studies is [End Page 205] “more than simply an amalgamation of disparate national-origin groups” (59). In many ways unique to the US, there are “places where Latina/os come together in their daily lived experiences” (59), which the field of Latina/o studies now conceptualizes “as embodying Latinidades” (59). In a similar way, chapter 5 engages Latina subject positions to illustrate the expansion of identity through conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. Mize outlines scholarship aimed at “reclaiming the lost voices of Latinas” (62) in historical contexts such as representations of Doña María/La Malintzin/La Malinche and other writings that “inform our understanding of life filtered through Latina eyes” (64). In chapter 6, Mize returns to the present to concentrate on popular culture and the representation of Latina/os therein. Mize demonstrates the “conflation” (76) of Latina/o identities and stereotypical representation of Latina/o subjects in all forms of popular media as well as an imagined homogenized market segment. He then counters with an outline of the heterogenous responses put forth by Latina/o studies scholars. This chapter further explicates the political threat posed by representations like the “Latino threat narrative” (77) emerging from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and administration. Mize illustrates how state legislation is a “main expression of today’s nativism” (79), positing that “Latina/o Studies scholars have to recognize that in many ways our celebration...

“Rethinking American Culture” was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which “new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture.” This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and anthropologists might best describe and analyze such warrants and reconstitute these fields, both of which are under pressure in a present “moment of danger” made all the more visible by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, eds, Eric Walrond: The Critical Heritage. Kingston: University West Indies Press, 2012. 246 pp.a superb and comprehensive collection scholarship, Eric Walrond: The Critical Heritage makes an invaluable contribution to Caribbean, American, African diaspora, British, and Latin American literary studies, and to the study literature generally, because Eric Walrond was a journalist and literary writer singular calibre who lived in and portrayed these regions with keen attention to cultural specificity and a no-holds-barred critique human and power relations.A migrant many times over, Walrond was a quintessentially international black subject, and an outsider in nearly all the many places he lived. Born in 1898 in British Guiana, Walrond migrated with his mother first to Barbados in 1906 when his father went to Panama and ceased supporting the family, then to Panama in 1910 in search his father. As a Guyanese in Barbados, he was derided as a mud-head; in Colon (the setting many his works) he was black and British among colour-conscious Panamanians, in the segregated world the US Canal Zone, and the divided, multinational Canal workforce. In 1918, having established himself as a journalist in Panama, he arrived in Brooklyn - where he was West Indian, among (US) African-Americans and black in a white-dominated society. Yet, despite significant racial discrimination, Walrond rose quickly. By 1925 he had moved to Harlem, where in addition to publishing short stories, he was editor the National Urban League's journal Opportunity. He reached the pinnacle his public recognition in 1926, with the publication his masterpiece Tropic Death,1 which depicted in virtuoso high modernist aesthetics, the impossible combination horror, tragedy and beauty that characterised the lives Afrodescended people in Latin America and the Caribbean archipelago. Tropic Death won for Walrond the Harmon Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a scholarship to the University Wisconsin. Then in 1929, Walrond boarded a boat to England and disappeared from the scholarly radar.There was virtually no scholarship on Walrond until Kenneth Ramchand's 1970 Savacou article calling for recognition Walrond as one the most imaginative and technically accomplished writers ever to come out of the Caribbean (34).2 Then again silence, until 1988, when Robert Bone dedicated a chapter his book on the Afro-American short story to Walrond, presenting Tropic Death as a notable achievement the Harlem Renaissance (34).3 Then again, silence until 1999. However, since 2000 (mostly since 2010), more than ten articles have been published, in addition to the eight original essays in this collection - and James Davis's biography Walrond is forthcoming. Walrond had to wait nearly ninety years after the publication Tropic Death, but finally the scholarly world is taking note his great significance.As Parascandola and Wade explain, Walrond has become visible in the twenty-first century because American and African-American studies have become transnational fields - and, I would add, because Caribbean studies has addressed its close relations to Latin America and Latin American studies is now placing more emphasis on race and Afro-descended peoples. The surge in Walrond studies would not have happened without critique the nationalist framework for literary and cultural studies. However, little new scholarship could have been written without the painstaking work Parascandola and Wade. With his 1998 Walrond reader,4 Parascandola laid the foundations for this new generation scholarship by republishing a broad selection Walrond's work, including stories from Tropic Death. Parascandola and Wade's 2011 collaboration on Walrond's later writings3 presented unknown journalism and fiction Walrond wrote after leaving the United States, including a significant corpus fiction and essays published in the 19 50s in Roundway Review when Walrond was a patient in the Roundway (psychiatric) hospital in Wiltshire, UK. …

Introduction: American studies have pointed out racial disparities regarding Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) occurrence, but to date, no data exists among immigrants in Europe. Hypothesis: The risk of OHCA may vary according to region of origin among immigrants. Methods: This nationwide study included all immigrants identified from the Danish Cardiac Arrest Register with OHCA with presumed cardiac cause between 18 and 80 years from 2001 to 2014. Regions of origin were defined as Asia, Western countries, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and Arabic countries. Results: Overall, among 940,207 immigrants present in Denmark, a total of 1,724 (0.2%) OHCA (median 62 (IQR 50,71) years 70% males) were recorded. History of myocardial infarction, heart failure, and diabetes were present in 23%, 18%, and 16% respectively. 217 OHCA occurred in Asians, 673 in Westerners, 347 in Eastern Europeans, 107 in Africans, 19 in South Americans, and 361 in Arabic immigrants.Crude incidence rate (/ 100 000 person-years) was 15.2 (95%CI 9.14-23.7) in South American, 19.4 (95%CI 16.9-22.2) in Asian, 22.8 (95%CI 18.7-27.5) in African, 24.7 (95%CI 22.2-27.3) in Arabic, 26.2 (95%CI 23.5-29.1) in Eastern European and 32.4 (95%CI 30.0-34.9) in Western immigrants.After Cox regression, factors associated with OHCA were Eastern European origin (HR 1.28, 95%CI 1.13-1.47; P<0.001), African origin (HR 1.31, 95%CI 1.07-1.61; P=0.01), male sex (HR 1.89, 95%CI 1.70-2.10; P<0.001), age (HR 1.05, 95%CI 1.04-1.06; P<0.001), ischemic heart disease (HR 52.02; 95%CI 39.41-68.67; P<0.001), diabetes (HR 7.04; 95%CI 5.42-9.16; P<0.001), and heart failure (HR 1.33, 95%CI 1.06-1.64; P=0.01). Conclusions: This is the first European study assessing the incidence of OHCA among immigrants according to their region of origin. Eastern European and African immigrants had a higher risk of OHCA compared to South American, Asian, Arabic and Western immigrants.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR ROLE AS American studies scholars and teachers has taken on dimensions and conditions we could not have imagined just one year ago. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of a new-fashioned global war on terrorism, have transformed the thinking and direction of many of us who study and interpret social and cultural life in the United States. For me to make sense of my own world in these troubling times, I have deliberately returned to work that I have done for over a decade that gives meaning to my own life as an academic. Last year, as I prepared for a presentation to a community forum in East Los Angeles, I noticed an elderly African American woman enter the auditorium carrying two plastic grocery sacks full of what appeared to be letters. This forum was being held at the International Institute in Boyle Heights, a place where immigrants from around the world had been welcomed to Los Angeles for the past eighty years (fig. 1). But this meeting brought together different generations of newcomers to Los Angeles that had rarely met: today's largely recent Latino immigrants in the neighborhood and an older group of white, Jewish, African American, Asian American, and Latino citizens who had first entered Boyle Heights in the mid-twentieth century but no longer lived in the community (figs. 2 and 3).

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...