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Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as a new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the ?passage of crisis? with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes? George Washington Gomez, Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncr...
Praise for The Unfinished Agenda of Brown V. Board of Education "My father, Oliver L. Brown, for whom Brown v. Board of Education is named, was a proud member of a group of a few hundred people, across the country, who took risks by taking a stand for what they believed. He died in 1961, just seven years after the case, so he didn't live long enough to know that Brown would become the foundation on which so much of this country's civil and human rights initiatives would rest. Brown v. Board became important for every citizen, not just African Americans. It shows that the founding documents of our country provided us with sovereign rights that cannot be restricted by state and local governmen...
Mass media has become an integral part of the human experience. News travels around the world in a split second affecting people in other countries in untold ways. Although being on top of the news may be good, at least for news junkies, mass media also transmits values or the lack thereof, condenses complex events and thoughts to simplified sound bites and often ignores the essence of an event or story. The selective bibliography gathers the books and magazine literature over the previous ten years while providing access through author, title and subject indexes.
In this groundbreaking analysis, Marco Portales examines the way in which education and the media act as immobilizing social forces to shape the Latino world that exists despite the best efforts of many Mexican Americans and other Latinos. The delicate relationships between what Latinos are and what they seem to be, as perceived both by the larger society and by Latinos themselves, create and craft a culture that students of American culture have not sufficiently studied or understood. As bandidos or gigolos, drug users or unwed mothers, Latinos continue to figure in the public consciousness primarily as undesirables. Despite decades of effort by Spanish-speaking Americans to improve their i...
In a ground-breaking study of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant takes issue with current notions of Hurston as a feminist and earlier impressions of her as an intellectual lightweight who disregarded serious issues of race in American culture. Instead, Plant calls Hurston a "writer of resistance" who challenged the politics of domination both in her life and in her work. One of the great geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston stands out as a strong voice for African American women. Her anthropological inquiries as well as her evocative prose provide today's readers with a rich history of African American folk culture - a folk culture through which Hurston expressed her personal and poli...
Providing a counterpoint to readings of modern American culture that focus on the cult of youth, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age interrogates early twentieth-century literature’s obsessions with aging past early youth. Exploring the ways in which the aging process was understood as generating unequal privileges and as inciting intergenerational contests, this study situates constructions of age at the center of modern narrative conflicts. Dawson examines how representations of aging connect the work of Edith Wharton to writings by a number of modern authors, including Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Eugene O’Neil...
Examines representations of the transborder Yaqui people as interpreted through the writing of Spanish, Mexican, and Chicana/o authors--Provided by publisher.
The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices – Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing. The aim is to set up and explore these different counter-seams of modern American writing, those which sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons.
Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it. With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from spe...
Karen S. Glover investigates the social science practices of racial profiling inquiry, examining their key influence in shaping public understandings of race, law, and law enforcement. Commonly manifesting in the traffic stop, the association with racial minority status and criminality challenges the fundamental principle of equal justice under the law as described in the U.S. Constitution. Communities of color have long voiced resistance to racialized law and law enforcement, yet the body of knowledge about racial profiling rarely engages these voices. Applying a critical race framework, Glover provides in-depth interview data and analysis that demonstrate the broad social and legal realms of citizenship that are inherent to the racial profiling phenomenon. To demonstrate the often subtle workings of race and the law in the post-Civil Rights era, the book includes examination of the 1996 U.S. Supreme Court's Whren decision-a judicial pronouncement that allows pretextual action by law enforcement and thus widens law enforcement powers in decisions concerning when and against whom law is applied.