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Hip Hop Desis explores the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists. Nitasha Tamar Sharma argues that through their lives and lyrics, young “hip hop desis” express a global race consciousness that reflects both their sense of connection with Blacks as racialized minorities in the United States and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians. She emphasizes the role of appropriation and sampling in the ways that hip hop desis craft their identities, create art, and pursue social activism. Some desi artists produce what she calls “ethnic hip hop,” incorporating South Asian languages, instruments, and immigrant themes. Through ...
Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of ...
Written by scholars of various disciplines, the essays in this volume dig beneath the veneer of Hawai‘i’s myth as a melting pot paradise to uncover historical and complicated cross-racial dynamics. Race is not the primary paradigm through which Hawai‘i is understood. Instead, ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. Racial inequality is disruptive to the tourist image of the islands. It ruptures the image of tolerance, diversity, and happiness upon which tourism, business, and so many other vested transnational interests in the islands are based. The contributors of this interdisciplinary volume rec...
Introduces key terms, research frameworks, debates, and histories for Asian American Studies Born out of the Civil Rights and Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies has grown significantly over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. Characterized by transnational, trans-Pacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class, this multidisciplinary field engages with a set of concepts profoundly shaped by past and present histories of racialization and social formation. The keywords included in this collection are central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and reflect the ways in which Asian American Studies has transformed scholarly discourses, research agendas, and pedagogical frameworks. Spanning multiple histories, numerous migrations, and diverse populations, Keywords for Asian American Studies reconsiders and recalibrates the ever-shifting borders of Asian American studies as a distinctly interdisciplinary field. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.
A history of the colonial tea plantation regime in Assam, which brought more than one million migrants to the region in northeast India, irrevocably changing the social landscape.
" ... the first to examine the fraught relationship between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and religious groups in the United States in the past century. Encompassing religious organizations from established institutions to extremist groups and covering a period that includes the World Wars, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and 9/11, this book tackles questions of importance for understanding American religion, the history of law enforcement, and the future of religious liberty"--Back cover.
Finalist, 2020 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Honorable Mention, 2021 Asian America Section Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association An inspiring look inside immigrant youth’s political activism in perilous times Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In Organizing While Undocumented, Kevin Escudero shows why and how—despite this risk—many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights. Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movemen...
Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans in Los Angeles moved toward becoming a racial majority in the communities of the East San Gabriel Valley. By the late 1990s, their "model minority" status resulted in greater influence in local culture, neighborhood politics, and policies regarding the use of suburban space. In the "country living" subdivisions, which featured symbols of Western agrarianism including horse trails, ranch fencing, and Spanish colonial architecture, white homeowners encouraged assimilation and enacted policies suppressing unwanted "changes"—that is, increased density and influence of Asian culture. While some Asian suburbanites challenged whites' concerns, many others did not. Rather, white critics found support from affluent Asian homeowners who also wished to protect their class privilege and suburbia's conservative Anglocentric milieu. In Resisting Change in Suburbia, award-winning historian James Zarsadiaz explains how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging.
Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded f...
In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music--a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms--are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's activist music. Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s. Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.