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We play a game
\"Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore--now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve--the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for--and masterfully playing with--the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that \"talks to his other self in the well\"--all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.\"--Dust jacket.
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Fit to Be Citizens?
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
eBook
Incidents of travel in poetry : new and selected poems
\"Incidents of Travel in Poetry is the first collection by Latino New York School poet Frank Lima in almost 20 years. In addition to a generous selection of his published books, Incidents contains a wealth of previously unpublished new material, tracing his development from his early gritty portrayals of Spanish Harlem street life to his later abstractly lyrical mode\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
eBook
The weary blues
\"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening \"Proem\" (prologue poem)--\"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa\"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, \"His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal,\" and, he concludes, they are the expression of \"an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature.\" That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is \"celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream,\" and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American \"I\" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins \"I, too, sing America,\" but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. \"Bring me all of your / Heart melodies,\" the young Hughes offers, \"That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world.\"\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Aphrodite's Daughters
The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment.Aphrodite's Daughtersintroduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression.
Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women-Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery-who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence.
The product of extensive archival research,Aphrodite's Daughtersdraws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.
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Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities
\\Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The \"guerilla\" figure-taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party-has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential.In Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities, author Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, she examines the notion of \"Power,\" in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating-and sometimes competing-ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts-editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays-that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the volume culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker's Meridian, and John Okada's No No Boy.
eBook
Sightseer in this killing city
\"Eugene Gloria's fourth collection of poetry captures the surreal and unreal feelings of the present. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, who is a Filipina American woman with an ambiguous sexual identity, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with brutality and beauty. Flawed like America, Nacirema embodies ideas of wanderlust and self-discovery. In poems that recount her journey, Gloria invokes the spirit of 1970s soul music and of jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in This Killing City argues for grace and perseverance in these strange times\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Cutting Along the Color Line
Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.Cutting Along the Color Linechronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.
eBook