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Conventionally, U.S. immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, this book considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, the book looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from U.S. policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest U.S. immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the U.S. impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, this book examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

Global migration is more pronounced than it has ever been while issues concerning immigration are constantly in the news. Yet answers as to why remain few and far between. Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and theLiterature of New African Diasporas intersects black Atlantic, postcolonial, and queer diaspora studies to answer these increasingly crucial questions regarding crises of immigration by rethinking migration historically and globally. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. This book uses the term conscription as a way to understand the political and economic systems that undergird contemporary immigration and its colonial histories while providing the first substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature: migritude. Authors like FatouDiome, Shailja Patel, Nadifa Mohamed, Diriye Osman and others, address vital issues of migrancy, diaspora, global refugee crises, racism against immigrants, identity, gender, sexuality, resurgent nationalisms, and neoliberal globalization.

The book proposes a critical study of the work by Latino cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, a key voice in the controversial topic of immigration. It contends that his production is significant for its documentation of the travails of the community and its assessment of the frictions resulting from a radical shift in national demographics: the rise of Latinos as the largest minority ethnicity and the eventual transition of the general population into a mode of plurality rather than majority. In his cartoons and comic strips, readers can recognize how Latinos have been used by opportunist politicians and media personalities seeking personal benefit. It is also possible to visualize how, in many cases, the political system has operated against Latinos in an almost systematic fashion, failing to acknowledge their lengthy historical record and contributions as Americans. The book chronicles the cartoonist’s evolution from a cultural actor willing to criticize injustice for the sake of retribution to one who effectively identifies and denounces the mechanisms behind rampant societal inequity—most crucially, the dynamics and implications of a hidden mainstream norm, supportive of a cultural ideology benefiting an exclusive segment of the population. In the evolution of his production, the search for a more acute representation and dissection of prejudice and exclusion becomes plain. In a sense, Alcaraz’s work is a testament not only to the growing pains of Latinos, but most importantly to those of the entire nation, as it comes to terms with the redefinition of US identity in the twenty-first century.

The urban foodscape is changing, rapidly. Fish tacos, vegan cupcakes, gourmet pizzas, and barbeque ribs, and all served from the confines of cramped, idling, and often garishly painted trucks. These food trucks, part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending, while common in the global South, are becoming increasingly common sights in many cities, towns, and universities throughout the United States and Canada. Within the past few years, urban dwellers of all walks have flocked to these new businesses on wheels to get their fix of food that is inventive, authentic, and often inexpensive. In From Loncheras to Lobsta Love, we offer a variety of perspectives from across North America on the guiding questions “What are the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion of mobile food vending?” and “How might these motivations connect to the broad goals of social justice?” The cities represented in the chapters range from Montreal to New Orleans, from Durham to Los Angeles, and are written by contributors from a diversity of fields. In all, the chapters of From Loncheras to Lobsta Love tell stories of the huckster and the truckster, of city welcomes and city confrontations, of ground-up and of top-down, of the right to entrepreneurship and of rights to active citizenship, of personal and cultural identities and patterns of eating and spatial mobilities, of cultural and political geographies, of gastro-tourist entities and as city-branding tools, of the clash of ideals of ethnic ‘authenticity’ and local/organic sourcing.

Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried.  Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world.  The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork.  This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure.  Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.

This work seeks to understand why a disproportionately large number of third class passengers, particularly women and children, died during the sinking of the Titanic in relation to the first and second classes. It examines the gender, class, social, and cultural factors that influenced this disparity. It aims to uncover both why and how five hundred and thirty one third class passengers died on the night of April 14th 1912. A key area of focus is the difficult relationship between the ship’s authorities and the men of the third class, and the extent to which this determined the fate of passengers during the rescue efforts. The introduction asks ‘Who were the third class passengers?’ and uses ethnic and economic backgrounds to suggest the third class belonged to the ‘Old Immigration’ wave of migrants, rather than the contemporary ‘New Immigration’ of the first and second. The first chapter concerns the exclusion of third class narratives in the ‘popular story’ of the Titanic. Chapters two through seven determine the whereabouts of the third class during every stage of evacuation, and flags the discrepancies in testimonies from both the British and American inquiries. Chapter eight provides a conclusion, which claims the ‘popular story’ includes a great many falsehoods with regard to the third class - including their treatment by crew, their behaviours, and their survival rates. The first appendix tables nationalities into regions; the second outlines the twenty routes to the lifeboats, as testified by one of the Titanic design architects; and the third provides deck plans for every level of the ship.

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

With the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim’s transnational study reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

This book provides an exhaustive reading of the significant yet understudied intellectual review Lignes, from 1987 to 2017, to demonstrate how it has managed to preserve and develop the legacy of French radical thought often referred to as ‘French Theory’ or ‘la pensée 68’. Whilst many studies on intellectual reviews from the 1930s to the 1980s exist, this book crucially illuminates the shifting intellectual and political culture of France since the 1980s, filling a major gap in contemporary debates on the continued relevance of French intellectuals. This book provides a strong counter-narrative to the received account that, after the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ of the late 1970s, Marxism and structuralism were completely banished from the French intellectual sphere. It provides the historical context behind the rise of such internationally renowned thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière Jean-Luc Nancy, whilst placing them within an intellectual genealogy stretching back to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in the 1930s. The book also introduces the reader to lesser known but nonetheless significant thinkers, including Lignes editor Michel Surya, Dionys Mascolo, Daniel Bensaïd, Fethi Benslama, Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz. Through the review’s pages, a novel cultural history of France emerges as intellectuals respond to pressing contemporary issues, such as the fall of Communism, the European migrant crisis and rising nationalist tensions, the globalisation of financial capitalism and the 2008 economic crisis, scandals surrounding paedophilia and the return of religious thought to France, as well as debates on literature and the political value of art.

Through contextual and textual analyses, Adjusting the contrast: British television and constructs of race explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of television’s relationship with ‘race’. The collection brings together media scholars from the UK and US, who focus on a range of issues, from television scheduling to historical questions of representation. The collection also seeks to examine how television represents Britishness through whiteness, and continued constructs of racialised normativity. Included are analyses of programmes such as Doctor Who, Shoot the Messenger, Desi DNA andTop Boy, which explore the broadcast policies and cultural production in the 'new age' of television. Other chapters examine the reframing of the 1950s on contemporary television though the example of Call the Midwife; the continuing myth of a multicultural England on Luther, and how sitcoms such as Till Death Us Do Part and Mind Your Language framed racial tensions through comedy. Through a critical analysis of literature and new empirical research, cultures of production are deconstructed, and public service remits examined.

This volume takes the pulse of French post-coloniality by studying representations of trans-Mediterranean immigration to France in recent literature, television and film. The writers and filmmakers examined have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the state of multiculturalism within – and in spite of – a continuing Republican framework. Their work deflates stereotypes, promotes respect for cultural and ethnic minorities, and gives a new dignity to subjects supposedly located on the margins of the Republic. Establishing a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch’s ground-breaking concept of postmemory, this volume provides a much-needed vocabulary for rethinking the intergenerational legacy of trans-Mediterranean immigrants.