Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195055108
- eISBN:
- 9780199854219
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195055108.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to ...
More
Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to help redirect thinking on the subject of immigration by giving a summary of the current state of immigration studies and a coherent new perspective that emphasizes the international dimensions of the immigrant experience from the time of the slave trade to present-day movements of Asian and Latin American peoples. This book challenges ethnocentric American or European perspectives on immigration, disputes the classical assimilation model of a linear progression of immigrant cultures toward a dominant American national character, questions human capital theory as an explanation of ethnic group achievement, reveals conflicting ethnic and racial attitudes toward immigration restriction, and examines the revival of interest in oral history, immigrant autobiographies, and other subjective documents.Less
Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to help redirect thinking on the subject of immigration by giving a summary of the current state of immigration studies and a coherent new perspective that emphasizes the international dimensions of the immigrant experience from the time of the slave trade to present-day movements of Asian and Latin American peoples. This book challenges ethnocentric American or European perspectives on immigration, disputes the classical assimilation model of a linear progression of immigrant cultures toward a dominant American national character, questions human capital theory as an explanation of ethnic group achievement, reveals conflicting ethnic and racial attitudes toward immigration restriction, and examines the revival of interest in oral history, immigrant autobiographies, and other subjective documents.
Madeline Y. Hsu
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164021
- eISBN:
- 9781400866373
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164021.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter discusses how Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period—as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of ...
More
This chapter discusses how Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period—as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of incarceration during World War II. The impossibility of Asians becoming U.S. citizens was established early in America's history. Much of immigration studies scholarship has usefully focused on the goal of restriction—the targeting of certain populations as unwanted in the United States. By focusing on restriction, however, the scholarship has neglected the selective aspects of immigration laws, which not only erected gates barring entry to unwanted persons but also established gateways that permitted admission to peoples deemed assimilable but also strategic, as determined by a variety of revealing rationales.Less
This chapter discusses how Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period—as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of incarceration during World War II. The impossibility of Asians becoming U.S. citizens was established early in America's history. Much of immigration studies scholarship has usefully focused on the goal of restriction—the targeting of certain populations as unwanted in the United States. By focusing on restriction, however, the scholarship has neglected the selective aspects of immigration laws, which not only erected gates barring entry to unwanted persons but also established gateways that permitted admission to peoples deemed assimilable but also strategic, as determined by a variety of revealing rationales.
Virginia Yans-McLaughlin
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195055108
- eISBN:
- 9780199854219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195055108.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
This chapter explores subjective documents and their relationship to immigration and ethnic studies, fields that historically have found these sources both appealing and problematic. By “subjective ...
More
This chapter explores subjective documents and their relationship to immigration and ethnic studies, fields that historically have found these sources both appealing and problematic. By “subjective documents”, it refers to a broad class of evidence that reveals the participant's view of experiences in which he had been involved. They include autobiographies, life histories, letters, oral narratives, interviews, and court records. The discussion here familiarizes readers with some recent debates over the use and creation of this type of data, giving particular emphasis to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and textual analysis. Looking at the oral interview or narrative exposes both the unique peculiarities of these data and scholarly ambivalence about subjective sources.Less
This chapter explores subjective documents and their relationship to immigration and ethnic studies, fields that historically have found these sources both appealing and problematic. By “subjective documents”, it refers to a broad class of evidence that reveals the participant's view of experiences in which he had been involved. They include autobiographies, life histories, letters, oral narratives, interviews, and court records. The discussion here familiarizes readers with some recent debates over the use and creation of this type of data, giving particular emphasis to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and textual analysis. Looking at the oral interview or narrative exposes both the unique peculiarities of these data and scholarly ambivalence about subjective sources.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479847730
- eISBN:
- 9781479805396
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
The New Immigrant Whiteness examines representations of post-1980s migration from the former USSR to the United States as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to ...
More
The New Immigrant Whiteness examines representations of post-1980s migration from the former USSR to the United States as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to studies of immigration and whiteness. The book analyzes representations of the new diaspora in reality TV shows, parental memoirs of transnational adoption, fiction about irregular migration, and interviews with highly skilled and marriage immigrants. A study of post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in these diverse forms of US migration highlights the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights and complements the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The book traces the emergence of discourses that associate the post-USSR diaspora with the upwardly mobile and assimilationist trajectories of early twentieth-century European immigrants toward a pan-European whiteness, and extend this notion to residents of the former USSR who participate in marriage and adoptive migration. The New Immigrant Whiteness also examines representations that place the post-Soviet diaspora in dialogue with Latina/o and Asian American migration to set an agenda for comparative work that displaces immigrant whiteness from its centrality as a US founding mythology despite significant domestic and global changes.
The book is unique in its focus on migration from the former USSR, its internal diversity, and its relationship to other US migrant groups. It is also unique in combining the methodologies of various fields, including literary and cultural studies, social sciences, and media studies.Less
The New Immigrant Whiteness examines representations of post-1980s migration from the former USSR to the United States as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to studies of immigration and whiteness. The book analyzes representations of the new diaspora in reality TV shows, parental memoirs of transnational adoption, fiction about irregular migration, and interviews with highly skilled and marriage immigrants. A study of post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in these diverse forms of US migration highlights the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights and complements the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The book traces the emergence of discourses that associate the post-USSR diaspora with the upwardly mobile and assimilationist trajectories of early twentieth-century European immigrants toward a pan-European whiteness, and extend this notion to residents of the former USSR who participate in marriage and adoptive migration. The New Immigrant Whiteness also examines representations that place the post-Soviet diaspora in dialogue with Latina/o and Asian American migration to set an agenda for comparative work that displaces immigrant whiteness from its centrality as a US founding mythology despite significant domestic and global changes.
The book is unique in its focus on migration from the former USSR, its internal diversity, and its relationship to other US migrant groups. It is also unique in combining the methodologies of various fields, including literary and cultural studies, social sciences, and media studies.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479847730
- eISBN:
- 9781479805396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
The Introduction lays out the book’s focus on representations of migration from the former USSR to the United States—in TV shows, memoirs, fiction, and interviews—as responses to the global extension ...
More
The Introduction lays out the book’s focus on representations of migration from the former USSR to the United States—in TV shows, memoirs, fiction, and interviews—as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to scholarship on immigration and whiteness. By examining post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in diverse forms of human movement, the book adds a focus on the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights to the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The New Immigrant Whiteness explores the emergence of discourses associating post-Soviet migrants with a pan-European whiteness that place them in explicit contrast to nonwhite populations even before their arrival in the United States. The book also examines representations of undocumented post-Soviet migration, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration from Mexico, and explores parallels between post-USSR and Asian immigrants who are similarly associated with the American immigrant dream of upward mobility. As the book renders members of the post-Soviet diaspora less exceptional from other contemporary arrivals, it creates an agenda for comparative work that addresses ongoing changes in the US ethnoracial hierarchy.Less
The Introduction lays out the book’s focus on representations of migration from the former USSR to the United States—in TV shows, memoirs, fiction, and interviews—as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to scholarship on immigration and whiteness. By examining post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in diverse forms of human movement, the book adds a focus on the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights to the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The New Immigrant Whiteness explores the emergence of discourses associating post-Soviet migrants with a pan-European whiteness that place them in explicit contrast to nonwhite populations even before their arrival in the United States. The book also examines representations of undocumented post-Soviet migration, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration from Mexico, and explores parallels between post-USSR and Asian immigrants who are similarly associated with the American immigrant dream of upward mobility. As the book renders members of the post-Soviet diaspora less exceptional from other contemporary arrivals, it creates an agenda for comparative work that addresses ongoing changes in the US ethnoracial hierarchy.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479847730
- eISBN:
- 9781479805396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of ...
More
This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of scholarship on adaptation and return migration. The two migratory forms have been spurred by the interests of US men in creating monoracial families and by the immense growth in the number of contingent academic positions at US institutions of higher learning. Their differential legal status upon arrival provides post-Soviet marriage and highly skilled migrants with divergent access to economic, social, and cultural forms of US citizenship, community building, and opportunities for return. Highly skilled migrants create middle-class lives, appear less interested in participating in a coethnic community, and maintain limited physical transnational connections, while marriage migrants face downward mobility and dependency, experience greater difficulty connecting to other post-Soviet migrants, and more often consider returning. While they are immediately provided with membership in their husbands’ middle-class lives, the globalized form of US whiteness that marriage migrants are assigned even before they leave their countries of origin creates heightened expectations of their complete assimilation to a middle-class whiteness at the cost of their and often their children’s bicultural and transnational identities. Less
This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of scholarship on adaptation and return migration. The two migratory forms have been spurred by the interests of US men in creating monoracial families and by the immense growth in the number of contingent academic positions at US institutions of higher learning. Their differential legal status upon arrival provides post-Soviet marriage and highly skilled migrants with divergent access to economic, social, and cultural forms of US citizenship, community building, and opportunities for return. Highly skilled migrants create middle-class lives, appear less interested in participating in a coethnic community, and maintain limited physical transnational connections, while marriage migrants face downward mobility and dependency, experience greater difficulty connecting to other post-Soviet migrants, and more often consider returning. While they are immediately provided with membership in their husbands’ middle-class lives, the globalized form of US whiteness that marriage migrants are assigned even before they leave their countries of origin creates heightened expectations of their complete assimilation to a middle-class whiteness at the cost of their and often their children’s bicultural and transnational identities.
Ana Elizabeth Rosas
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780520282667
- eISBN:
- 9780520958654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520282667.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ ...
More
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.Less
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.
Natalia Molina
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Natalia Molina This chapter provides insight into how public health and immigration policies intersected and informed one another when it came to Mexican immigration through an examination of key ...
More
Natalia Molina This chapter provides insight into how public health and immigration policies intersected and informed one another when it came to Mexican immigration through an examination of key events throughout the 20th century. Medical racial profiling marked Mexicans as unfit for citizenship while ignoring structural inequalities in health care.Less
Natalia Molina This chapter provides insight into how public health and immigration policies intersected and informed one another when it came to Mexican immigration through an examination of key events throughout the 20th century. Medical racial profiling marked Mexicans as unfit for citizenship while ignoring structural inequalities in health care.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479847730
- eISBN:
- 9781479805396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the ...
More
This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the post-Soviet diaspora with idealized accounts of turn of the twentieth century European immigrant adaptation and upward mobility. While they focus on 1.5 generation immigrant participants, many of whom likely came to the United States as religious refugees, the two shows consistently represent their emerging collective “Russian” identity as just another ethnicized version of pan-European whiteness. Post-Soviet migrant cast members are portrayed as following in the footsteps of idealized and homogenized early European migrants, and they are set in firm opposition to Latina/os. The chapter also examines media commentary surrounding the two shows, interviews with participants, their social media posts, and their participation in a Ukrainian TV show where their identity is differently constructed to highlight migrants’ engagement with growing anti-immigration sentiment and their efforts to establish new collective transnational and diasporic identities, which are not represented on DWTS and Russian Dolls.Less
This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the post-Soviet diaspora with idealized accounts of turn of the twentieth century European immigrant adaptation and upward mobility. While they focus on 1.5 generation immigrant participants, many of whom likely came to the United States as religious refugees, the two shows consistently represent their emerging collective “Russian” identity as just another ethnicized version of pan-European whiteness. Post-Soviet migrant cast members are portrayed as following in the footsteps of idealized and homogenized early European migrants, and they are set in firm opposition to Latina/os. The chapter also examines media commentary surrounding the two shows, interviews with participants, their social media posts, and their participation in a Ukrainian TV show where their identity is differently constructed to highlight migrants’ engagement with growing anti-immigration sentiment and their efforts to establish new collective transnational and diasporic identities, which are not represented on DWTS and Russian Dolls.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479847730
- eISBN:
- 9781479805396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.003.0007
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
The Conclusion explores how whiteness continues to function as a privileged racial identity that provides exemption from racial profiling and that is regularly mobilized in the service of white ...
More
The Conclusion explores how whiteness continues to function as a privileged racial identity that provides exemption from racial profiling and that is regularly mobilized in the service of white supremacy and white nationalism, even as the immigrant myth of bootstrapism is becoming disconnected from accounts of turn of the century European immigrants’ ascendance to a pan-European white identity and expanded to other immigrant groups. This chapter calls for more inclusive struggles for migrant citizenship rights based on connections—rather than stark divisions—between the post-Soviet diaspora and other migrants that place whiteness among other racial formations, in order to decenter its persisting centrality as a US founding mythology despite significant domestic and global changes. Coalitions across ethnic, national, and legal status will be needed to address increasingly explicit and encompassing anti-immigration discourses and policies in the United States.Less
The Conclusion explores how whiteness continues to function as a privileged racial identity that provides exemption from racial profiling and that is regularly mobilized in the service of white supremacy and white nationalism, even as the immigrant myth of bootstrapism is becoming disconnected from accounts of turn of the century European immigrants’ ascendance to a pan-European white identity and expanded to other immigrant groups. This chapter calls for more inclusive struggles for migrant citizenship rights based on connections—rather than stark divisions—between the post-Soviet diaspora and other migrants that place whiteness among other racial formations, in order to decenter its persisting centrality as a US founding mythology despite significant domestic and global changes. Coalitions across ethnic, national, and legal status will be needed to address increasingly explicit and encompassing anti-immigration discourses and policies in the United States.
Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, and Martin Summers (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This collection of essays explores the complex interplay between disease as biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, race as an ideological construct, and racism as a material ...
More
This collection of essays explores the complex interplay between disease as biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, race as an ideological construct, and racism as a material practice. Ranging across time and space—from the interactions between white settlers and Native Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Puget Sound to physicians’ activism around hunger in the South and the Southwest in the 1960s—the contributions here collectively tell a complicated history of the relationship between medical knowledge, ideas of racial difference, health practices and power. Rather than reducing the heterogeneous histories of people of color and Western biomedicine to standard stories of medical racism or simple binaries of power and resistance, the essays highlight the contradictions and historical contingencies that mark the ways in which medical knowledge and public health policy work to racialize certain groups, on the one hand, and the ways in which racialized groups make demands on the health care profession or claims on the state to attend to their health needs, on the other. This collection of essays brings together for the first time in a single volume studies by scholars trained in the medical humanities and in the history of race and ethnicity, both fields which have grown considerably in the last two decades. Considered together, the essays provoke new ways of thinking about health and disease, race and citizenship in America.Less
This collection of essays explores the complex interplay between disease as biological phenomenon, illness as a subjective experience, race as an ideological construct, and racism as a material practice. Ranging across time and space—from the interactions between white settlers and Native Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Puget Sound to physicians’ activism around hunger in the South and the Southwest in the 1960s—the contributions here collectively tell a complicated history of the relationship between medical knowledge, ideas of racial difference, health practices and power. Rather than reducing the heterogeneous histories of people of color and Western biomedicine to standard stories of medical racism or simple binaries of power and resistance, the essays highlight the contradictions and historical contingencies that mark the ways in which medical knowledge and public health policy work to racialize certain groups, on the one hand, and the ways in which racialized groups make demands on the health care profession or claims on the state to attend to their health needs, on the other. This collection of essays brings together for the first time in a single volume studies by scholars trained in the medical humanities and in the history of race and ethnicity, both fields which have grown considerably in the last two decades. Considered together, the essays provoke new ways of thinking about health and disease, race and citizenship in America.
Roberta Villalón
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814788233
- eISBN:
- 9780814788424
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814788233.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
This concluding chapter articulates the theoretical and empirical contributions that this activist research provides to the knowledge about and struggle against violence against Latina immigrants. It ...
More
This concluding chapter articulates the theoretical and empirical contributions that this activist research provides to the knowledge about and struggle against violence against Latina immigrants. It expands the call for culturally sensitive services by redefining the meaning of cultural sensitivity. It also counters stereotypes that portray battered immigrants as passive or ignorant. The stories of all the immigrants presented here have proven the contrary by focusing on their nuanced agency. Furthermore, this analysis also advances the call to put intimate partner violence research in dialogue with immigration studies, particularly as the analysis builds on other literature that explores the links between gender violence, citizenship, and social inequality.Less
This concluding chapter articulates the theoretical and empirical contributions that this activist research provides to the knowledge about and struggle against violence against Latina immigrants. It expands the call for culturally sensitive services by redefining the meaning of cultural sensitivity. It also counters stereotypes that portray battered immigrants as passive or ignorant. The stories of all the immigrants presented here have proven the contrary by focusing on their nuanced agency. Furthermore, this analysis also advances the call to put intimate partner violence research in dialogue with immigration studies, particularly as the analysis builds on other literature that explores the links between gender violence, citizenship, and social inequality.
Yến Lê Espiritu
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520277700
- eISBN:
- 9780520959002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520277700.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
This chapter shows how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. It asserts that studies of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees are ...
More
This chapter shows how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. It asserts that studies of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees are necessarily joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued, respectively, they together re-position the United States as the ideal refuge for Vietnam’s “runaways” and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War. The chapter contends that it is this seeming victory—the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam’s “collateral damage” as historically necessary for the progress of freedom and democracy. By critically juxtaposing the constructions of the Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese refugees together and in relation to continued U.S. militarism, this chapter draws on and brings into conversation three often-distinct fields: American studies, refugee/immigration studies, and war/international studies.Less
This chapter shows how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. It asserts that studies of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees are necessarily joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued, respectively, they together re-position the United States as the ideal refuge for Vietnam’s “runaways” and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War. The chapter contends that it is this seeming victory—the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam’s “collateral damage” as historically necessary for the progress of freedom and democracy. By critically juxtaposing the constructions of the Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese refugees together and in relation to continued U.S. militarism, this chapter draws on and brings into conversation three often-distinct fields: American studies, refugee/immigration studies, and war/international studies.
Susan M. Reverby
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Susan M. Reverby Voice and agency and resistance and suffering have been the operating tropes in historical analysis of race and medicine. Rather than opening analysis, it is argued that focus on ...
More
Susan M. Reverby Voice and agency and resistance and suffering have been the operating tropes in historical analysis of race and medicine. Rather than opening analysis, it is argued that focus on historical contingency, uncertainty in medicine where race fills in the lacunae, and a critique metaphoric use of suffering might provide better historical tools.Less
Susan M. Reverby Voice and agency and resistance and suffering have been the operating tropes in historical analysis of race and medicine. Rather than opening analysis, it is argued that focus on historical contingency, uncertainty in medicine where race fills in the lacunae, and a critique metaphoric use of suffering might provide better historical tools.
John Mckiernan-González
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
John McKiernan-Gonzalez Camp Jenner, a quarantine camp on the Texas border for black migrants, provides an unexpected lens on medical authority and black migrant citizenship in 1895. The returning ...
More
John McKiernan-Gonzalez Camp Jenner, a quarantine camp on the Texas border for black migrants, provides an unexpected lens on medical authority and black migrant citizenship in 1895. The returning migrants were quarantined in Eagle Pass when the United States Marine Hospital Service needed to test a promising smallpox treatment. The migrants, in turn, leveraged their status as objects of a federal field trial to guarantee their return home in defiance of white southern authorities. Camp Jenner illuminates the ways African American workers leveraged their role as commodities in an emerging research economy, even as federal health officers exploited their illness while laboring on their behalf.Less
John McKiernan-Gonzalez Camp Jenner, a quarantine camp on the Texas border for black migrants, provides an unexpected lens on medical authority and black migrant citizenship in 1895. The returning migrants were quarantined in Eagle Pass when the United States Marine Hospital Service needed to test a promising smallpox treatment. The migrants, in turn, leveraged their status as objects of a federal field trial to guarantee their return home in defiance of white southern authorities. Camp Jenner illuminates the ways African American workers leveraged their role as commodities in an emerging research economy, even as federal health officers exploited their illness while laboring on their behalf.
Jean J. Kim
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Jean Kim This chapter examines the multiple colonial roots of “local girls,” or indigenous Hawaiian, Asian, and mixed-race women working in Hawai’i as nurses in the early twentieth century and how ...
More
Jean Kim This chapter examines the multiple colonial roots of “local girls,” or indigenous Hawaiian, Asian, and mixed-race women working in Hawai’i as nurses in the early twentieth century and how these women both reproduced and challenged the racializing impulses of colonial biomedicine within changing parameters of settler and territorial inequalities.Less
Jean Kim This chapter examines the multiple colonial roots of “local girls,” or indigenous Hawaiian, Asian, and mixed-race women working in Hawai’i as nurses in the early twentieth century and how these women both reproduced and challenged the racializing impulses of colonial biomedicine within changing parameters of settler and territorial inequalities.
Lena Mcquade-Salzfass
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Lena McQuade Documenting the history of New Mexican midwives, known as parteras, this chapter foregrounds the racialization of birth practices and practitioners in the decades following New Mexico’s ...
More
Lena McQuade Documenting the history of New Mexican midwives, known as parteras, this chapter foregrounds the racialization of birth practices and practitioners in the decades following New Mexico’s admission as a state in the nation.Less
Lena McQuade Documenting the history of New Mexican midwives, known as parteras, this chapter foregrounds the racialization of birth practices and practitioners in the decades following New Mexico’s admission as a state in the nation.
Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Veronica Martinez-Matsuda This chapter documents how the U.S. Farm Security Administration aimed to improve Mexican farmworkers’ dire health status through direct medical treatment and social and ...
More
Veronica Martinez-Matsuda This chapter documents how the U.S. Farm Security Administration aimed to improve Mexican farmworkers’ dire health status through direct medical treatment and social and cultural reform. Such efforts paradoxically helped Mexican families achieve improved health even as they frequently perpetuated racialized views blaming Mexicans for their poor condition.Less
Veronica Martinez-Matsuda This chapter documents how the U.S. Farm Security Administration aimed to improve Mexican farmworkers’ dire health status through direct medical treatment and social and cultural reform. Such efforts paradoxically helped Mexican families achieve improved health even as they frequently perpetuated racialized views blaming Mexicans for their poor condition.
Jason E. Glenn
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Jason E. Glenn This essay explores the role that crack baby narratives played in redefining race in America. It helped policymakers come to a consensus as to how newly-coded racial discourses of ...
More
Jason E. Glenn This essay explores the role that crack baby narratives played in redefining race in America. It helped policymakers come to a consensus as to how newly-coded racial discourses of behavioral pathology and personal irresponsibility could be employed to manufacture consent for neo-liberal economic policies and dismantling the New Deal state.Less
Jason E. Glenn This essay explores the role that crack baby narratives played in redefining race in America. It helped policymakers come to a consensus as to how newly-coded racial discourses of behavioral pathology and personal irresponsibility could be employed to manufacture consent for neo-liberal economic policies and dismantling the New Deal state.
Martin Summers
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816690466
- eISBN:
- 9781452949444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816690466.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Martin Summers This chapter argues that black physicians’ understandable preoccupation with somatic diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra–diseases that allowed them to highlight the ...
More
Martin Summers This chapter argues that black physicians’ understandable preoccupation with somatic diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra–diseases that allowed them to highlight the physical trauma of racism–contributed to the marginalization of those African Americans with functional mental illnesses as well as psychotherapy as a legitimate therapeutic practice.Less
Martin Summers This chapter argues that black physicians’ understandable preoccupation with somatic diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra–diseases that allowed them to highlight the physical trauma of racism–contributed to the marginalization of those African Americans with functional mental illnesses as well as psychotherapy as a legitimate therapeutic practice.