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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Virginia Commonwealth University

Journal

Race

2003

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Getting Into The Game: The Trickster In American Ethnic Fiction, Helen Lock Jan 2003

Getting Into The Game: The Trickster In American Ethnic Fiction, Helen Lock

Ethnic Studies Review

Trickster novels, especially those by Gerald Vizenor and Maxine Hong Kingston, can be used to destabilize and undermine ethnic stereotypes. As many studies show, the trickster him/herself cannot be stable and thus resists the limitations of definition as the embodiment of ambiguity. Both insider and outsider, s/he plays with the whole concept of "sides" so as to erase the distinction between them. The trickster plays the game, including the game of language, in order to break and exploit its rules and thus destabilizes linguistic markers. Kingston and Vizenor use their novels to subvert the rules of the linguistic game and …


The Suppression Of Diversity, Adrian J. Lottie, Phyllis A. Clemens Noda Jan 2003

The Suppression Of Diversity, Adrian J. Lottie, Phyllis A. Clemens Noda

Ethnic Studies Review

Is it a systematic strategy or a mutation of millennial ferver that drives the escalating challenges to the civil rights of this nation's racial, linguistic, and national origin minorities? Increasing juridical, legislative, and popular assaults on affirmative action policies coupled with the sometimes less heralded emergence of a de facto U.S. language policy are sweeping through the states. These activities draw on a consistent repertoire of approaches from the invocation of the very language and concepts of the civil rights movement to the isolationist "buzz-words" of early twentieth century advocates of "Americanization." In an effort to legitimize their efforts this …


Centering Race And Ethnicity- Related Issues In Social Sciences Curricula, Joseph F. Sheley Jan 2003

Centering Race And Ethnicity- Related Issues In Social Sciences Curricula, Joseph F. Sheley

Ethnic Studies Review

A 2002 review of the course requirements and electives of Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology programs in thirty randomly selected state and private, "doctoral-level" and "masters-level" institutions produced 201 courses relating to the study of race-and ethnic-related issues. Only two courses (History offerings on a single campus) were required for completion of a major. While some departments offered "concentrations" with mandated content, the concentrations themselves were elective. Diversity in America today is a truly important component of social (re)organization and change and, thus, a major source of social friction. Why is it, then, that students, those majoring in the …


Race, Sex, And Redemption In Monster's Ball, Celeste Fisher, Carole Wiebe Jan 2003

Race, Sex, And Redemption In Monster's Ball, Celeste Fisher, Carole Wiebe

Ethnic Studies Review

In this paper, we explore the way that interracial relationships between blacks and whites come to be represented as problematic for mainstream audiences. By looking specifically at the film Monster's Ball (2001), we examine how race is used to identify and characterize our culture's standard protagonist, the white male, and at how white male sexuality is constructed through the black female. Particularly striking in this film is how the social and institutional structures that create and reiterate problems of race are used to characterize the movie's central protagonists, yet then evaded and submerged in the discourse of romance.


[Review Of] Claudia Koonz. The Nazi Conscience, Gregory Paul Wegner Jan 2003

[Review Of] Claudia Koonz. The Nazi Conscience, Gregory Paul Wegner

Ethnic Studies Review

As the author observed in this engaging work, the expression "Nazi conscience" is not an oxymoron. Nazi morality, profoundly ethnic in nature, sharply defined those accepted and rejected as members of the German Volk. Claudia Koonz describes with great clarity the emergence of an "ethnic fundamentalism" supported by numerous "ethnocrats" under the Third Reich who, during the "normal years" of 1933-1 939, advanced decidedly racial and biological perspectives on ethnicity (141, 217). Especially significant for our understanding of Nazi racial policy is Koonz's exploration of German public opinion, much of which reflected an abhorrence of Nazi brutality. What made the …


[Review Of] Jun Xing And Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Eds. Reversing The Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, And Sexuality Through Film, Susan Crutchfield Jan 2003

[Review Of] Jun Xing And Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Eds. Reversing The Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, And Sexuality Through Film, Susan Crutchfield

Ethnic Studies Review

The fourteen essays collected in Xing and Hirabayashi's new volume make a strong argument for serious intellectual work involved not only in the college-level study of moving images for their messages about minority groups but also in pedagogical approaches that take film and video as their primary texts. Written by a collection of scholars who work in ethnic and racial studies and various allied fields, the essays share a concern with pedagogy and with showing "how visual media can be used to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communications, particularly with respect to the thorny topics of ethnicity and race" (3). Indeed, …


Ethnic And Racial Definitions As Manifestations Of American Public Policy, Ashton Wesley Welch Jan 2003

Ethnic And Racial Definitions As Manifestations Of American Public Policy, Ashton Wesley Welch

Ethnic Studies Review

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black or Hispanic or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. Those cracks, however, tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.1