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Full-Text Articles in Race and Ethnicity
Women Without A Voice: The Paradox Of Silence In The Works Of Sandra Cisneros, Shashi Deshpande And Azar Nafisi, Sharon K. Wilson, Pelgy Vaz
Women Without A Voice: The Paradox Of Silence In The Works Of Sandra Cisneros, Shashi Deshpande And Azar Nafisi, Sharon K. Wilson, Pelgy Vaz
Ethnic Studies Review
Women of every culture face a similar problem: loss of voice. Their lives are permeated with silence. Whether their silence results from a patriarchal society that prohibits women from asserting their identity or from a social expectation of gender roles that confine women to an expressive domain-submissive, nurturing, passive, and domestic-rather than an instrumental role where men are dominant, affective and aggressive-women share the common bond of a debilitating silence. Maria Racine, in her analysis of Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, reaffirms the pervasiveness of this bond: "For women, silence has crossed every racial and …
Inside The Image And The Word: The Re/Membering Of Indigenous Identities, Dina Fachin
Inside The Image And The Word: The Re/Membering Of Indigenous Identities, Dina Fachin
Ethnic Studies Review
By appropriating the power of writing of the phonetic Latin alphabet and recent visual technology, new generations of indigenous people from the Americas have been able to articulate and reinforce their own sense of identity from "within" their cultural constructs. In so doing, they have been shaping new narratives of indigenous adaptation and survival based on native ontologies and epistemologies that critically decolonize the homogenizing forces of national and global rhetoric. I argue that the texts under examination put forward ways to conceive and to know individual and communal identity that cannot be understood outside specific, ancient notions of territoriality …
Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices, Quan Manh Ha
Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices, Quan Manh Ha
Ethnic Studies Review
Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. "The New Black Aesthetic," an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on "the future of African American artistic expression" in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed …
Memories Of Home: Reading The Bedouin In Arab American Literature, Anissa J. Wardi, Katherine Wardi-Zonna
Memories Of Home: Reading The Bedouin In Arab American Literature, Anissa J. Wardi, Katherine Wardi-Zonna
Ethnic Studies Review
In an urban neighborhood with a large Jewish population near my home, there is an Arabic restaurant. Name, menu and ownership mark its ethnic identification, yet its politics are otherwise obscured. An American flag, permanently placed in the restaurant's window since 9/11, greets American customers with a message of reconciliation. I am one of you, it says: come; eat; you are welcome here. In a climate where "Arabs, Arab-Americans and people with Middle Eastern features, everywhere are struggling to merely survive the United States' aggressive drive to 'bring democracy to the Middle East'" (Elia 160) and where the hostility toward …
The Tastes From Portugal: Food As Remembrance In Portuguese American Literature, Reinaldo Silva
The Tastes From Portugal: Food As Remembrance In Portuguese American Literature, Reinaldo Silva
Ethnic Studies Review
Contemporary Portuguese American literature written by Thomas Braga (1943-), Frank Gaspar (1946-), and Katherine Vaz (1955-) share a profusion of topics - with ethnic food being, perhaps, the most representative one. What these writers have in common is that their roots can be traced to Portugal's Atlantic islands - the Azores - and not to continental Portugal. They are native Americans and write in English, though their characters and themes are Portuguese American. Some of them lived close to the former New England whaling and fishing centers of New Bedford and Nantucket, which Herman Melville has immortalized in Moby-Dick and …
[Review Of] Jeff Karem. The Romance Of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics Of Regional And Ethnic Literatures, Helen Lock
Ethnic Studies Review
The "romance of authenticity" to which the title of Jeff Karem's timely new study refers is the romance between the American reading public and the regional or ethnic writer who is viewed as providing an "authentic" cultural viewpoint, often to the extent of becoming regarded as the premier representative of that culture. Karem's argument, however, is that too much "symbolic weight" (205) is often attached to the work of writers seized upon as "representative." They are asked to bear the burden of providing a vicarious and definitive immersion in a particular culture, and therefore their work is judged mostly in …
The Ethnic Impulse In Frank X. Gaspar's Poetry And Fiction, Reinaldo Silva
The Ethnic Impulse In Frank X. Gaspar's Poetry And Fiction, Reinaldo Silva
Ethnic Studies Review
Although a compelling and award-winning voice in contemporary American literature, the work of Frank Xavier Gaspar (1946-) has not received the attention it deserves. Apart from an article by Alice R. Clemente,(1) to my knowledge, there are no other scholarly publications touching upon his writings, all of which published in the course of the last seventeen years. While his work appeals to all audiences in the United States of America and even abroad -- Portugal in particular -- his poems dealing with issues related to his ancestral culture and ethnic background are the ones which have sparked the attention of …
Getting Into The Game: The Trickster In American Ethnic Fiction, Helen Lock
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 …
(Dis)Claiming Identity: Christina García’S The Agüero Sisters And Julia Alvarez' How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Özlem Ögüt
Ethnic Studies Review
Christine Garcia's The Aguero Sisters and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents are novels that revolve around the conflicts and tensions among the members of the two immigrant families, the Aguero sisters from Cuba and the Garcia sisters from the Dominican Republic, arising mainly from their need to come to terms with their ambiguous identities. This article focuses on the ways in which the Aguero and Garcia sisters through their hybrid identities overcome boundaries and exclusive categories so as to challenge homogenizing, hegemonic systems, and open vistas into new, non-essentialist modes of identity that still can be …
[Review Of] Stephen F. Feraca. Wakinyan: Lakota Religion In The Twentieth Century And Julian Rice. Before The Great Spirit: The Many Faces Of Sioux Spirituality, Raymond A. Bucko
[Review Of] Stephen F. Feraca. Wakinyan: Lakota Religion In The Twentieth Century And Julian Rice. Before The Great Spirit: The Many Faces Of Sioux Spirituality, Raymond A. Bucko
Ethnic Studies Review
Each of these authors provides unique approaches and insights concerning Lakota ritual and belief. Julian Rice, a prolific writer on Lakota Literature, attempts to reconstruct the essence of Lakota religion before European contact while Feraca, who logged long periods of interaction with Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation as a government employee and field worker, provides an intricate portrait of Lakota ritual during his tenure on the Pine Ridge reservation. They reach similar basic understandings of Lakota religious practice: the importance of the acquisition of spiritual power, the primacy of kinship, the democratic and charismatic nature of individual religious …
The Politics Of Faith In The Work Of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ana Castillo, And Sandra Cisneros, Darlene Pagan
The Politics Of Faith In The Work Of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ana Castillo, And Sandra Cisneros, Darlene Pagan
Ethnic Studies Review
If Chicanas are perceived as a communal threat because they are closer to the carnal, according to the Church, they paradoxically are worshipped as the female divine within indigenous practices like Yoruba or Mexica as well. In the works of Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Lorna Dee Cervantes women's religious commitment is revealed through their possible responses to cultural multiplicity: 1) the rejection of one tradition over another, 2) syncretism, or 3) the continual migration between practices despite contradictory impulses. Using irony to address the tension and seeming impossibility of maintaining distinct traditions simultaneously, these writers intimate how women derive …
The Athlete As Trickster, Gerald Gems
The Athlete As Trickster, Gerald Gems
Ethnic Studies Review
This study invokes hegemony theory to analyze the role and uses of sport as a means to resist dominant group pressures and the adaptation of sporting practices to subordinate groups' needs. The study draws upon literary and anthropological works that support the role of the trickster as a resistive, even manipulative figure, who fulfills both instructive and psychological needs for particular subordinate groups.
[Review Of] David Leiwei Li, Imagining The Nation: Asian American Literature And Cultural Consent, Phillipa Kafka
[Review Of] David Leiwei Li, Imagining The Nation: Asian American Literature And Cultural Consent, Phillipa Kafka
Ethnic Studies Review
Whenever "the nation" is "imagined," Americans of Asian ancestry are excluded by common "cultural consent" as alien/alienated "Others," as citizens of their ancestral nations. Due to recent immigration from many Asian nations, the globalization of economies, including the Pacific Rim, and especially the efforts of some Asian American writers, the situation has improved--somewhat. Still, if Asian-American writers stress the American in their representations, they are denying the Asian. If they stress the Asian, they have bought into American "cultural consent" its racist representations of Asian-Americans. Further, they themselves can't help but think within "the nation's" ongoing restrictive racist "cultural consent" …
[Review Of] George J. Leonard (Ed.). The Asian Pacific Heritage: A Companion To Literature And The Arts, Jeff Partridge
[Review Of] George J. Leonard (Ed.). The Asian Pacific Heritage: A Companion To Literature And The Arts, Jeff Partridge
Ethnic Studies Review
In this large volume of essays, general editor George J. Leonard aims to produce a "tool kit" for the multicultural classroom that will "unlock the greatest number of (Asian-Pacific American-APA) authors and artists" (xiv) for students and teachers. In many ways he hits the mark. Readers who once skipped over the Chinese phrases in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club can now find them explained in Molly H. Isham's "Reader's Guide" to the novel. Those who want to know the meaning of "no-no boys" or "FOBs," or "Mestizos" or the date when the "Queue Ordinance" was passed can find them …
[Review Of] Eric Wertheimer. Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, And The New World Of American Literature, David Carey Jr
[Review Of] Eric Wertheimer. Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, And The New World Of American Literature, David Carey Jr
Ethnic Studies Review
Eric Wertheimer convincingly argues that inaccuracy and omission in historical narratives made an indelible mark on American identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ethnic diversity of America, even though sparingly portrayed in the historical writing of the time, also had an important effect on American identity. Wertheimer concludes that while American identity has a public concept, individuals determine the real meaning in private spheres. He examines five Anglo, male authors (Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, William Prescott, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman) to ascertain what they thought of as American history and who should be represented in it. These …
[Review Of] Manuel De Jesus Hemandez-Gutierrez And David William Foster, Eds. Literatura Chicana, 1965-1995: An Anthology In Spanish, English, And Calo, Phillipa Kafka
Ethnic Studies Review
The works included in this anthology, many of them previously printed, reflect six characteristic themes of Chicana/o contemporary literature: "the search for identity, feminism, conservatism, revisionism, homoeroticism, and internationalism" (xix). Organized chronologically according to various literary genres and replete with many useful notes, the anthology contains no index. Further, Literatura Chicana could also be assigned as required reading in American Studies courses, specifically in contemporary American literature courses, even though the editors suggest that the anthology be adopted for university level humanities, Spanish, ethnic, Chicana/o literature courses, in women's studies programs and social science departments.
[Review Of] Tey Diana Rebolledo, Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis Of Chicana Literature, Maythee Rojas
[Review Of] Tey Diana Rebolledo, Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis Of Chicana Literature, Maythee Rojas
Ethnic Studies Review
The first book-length study of the Chicana literary tradition, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature is a superb work and salient contribution to Chicana literature and criticism. A companion volume to Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (U of Arizona Press 1993), Rebolledo's book takes its metaphorical title from the image of Chicanas using the "blank page" as a means for channeling their creative energies despite the fact that they are often faced with "a cold, inhospitable, and unreceptive culture" (ix). As she notes, "although there have been many attempts to silence Chicanas, they …