Overview
Moving beyond the black-white binary that has long framed racial discourse in the United States, this collection of essays examines how the experiences of Latinos and Asians intersect in the formation of the U.S. nation-state. The contributors analyze the political and social processes that have racialized Latinos and Asians at the same time that they highlight the productive ways that these communities challenge and transform the identities that are imposed on them. Each essay addresses the sociopolitical predicaments of both Latinos and Asians, bringing their experiences to light in relation to one another. Several contributors illuminate ways that Latinos and Asians were historically racialized: by U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the late nineteenth century, by public health discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, by anthropologists collecting physical data--height, weight, head measurements--from Chinese Americans to show how the American environment affected ""foreign"" body types in the 1930s, and by Los Angeles public officials seeking to explain the alleged criminal propensities of Mexican American youth during the 1940s. Other contributors focus on the coalitions and tensions between Latinos and Asians in the context of the fight to integrate public schools and debates over political redistricting. One addresses masculinity, race, and U.S. imperialism in the literary works of Junot Diaz and Chang-rae Lee. Another looks at the passions, identifications, and charges of betrayal aroused by the sensationalized cases of Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy rescued off the shores of Florida, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States. Together the essays interrogate many of the assumptions that underlie American and ethnic studies even as they signal the need for a research agenda that expands the purview of both fields.
Full Product Details
Author: Nicholas De Genova
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.458kg
ISBN: 9780822337041
ISBN 10: 0822337045
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 24 April 2006
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Racial Transformations is a timely contribution that challenges existing boundaries of scholarship and theory in compelling ways... [De Genova] furthers our understanding of the complexities of Asian and Latino racial formations in the United States. -- Cynthia Feliciano, American Journal of Sociology Racial Transformations is a unique volume that marvelously engages the intersection of Asian American and Latino Studies and helps us grasp the distinct patterns of racialization among groups considered neither white nor black. -- Michael Omi, Journal of American History This volume is unique for the themes it joins together and its true interdisciplinarity. It expands our basic knowledge of different historical periods while pushing readers to reconsider dominant understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and class. It will undoubtedly become a standard pointing to important new directions for racial studies, and I would highly recommend it for use in any graduate or upper-division undergraduate course on race. -- Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Journal of American Ethnic History Racial Transformations challenges standard notions of racial meaning, racial identity, and racial politics. We need work like this: its comparative approach to Latino and Asian American racial formations helps us rethink many of the existing paradigms of race. A valuable contribution. - Howard Winant, author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice This collection marks an important intervention in the history and historiography of 'race,' ethnicity, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. The essays offer important and provocative rationales for thinking through these complex issues from a broader comparative and critical perspective. -David G. Gutierrez, author of Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
Racial Transformations challenges standard notions of racial meaning, racial identity, and racial politics. We need work like this: its comparative approach to Latino and Asian American racial formation helps us rethink many of the existing paradigms of race. A valuable contribution. Howard Winant, author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice This collection marks an important intervention in the history and historiography of 'race,' ethnicity, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. David Gutierrez, author of Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
Author Information
Nicholas De Genova is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latino Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago, also published by Duke University Press, and a coauthor of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship.
