RACIAL REALITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-430
Author(s):  
Clovis L. White

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century and Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities are two important additions to the study of race in the United States. First, both provide insight into the continuous significance of race in a time when racial tensions are on the rise despite the ubiquitous suggestion that we are in a post-racial society. Secondly, both works serve as important indicators of the multiplicative nature of race, each covering many of the bases so critical to race study. As many academicians and students of race and ethnicity recognize, race is a phenomenon that must be approached from multiple angles (e.g., anthropologically, sociologically, historically, and so on) if we are to fully understand how race operates. Thirdly, these two works offer an array of possible solutions or models for addressing some of the problems that beset racial and ethnic conflicts. Finally, while each of the books tackles the issue of race, they complement each other as Doing Race provides a more general, comprehensive understanding of racial and ethnic issues across the United States while Black Los Angeles represents a specific case study of race relations in one urban setting. All in all, these works make important contributions to the literature about the significance of race in America.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
KRISTINA F. NIELSEN

Abstract (Spanish/English)Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los ÁngelesHoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.


Author(s):  
Kristina Kironska

Abstract This article combines the study of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy with a case study of Taiwan–Myanmar relations from a perspective of political relations, economic cooperation, and Taiwan’s (un)recognisability in Myanmar—i.e. Taiwan’s soft power in Myanmar. The first part of the paper introduces the policy and compares it with the previous ones, and sheds light on Taiwan’s motivation to engage with Myanmar. It considers the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, due to which investment relocation from China is expected to sharply increase. The second part of the paper provides an insight into the relationship between Taiwan and Myanmar after Myanmar’s state-led political transformation from military rule and economic liberalisation since approximately 2010. It explains the main aspects and determinants of the relationship between two countries that share a neighbouring potential hegemon which they both wish to balance against.


1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén G. Rumbaut

In at least one sense the “American century” is ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. But the diversity of the “new immigration” to the United States over the past three decades differs in many respects from that of the last period of mass immigration in the first three decades of the century. The immigrants themselves differ greatly in their social class and national origins, and so does the American society, polity, and economy that receives them—raising questions about their modes of incorporation, and challenging conventional accounts of assimilation processes that were framed during that previous epoch. The dynamics and future course of their adaptation are open empirical questions—as well as major questions for public policy, since the outcome will shape the future contours of American society. Indeed, as the United States undergoes its most profound demographic transformation in a century; as inexorable processes of globalization, especially international migrations from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, diversify still further the polyethnic composition of its population; and as issues of immigration, race and ethnicity become the subject of heated public debate, the question of incorporation, and its serious study, becomes all the more exigent. The essays in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives tackle that subject from a variety of analytical vantages and innovative approaches, covering a wide range of groups in major areas of immigrant settlement. Several of the papers focus specifically on Los Angeles and New York City, where, remarkably, fully a quarter of the total U.S. immigrant population resides.


Author(s):  
Adeana McNicholl

This chapter takes a step toward the theorization of discourses of race and racialization within the American Buddhist context. Far from being neutral observers, Buddhist Studies scholars have participated in the racialization of particular American Buddhisms. After mapping the landscape of key works on race, ethnicity, and American Buddhism, this chapter takes as a case study a collection of black Buddhist publications that reflect on race and ethnicity. Thus far, scholarship has ignored black Buddhists, yet black Buddhist reflections on race challenge dominant paradigms for the interpretation of the history of Buddhism and Buddhist teachings in the United States. This chapter concludes with suggestions for future avenues for research, including ways that we may connect the work of black Buddhists to the wider context of American religious history and American engagements with Asia.


Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji

How do interracial couples negotiate ethnoracial boundaries? Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage from the United States to Brazil takes a novel approach to answering this question by examining how contemporary black-white couples make sense of ethnoracial boundaries in their lives. Based on over 100 qualitative interviews with husbands and wives in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Boundaries of Love unpacks the cultural repertoires of race-mixing in these two post-Atlantic slavery societies and shows how different approaches to race mixture - celebrated in Brazil versus illegal for much of U.S. history - influence the meanings that contemporary interracial couples give to their lives and social interactions. Employing an innovative “critical constructivist” approach to race and ethnicity, Boundaries of Love compares the experiences of couples involving black men and white women with those of black women with white men in these two diverse, multicultural settings. It reveals the influence of ethnoracial boundaries on: dating preferences throughout the life course in their “romantic career;” comparisons between their own racial identity and how their spouse sees their blackness or whiteness; how parents identify their children and its implications for affirmative action eligibility; how white families handle the introduction of a black in-law; and the compromises couples make spending time together in public. Through its fresh qualitative comparative approach, Boundaries of Love provides a unique perspective on racial dynamics in the United States and Brazil and clearly illuminates the familiar adage that race is a social construction.


Author(s):  
Scott Valentine

Chapter 3 introduced a three-step framework that could be applied to case study analysis in order to extract insights for refining wind power development policy. The first step of the framework entailed the analysis of a sufficient number of national case studies to identify prominent commonalities that influence wind power development. In this book Germany, Denmark, China, the United States, Japan, and Canada were chosen as nations for analysis. Germany and Denmark—two nations that have laudable and sustained successes in wind power development—were selected in order to provide insight into successful wind power development policies. China and the United States, which have both experienced boom and bust periods of wind power development, were picked to provide insight into factors that cause such oscillations in development. Japan and Canada, which are two nations that have underperformed in regard to wind power development, were selected to provide insight into barriers to wind power diffusion. Although only six nations were included in this study, additional wind power policy analysis undertaken by the author in Australia and Taiwan provide general confirmation of the external validity of the findings that will be summarized in this chapter. In this chapter the social, technological, economic, and political (STEP) factors that emerged as influential for either supporting or impeding wind power development in the six case study nations will be summarized. The intention of this compendium is to provide policymakers and interested stakeholders with greater clarity regarding the factors that must be strategically managed in order to enhance the scale scope and pace of wind power diffusion. The factors introduced in this chapter should not be misconstrued as constituting a best practice list for optimizing wind power policy success. As was pointed out in the introductory chapter, energy policy is designed and implemented within a contextually unique environment that involves a seamless web of dynamically evolving forces. Consequently, the notion that it might be feasible to construct a universally applicable manual of best policy practice is a fool’s errand.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-381
Author(s):  
KIMBERLY FRANCIS

AbstractFrom December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Gary Dymski ◽  
Jessica Gordon Nembhard

As the United States approaches the twenty-first century … in an information-based, transnational and managerial economy, it is becoming increasingly apparent that if we do not better negotiate race and ethnicity in our society, we will not adequately solve the problems of economic inequality and discrimination. Racial and/or ethnic divisions and competition shape our efforts to understand and challenge hierarchy and inequity. As long as we ignore those issues, we cannot solve the problems of poverty, unemployment, and crime, nor effect productive job creation and economic justice. Absent a cultural and economic reckoning with racism's legacies, we will fail to revitalize our cities and to recover from the socioeconomic costs of “ending welfare as we knew it.” Although masked behind pronouncements of a “color-blind” society, unfinished racial business weakens our national will to provide one another the portfolio of social and economic rights essential to the sustenance of humane community in the post-industrial global economy. (Nembhard and Williams 1998)


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