Comparative African American and Asian American Literary Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Political Radicalism

Comparative African American and Asian American literary studies traces the diverse (if uneven) ways that African American and Asian American authors have explored the relationship between the two groups and delves into the histories and the politics behind these interracial representations. The literature ranges from the polemical to the fantastic, from the realist to the postmodern, and from the formally innovative to the generically conventional. While some may assume that the politics behind such representations are either coalitional or conflictual in nature, the literature is highly ecumenical, including narratives that engage in Orientalism and/or Negrophobia, Third World rhetoric, postcolonial critique, and political radicalism. African Americans have long been interested in Asia as a potential site for resistance to American racism and empire, while Asian American authors have looked to the experiences of black Americans to understand their own experiences of racism within the United States. Despite the fact that there is a long-established tradition of Afro-Asian literary representation, literary criticism has only taken up a sustained and in-depth study of this topic within the past two decades. Afro-Asian literary studies is part of a late-20th-century “comparative turn” within US-based race studies, which goes along with the increasing transnational/diasporic orientation of formerly nation- or area-based disciplines.

Real Men Do…Real Men Don’t: Young Latino and African American Men’s Discourses Regarding Sexual Health Care Utilization

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 218-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Kalmuss ◽  
Karen Austrian
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
African American ◽  
Sexual Health ◽  
African American Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Care Utilization ◽  
Care Seeking ◽  
Sexual Health Care ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Relationship

There is growing recognition that men as well as women need sexual health care (SHC) services. Despite this, male friendly sexual health services are not readily available in the United States, and men are underutilizing the services that are available. This situation needs to be rectified to improve sexual health outcomes for men and women. In this study we conducted 10 focus groups with young adult Latino and African American men to examine their perceptions of the factors influencing SHC utilization among the men they know, with an emphasis on how notions of what it means to be a man affects health care seeking. The findings both amplify and complicate the relationship between masculinity and SHC seeking. They suggest new directions for public health efforts to enhance men’s SHC utilization.

The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle N. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century

Is the posthuman postracial? Posthumanism, an interpretive paradigm that unseats the human individual as the de facto unit of literary analysis, can be a powerful tool for Asian American literary studies when deployed with attention to critical race theory and literary form. Throughout American literature, Asian Americans have frequently been figured as inhuman—alien, inscrutable, and inassimilable. Representations of Asian Americans as either sub- or superhuman populate many genres, including adventure literature, domestic realism, comics, and science fiction. This trope, which combines yellow peril and model minority stereotypes, forms a through line that runs from depictions of Asian Americans as nerveless 19th-century coolies to 21st-century robotic office workers. Manifesting both threat and promise for America, posthuman representations of Asian Americans refract national and racial anxieties about the fading of the United States’ global influence as Asian nations, especially China, become political and economic superpowers. Rather than directly refuting these characterizations, Asian American writers have creatively engaged these same thematics to contemplate how developments in science and technology produce different ways of understanding the human and, concomitantly, engender changes in racial formation. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and artists have all deployed posthumanism in order to conduct imaginative experiments that challenge expectations regarding the typical purview of Asian American literature. Several nodes of inquiry that demonstrate the importance of posthumanist critique for Asian American literary studies include race as an index of humanity, the mutability of race through biotechnology, the amplification of racial inequality through infrastructure, and the reproduction of race through algorithmic culture. In the wake of early 21st-century ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, examining the evolving relationship between Asian American racialization and posthumanism continues to provide important insights into how race is structured by the changing boundaries of the human and, in turn, demonstrates that the posthuman subject is never “beyond” race. In addition to offering an overview, this article provides a case study regarding the stereotyping of Asian Americans as robotic.

Children's Rights, Family Rights

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-188
Author(s):  
Karen M. Staller
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Relationship

In this article I explore the intersections of children's human rights, social policy, and qualitative inquiry from a social work perspective. First, I consider the relationship between human rights work and social work. Second, I argue that children add complexity to the human rights debate. In doing so, I briefly examine the conflict between children's rights as developed in the United States and that of the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child. Third, I turn to a specific qualitative research project in which a team of researchers conducted an in-depth study of the prosecution of child sexual abuse in one U.S. jurisdiction. I argue that the findings from this study illustrate how qualitative inquiry can reveal conflicting and often hidden value trade-offs that must be addressed when enacting and enforcing children's human rights. This study demonstrates what qualitative inquiry has to offer policy advocates who seek to promote children's human rights.

scholarly journals Occupational Attributes With The Highest Minority Domination: Variables Narrowing Or Increasing Interethnic Occupational Differences

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel Droussiotis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hispanic American ◽  
Font Size ◽  
Explanatory Variables ◽  
Occupational Differences ◽  
Males And Females

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 48.1pt 0pt 0.5in; mso-pagination: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The occupational profile of the various ethnic groups varies in the United States. The occupational stratification is sometimes based on one&rsquo;s ethnicity rather than ability. When interethnic occupational differences are attributed to discrimination the result is inefficiency in the labor market. The purpose of this study is to determine the occupations in which ethnic minorities are dominant and the factors which are most significant in either increasing or reducing this dominance. The data consist of 183 Economic Areas (as defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis). Explanatory variables reflect educational levels, human capital accumulation, social status, government action, and general area characteristic for each groups. Occupational attributes are used to aggregate all occupations, reflecting prestige and satisfaction levels. African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American groups are compared to non-Hispanic whites. Males and females are tested separately. The results show that African American and Hispanic males and females are influenced by similar variables. The level of higher education assists the labor position of African and Hispanic American males reducing interethnic occupational differences. The density of the minority group in the area improves the position of their female counterparts. The Asian American group is very different</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">.<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></p>

The Asian American Movement and Critical Practice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Ishii
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Asian American Movement ◽  
Asian American Student ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The University

Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints. Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.

African American Racial Identity and Learning

Education ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank C. Worrell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Academic Achievement ◽  
African American ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
European American ◽  
Black Racial Identity ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Racial identity is one of the most frequently studied cultural identities in the United States, and it is examined most frequently in relation to African Americans. Racial identity is also examined in European American samples to a lesser extent, and there is a growing literature on the racial identity of biracial and multiracial individuals. Racial identity and ethnic identity are similar constructs, and there are some researchers who do not distinguish between the constructs, using the terms and the measurement instruments interchangeably. However, as the instruments are developed in relation to theoretical models that speak to one or the other construct specifically (i.e., ethnic or racial identity), this perspective is not adopted in this article. Thus this article focuses solely on racial identity as a construct and does not include literature on ethnic identity or studies that used instruments developed to measure ethnic identity. The relationship between racial identity and learning, and more specifically academic achievement, is typically studied in the context of the achievement gap among racial and ethnic groups in the United States, and is most closely associated with the achievement gap between African American and European American students. Thus, studies of the relationship of racial identity to learning typically involve black racial identity but not white racial identity. In most of the scholarship in this area, researchers examine the relationship of black racial identity attitudes to academic achievement or other academic constructs (e.g., motivation). Additionally, two of the preeminent theories of underachievement in African Americans and other underachieving groups—that is, cultural ecological theory and stereotype threat—implicate racial identity as a contributing factor. Although there is a strong belief that racial identity is related to learning, there is still considerable debate about the contexts in which this relationship is manifested and the strength and explanatory power of the relationship, and the evidence in favor of a direct relationship between the racial identity and learning is mixed at best.

scholarly journals Intergenerational Factors, Fatherhood Beliefs, and African American Fathers’ Involvement: Building the Case for a Mediated Pathway

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (15) ◽  
pp. 2047-2075 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shauna M. Cooper ◽  
Latisha Ross ◽  
Adrianne Dues ◽  
Alexandrea R. Golden ◽  
Marketa Burnett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Parenting Competence ◽  
African American Fathers ◽  
Interactional Context ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Southeastern Region

Intergenerational factors have been suggested as a critical interactional context shaping African American fathers’ beliefs and parenting practices. However, relatively little attention has been given to the identification of underlying processes guiding the association between intergenerational factors and African American fathers’ involvement with their children. The current investigation builds the case for fathering role ideologies and sense of parenting competence as mediators. The sample was composed of 185 African American fathers ( M = 32.20 years, SD = 8.24) residing in a midsized city in the Southeastern region of the United States. Results revealed that fathering role ideologies, but not sense of parenting competence, mediated the relationship between African American fathers’ intergenerational factors and their involvement. Findings from this investigation highlight underlying mechanisms guiding the relationship between intergenerational factors and African American fathers’ involvement with their children. Implications for intervention and prevention programming for African American fathers are discussed.

Conclusion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Fanning
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Haitian American ◽  
The Relationship

This concluding chapter argues that the 1820s was a critical time in the relationship between the United States and Haiti, a time when each exerted influence on the other that had the potential to change their respective histories even more radically. During this decade, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer concentrated on U.S. relations in his work to improve the standing of his nation and opened up the island to African American emigrants as a gambit to strengthen his case for diplomatic recognition from the United States. Boyer's emigration plan found support among a diverse group of Americans, from abolitionists to black-community leaders to hard-nosed businessmen who all saw profit in the enterprise for different reasons. Ultimately, the project had a lasting effect on thousands of emigrants; on the black communities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York; on Haitian-American relations; and on African American political discourse.

A Sphinx upon the Dnieper: Black Modernism and the Yiddish Translation of Race

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-289
Author(s):  
Eli Rosenblatt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Black Modernism ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation shows how a transatlantic Jewish avant-garde interpreted and embedded itself within Soviet-African-American cultural exchange in the interwar years. Magidoff served as a Soviet correspondent for NBC and the Associated Press from 1935. He was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR in 1948.

Gender and the Civil Rights Curricula

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Robnett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Parental Leave ◽  
The United States ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Racial Ethnic

For decades, women in the United States have fought for civil rights. Other than the fight for women’s civil rights, women’s activism in other types of social movements has been largely ignored in textbooks and in the media. Two factors contribute to this neglect. First, historically, women have held differential access to structural and institutional power. Second, with a narrow definition of leadership, researchers focused exclusively on charismatic and formal social movement leaders. However, women served as leaders and participants not only in the Suffrage movement and the second-wave feminist movement but also in the U.S. civil rights movement, the Chican@ movement, the Asian American movement, and the Native American movement. Among the causes, women have fought on the front lines for voting rights; equal employment opportunities; equal pay; desegregated housing, schools, and public facilities; reproductive rights; tribal land rights; cultural and religious preservation; LGBTQ+ rights; criminal justice; welfare rights; universal healthcare; parental leave; environmental justice; and subsidized child care. Women served as formal leaders in women’s movement organizations, and as bridge leaders in mixed-gender groups. As bridge leaders, they fostered ties between the social movement and the community, between strategies (aimed at individual change, identity, and consciousness) and political strategies (aimed at organizational tactics designed to challenge existing relationships with the state and other societal institutions). The African American, Asian American, Native American, and Chicana women’s movements did not emerge after the second-wave feminist movement, which mainly comprised white middle-class women, but simultaneously. In the case of women of color, African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American women have struggled for justice and equality on behalf of their specific racial–ethnic groups. Born out of gender inequality within their respective racial–ethnic movement, the activists formulated a multicultural/womanist feminism/womanism that addressed the intersectionality, race–ethnicity, gender, and class dimensions of their lived experiences.

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