Creating a Regional American Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Hayes-Bautista
Keyword(s):  
Regional Identity ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

For over 150 years, Latinos have not assimilated and disappeared the way European immigrant groups have, but they have not remained isolated and untouched by Atlantic-American society around them. Instead, Latinos have been quietly creating a regional variant of American society and identity, one that is in the process of becoming as distinctive a way of being American as is the Texan regional identity.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Booker ◽  
Isra Daraiseh
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society ◽  
The Way

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

Managing Race in the American Workplace

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Skrentny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the problems of the roles racial differences play in the workplace. It discusses the changes in the way Americans talk about race and what pragmatic and progressive voices say that they want since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Never before has such a wide variety of employers, advocates, activists, and government leaders in American society discussed the benefits of racial diversity and the utility of racial difference in such a broad range of contexts. Thus, the chapter points out the emerging discourse of race as a qualification for employment, and briefly details the many issues as well as the role of established laws on such an issue. It also lays out the conceptual foundations upon which the following chapters will be based on.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
American Music ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
White People ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter explains how music is considered less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded. The music under consideration represents a wide range of styles that attracted the attention of a wide range of audiences, which sounds have little in common. What these types of music do have in common is the fact that all of them sprang up in a particular cultural environment: the postwar Fifties. A great many forces—technology; the economy; domestic and international politics; relationships between black and white people, between men and women, between young and old—animated American society during the Fifties. The lenses through which the whole of American music in the Fifties is examined here represent forces whose interconnected dynamics between 1945 and 1963 are linked to the fact that, for America, the war ended the way it did.

scholarly journals Orcs Lives Matter: Representation of African Americans in Bright Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Shafira Ayuningtyas ◽  
Pita Merdeka
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
American System ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

Exploring the way Orcs are portrayed in the Bright film are the focus of this research and futher analyzing the ideology within. This research uses the qualitative research method to help answering the research questions on how Orcs are represented in Bright and how representations reflect the ideology of the text. Additionally, Hall’s representation and ideology theories are applied in the process to provide an insight into the research problems. The research found that Orcs in Bright are constructed in a very like ways as African Americans as they are portrayed as the designated bad guys, targets for animalization and victims of police brutality which match the image of African Americans in American society. These portrayals of Orcs leads to the discussion of Orcs’ poor social standing in society in comparison to other races in the film and in result reflects the ideology the text tries to convey that is black inferiority, as shown by the way the American system and society treated them. Overall, this research can be used as a reference for researches on representation of African Americans and racial allegories in literature.

scholarly journals Understanding Arab American Identity through Orientalist Stereotypes and Representations in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Ishak Berrebbah
Keyword(s):  
American Identity ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Arab American ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Diasporic Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
American Society

Abstract Arab-American women’s literature has emerged noticeably in the early years of the 21st century. The social and political atmosphere in post-9/11 America encouraged the growth of such literature and brought it to international attention. This diasporic literature functions as a means of discussing the Orientalist discourse that circumscribes Arab American identity and its effects in determining their position in the wider American society. As such, this article investigates the extent to which Edward Said’s discourse of Orientalism is employed by Mohja Kahf in her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) to project the stereotypes and misrepresentations that confine the identity of Arab and Muslim characters in the US society. This article suggests that post-9/11 Arab American fiction serves as a literary reference to such stereotype-based discourse in the contemporary era. The arguments in this article, while employing an analytical and critical approach to the novel, are outlined within postcolonial and Orientalist theoretical frameworks based on arguments of prominent critics and scholars such as Peter Morey, Edward Said, and Jack Shaheen, to name just a few.

scholarly journals From Anti-Vaxxer Moms to Militia Men: Influence Operations, Narrative Weaponization, and the Fracturing of American Identity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Weinberg ◽  
Jessica Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

How in 2020 were anti-vaxxer moms mobilized to attend reopen protests alongside armed militia men? This paper explores the power of weaponized narratives on social media both to create and polarize communities and to mobilize collective action and even violence. We propose that focusing on invocation of specific narratives and the patterns of narrative combination provides insight into the shared sense of identity and meaning different groups derive from these narratives. We then develop the WARP (Weaponize, Activate, Radicalize, Persuade) framework for understanding the strategic deployment and presentation of narratives in relation to group identity building and individual responses. The approach and framework provide powerful tools for investigating the way narratives may be used both to speak to a core audience of believers while also introducing and engaging new and even initially unreceptive audience segments to potent cultural messages, potentially inducting them into a process of radicalization and mobilization.

Religion and Occupation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asiya Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Personal Information ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
The Way

Petitioners frequently identified themselves with reference to their religion and occupation, as well as their origins. In this chapter, we discuss the correlation between religion and occupation, and the fact that people of specific religions tended to follow particular occupations. We believe that a heightened sense of religious and regional identity is evident in the way petitioners identified themselves. This might follow from the introduction of censuses that solicited personal information. Or, a sense of separate identity may have been strengthened by the kinds of encounters between people from different communities in an urban milieu, encounters that at times precipitated clashes.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
National Origin ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

In November 1993, the editors of Time magazine devoted an entire issue to the dramatic transformations in American society following the 1965 passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which had finally abolished the national origin quotas introduced in the 1920s and opened the way for increased immigration from Asia and Latin America. Turning their attention to what they dubbed as “America’s Immigrant Challenge,” the contributors to the issue responded to the visible changes in “the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great national pool … constantly fed by new streams of immigrants.”...

The American Foundations

Hadassah ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Mira Katzburg-Yungman
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
American Values ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
American Society ◽  
Ideological Identification

This chapter discusses Hadassah's American foundations. American zionist ideology had much in common with core American values and the American ethos. Hadassah's ideology is no exception to this rule, echoing American national ideals and characteristics fundamental to American culture. In the absence of a national common denominator, such as country of origin or heritage, the American national consciousness was largely formed on the basis of ideological identification with and commitment to a set of universal values. An individual's American identity is based on a system of ideas that has penetrated the daily life of American society and constitutes a living faith for most Americans.

7. Dissension: September 1872–April 1877

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Allen C. Guelzo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Black Population ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The South ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Way

Revulsion fed the Liberal Republican insurrection in 1872, and it paved the way for Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives in the 1874 elections, for the first time in twenty years. ‘Dissention, September 1872–April 1877’ explains how this increased Democratic power reduced the support for Republican enforcement against corruption and disorder in the South. The non-emergence of a single commanding leader who could bind together the disparate shards of African American identity into a single movement also hindered progress for the black population. The Reconstruction governments contributed mightily to their own demise by their incessant, self-weakening infighting.

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