Dissertation•
Authentic Assertions, Commercial Concessions: Race, Nation, and Popular Culture in Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960.
01 Jan 2012-
About: The article was published on 2012-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 49 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Miami & Popular culture.
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TL;DR: In this paper, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism are discussed. And the history of European ideas: Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 721-722.
13,842 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and the complexities of those relations are explored, including gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class.
Abstract: MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.
766 citations
TL;DR: Gross as mentioned in this paper argues that the modern plunderers are not anomalies but are the legitimate descendants of the financiers who organized Lowell and the Boott and turns a study of a defunct textile corporation into a condemnation of economic practices and theories that are widely accepted today and are inherent in the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Abstract: parative advantage. The work would also be stronger if the author could provide more detail as to how profitable the Boott was and where the profits were re-invested; Gross makes it clear that profits were not plowed back into the mill. It is probable that the figures are simply not available but, if they could be presented, they would make a strong case even more convincing. In his postscript Gross draws parallels between modern entrepreneurs, who are often criticized for \"being devoted to the production of profits, not of goods\" (p. 242), and the owners of the Boott. He argues that the modern \"plunderers\" are not anomalies but are the legitimate descendants of the financiers who organized Lowell and the Boott. In short, Gross turns a study of a defunct textile corporation into a condemnation of economic practices and theories that are widely accepted today and are inherent in the North American Free Trade Agreement. How his thesis will be received and incorporated into the interpretation of Lowell is an interesting question.
294 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors implicitly ask communication theorists and critics to read important poets and novelists, not just in the sense of reading more, but by reading more alertly, and they call us to glimpse connections across terrains of knowing, to build our own lessons from them, to confirm others' concrete presence even as we must stand up to them, and to recognize deeper and more organic links.
Abstract: brings rigorous and first-rate intellects into my life and dares me to be a better and more versatile reader. More specifically, these works implicitly ask communication theorists and critics to read important poets and novelists, not just in the sense of reading more, but by reading more alertly. They call us to glimpse connections across terrains of knowing, to build our own lessons from them, to confirm others’ concrete presence even as we must stand up to them, and to recognize deeper and more organic links. Moreover, consistent with a concrete philosophy of dialogue, they each ask readers to respond, despite the clutter and ill-formed meanings of our own lives. I look at my messy desk, and know I have time for that.
199 citations
TL;DR: Ferrer as discussed by the authors examines the role of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy. |Examines the tensions between racism and anti-racism in Cuba's struggle to become a nation between 1868 and 1898.
149 citations
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TL;DR: Brownsville was a Jewish ghetto from its inception, and it was viewed with contempt by the better classes of the city as mentioned in this paper, and by World War II, the area's housing and infrastructure was seriously deteriorated.
Abstract: The 1940s and 1950s are an important but neglected period in shaping modern race relations in New York City. The war mobilization and the economic boom that followed created new possibilities for economic and social mobility, and opened up new areas of the city and the suburbs to second-generation immigrants. The economic expansion also attracted hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, primarily African Americans from the South and Latinos from Puerto Rico, significantly changing the color of New York’s melting pot. These demographic trends had a dramatic impact on relations among New Yorkers in this period. This article will examine the impact of these societal trends on one New York neighborhood: Brownsville, an area in eastern Brooklyn. From its creation at the turn of the century, Brownsville was known as Brooklyn’s Lower East Side, a second stop on the ladder of upward mobility for recent Jewish immigrants. Built in the late 1800s and early 1900s for the working class, Brownsville housing and infrastructure was substandard from the beginning, and Brownsville residents struggled to secure basic neighborhood resources. Brownsville was a Jewish ghetto from its inception, and it was viewed with contempt by the better classes of the city. At the same time, Brownsville supported a wide variety of religious, business, and civic institutions. It also provided a common culture and identity for its 100,000 residents, mostly firstand second-generation immigrants, and helped them acclimate to American society. Many upwardly mobile Jews moved out in the 1920s, when Brownsville’s development ceased, and the Depression hit Brownsville harder than most New York neighborhoods. By World War II, the area’s housing and infrastructure was seriously deteriorated. In response, Brownsville residents created
7 citations
01 Jan 1988
6 citations
TL;DR: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) as discussed by the authors is one of the best-known novels written by Hijuelos and is a classic example of such a novel.
Abstract: Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won high praise from reviewers for its depiction of the New York Latin music scene of the forties and fifties, although some critics have faulted it for a dragging plot and excessive descriptions.(1) Nicolas Kanellos, director of Arte Publico Press, called it "the best Hispanic book ever published by a large commercial press" (113). He gives the following reason why this novel stands out: "Not your typical ethnic autobiography which charts a protagonist's search for the American dream, The Mambo Kings instead is an evocation of the period when one segment of Hispanic culture heavily influenced American popular culture, dancing its way right into the heart of the mainstream" (113). Indeed, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is populated by many of the greats who brought the Latin rhythms of the mambo, rumba, and cha-cha-cha into the North American mainstream: Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Perez Prado, Beny More, and, most important to this novel, Desi Arnaz. In a New York Times Book Review article, Joseph Cincotti calls Hijuelos's effort to evoke this place and time "literary archaeology" (30), while Hijuelos himself, in the same article, refers to it as "wandering around 1952..., taking walks down memory lane, even if it's not my memory." One might wonder to whose memory Hijuelos is referring. It is significant that the text itself reflects this memory/not memory tension, this search for something experienced yet not experienced. This dichotomy is revealed in the novel's crucial linguistic ambivalence, which has been described by Gustavo Perez Firmat,(2) and which Ilan Stavans calls "for tourists."(3) On another level the text suggests that the memory it seeks to recover is a collective one rooted in both Anglo and Hispanic cultural experiences of music and television. I will argue that the Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo character construct serves multiple purposes in the narrative, providing a stable referent for the author's "archaeological" finds while at the same time creating unstable effects. The presence of historical characters in a novel may contribute to verisimilitude by relying on the reader's knowledge to supply this very illusion of the real, or it may serve a more subversive narrative purpose, such as creating tension between the reader's knowledge and expectation on the one hand and what the narrative actually delivers on the other. A proper name (say, Charlie Chaplin or John Wayne) is a locus of multiple meanings that can never be exhausted by a list of adjectives or a study of roles played. In The Mambo Kings the names Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are deployed to draw on the reader's experience of popular culture, thus providing a structure or map for some of the novel's thematic concerns; however, as we shall see, these names and their significance in popular culture are reinvented in the novel. These names, not surprisingly, often appear in reference to the I Love Lucy television show (a title which could arguably be said to function much the way a proper name does), evoking even more extensive cultural significance. Fictional identities often blend, as the reader of The Mambo Kings encounters references to Desi Arnaz (fictionalized historical person) and then Ricky Ricardo (fictional television character played by Arnaz) as if no boundary - real or fictional - existed between them. The effect is somewhat like a narrative optical illusion, where the eye sees two distinct images but can process only one at a time.(4) This suggests, as histories of the I Love Lucy show have said, that Desi Arnaz played himself in the series.(5) While this is an easy line to swallow - after all Arnaz was a Cuban singer and bandleader and played one on the show - it obfuscates the division between the performing self and the non-performing self. For the television viewer, Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are surely the same entity. And the reader of The Mambo Kings will have no difficulty visualizing Desi/Ricky in the novel or assuming an acquaintance with him, because he is universally known. …
6 citations
Dissertation•
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