BiblioVault - Books about Ethnic identity

The Harkis

The Wound That Never Heals

Vincent Crapanzano

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In this haunting chronicle of betrayal and abandonment, ostracism and exile, racism and humiliation, Vincent Crapanzano examines the story of the Harkis, the quarter of a million Algerian auxiliary troops who fought for the French in Algeria’s war of independence. After tens of thousands of Harkis were massacred by other Algerians at the end of the war, the survivors fled to France where they were placed in camps, some for as long as sixteen years. Condemned as traitors by other Algerians and scorned by the French, the Harkis became a population apart, and their children still suffer from their parents’ wounds. Many have become activists, lobbying for recognition of their parents’ sacrifices, compensation, and an apology.

More than just a retelling of the Harkis’ grim past and troubling present, The Harkis is a resonant reflection on how children bear responsibility for the choices their parents make, how personal identity is shaped by the impersonal forces of history, and how violence insinuates itself into every facet of human life.

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Hawai'i Is My Haven

Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Duke University Press, 2021

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

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Hellenicity

Between Ethnicity and Culture

Jonathan M. Hall

University of Chicago Press, 2002

In today's cosmopolitan world, ethnic and national identity has assumed an ever-increasing importance. But how is this identity formed, and how does it change over time?

With Hellenicity, Jonathan M. Hall explores these questions in the context of ancient Greece, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence to determine when, how, why, and to what extent the Greeks conceived themselves as a single people. Hall argues that a subjective sense of Hellenic identity emerged in Greece much later than is normally assumed. For instance, he shows that the four main ethnic subcategories of the ancient Greeks—Akhaians, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians—were not primordial survivals from a premigratory period, but emerged in precise historical circumstances during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Furthermore, Hall demonstrates that the terms of defining Hellenic identity shifted from ethnic to broader cultural criteria during the course of the fifth century B.C., chiefly due to the influence of Athens, whose citizens formulated a new Athenoconcentric conception of "Greekness."

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Here to Stay

Uncovering South Asian American History

Geetika Rudra

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Today, South Asians are a rapidly growing demographic in the United States, comprising nearly 2 percent of the population. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past when the United States was far less hospitable to South Asian immigrants. In fact, until 1952, only white immigrants could become naturalized American citizens. Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, many states still had thriving communities of South Asians.

In Here to Stay, Geetika Rudra, a second-generation Indian immigrant and American history buff, takes readers on a journey across the country to unearth the little-known histories of earlier generations of South Asian Americans. She visits storied sites such as Oregon’s “Hindoo Alley,” home to many lumber workers at the turn of the century, and Angel Island, California’s immigration hub. She also introduces readers to such inspiring figures as Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve his adopted country in World War I, but who was later denied citizenship and took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In turns both serious and joyful, this book vividly reveals how South Asians have always been a vital part of the American tapestry.

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Hidden Out in the Open

Spanish Migration to the United States (1875-1930)

Phylis Cancilla Martinelli

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Hidden Out in the Open is the first English-language volume on Spanish migration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This panoramic study covers a period defined by the crucial transformations of the Progressive Era in the United States, and by similarly momentous changes in Spain following the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII.

The chapters in this volume are geographically wide-ranging, reflecting the transnational nature of the Spanish diaspora in the Americas, encompassing networks that connected Spain, Cuba, Latin American countries, the United States, and American-controlled territories in Hawai’i and Panama. The geographic diversity reveals the different jobs immigrants engaged in, from construction gangs in the Panama Canal to mining crews in Arizona and West Virginia. Contributors analyze the Spanish experience in the United States from a variety of perspectives, discussing rural and urban enclaves, the role of the state, and the political mobilization of migrants, using a range of methodological approaches that examine ethnicity, race, gender, and cultural practices through the lenses of sociology, history, and cultural studies.

The mention of the Spanish influence in the United States often conjures up images of conquistadores and padres of old. Forgotten in this account are the Spanish immigrants who reached American shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hidden Out in the Open reveals the role of the modern migration of Spaniards in this "land of immigrants" and rectifies the erasure of Spain in the American narrative. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of US history and the history of modern Spain and Europe, as well as those interested ethnic and migration/diaspora studies, Hispanic/Latino studies, and the study of working class and radicalism.

Contributors: Brian D. Bunk, Christopher J. Castañeda, Thomas Hidalgo, Beverly Lozano, Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, Gary R. Mormino, George E. Pozzetta†, Ana Varela-Lago.

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Hispanic Nation

Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity

Geoffrey Fox

University of Arizona Press, 1997

A new ethnic identity is being constructed in the United States: the Hispanic nation. Overcoming age-old racial, regional, and political differences, Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Spanish-language origins are beginning to imagine themselves as a single ethnic community-which by the turn of the century may become the United States' largest and most influential minority.

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Histories and Stories from Chiapas

Border Identities in Southern Mexico

By R. Aída Hernández Castillo

University of Texas Press, 2001

The 1994 Zapatista uprising of Chiapas' Maya peoples against the Mexican government shattered the state myth that indigenous groups have been successfully assimilated into the nation. In this wide-ranging study of identity formation in Chiapas, Aída Hernández delves into the experience of a Maya group, the Mam, to analyze how Chiapas' indigenous peoples have in fact rejected, accepted, or negotiated the official discourse on "being Mexican" and participating in the construction of a Mexican national identity.

Hernández traces the complex relations between the Mam and the national government from 1934 to the Zapatista rebellion. She investigates the many policies and modernization projects through which the state has attempted to impose a Mexican identity on the Mam and shows how this Maya group has resisted or accommodated these efforts. In particular, she explores how changing religious affiliation, women's and ecological movements, economic globalization, state policies, and the Zapatista movement have all given rise to various ways of "being Mam" and considers what these indigenous identities may mean for the future of the Mexican nation. The Spanish version of this book won the 1997 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún national prize for the best social anthropology research in Mexico.

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Histories of the Present

People and Power in Ecuador

Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten

University of Illinois Press, 2011

The wellspring of critical analysis in this book emerges from Ecuador's major Indigenous Uprising of 1990 and its ongoing aftermath in which indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian action transformed the nation-state and established new dimensions of human relationships. The authors weave anthropological theory with longitudinal Ecuadorian ethnography to produce a unique contribution to Latin American studies.

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How Did You Get To Be Mexican

Kevin R. Johnson

Temple University Press, 1999

This compelling account of racial identity takes a close look at the question "Who is a Latino?" and determines where persons of mixed Latino-Anglo heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. The son of a Mexican American mother and an Anglo father, Kevin Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino-Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in contemporary America.

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How to Be South Asian in America

Narratives of Ambivalence and Belonging

Authored by anupama jain

Temple University Press, 2011

Providing a useful analysis of and framework for understanding immigration and assimilation narratives, anupama jain's How to Be South Asian in America considers the myth of the American Dream in fiction (Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music), film (American Desi, American Chai), and personal testimonies. By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of more supposedly exotic narratives, jain illuminates complexities of belonging that also reveal South Asians' anxieties about belonging, (trans)nationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration.

jain argues that these stories transform as well as reflect cultural processes, and she shows just how aspects of identity—gender, sexual, class, ethnic, national—are shaped by South Asians' accommodation of and resistance to mainstream American culture.

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