front cover of Uncivil Youth
Uncivil Youth
Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality
Soo Ah Kwon
Duke University Press, 2013
In Uncivil Youth, Soo Ah Kwon explores youth of color activism as linked to the making of democratic citizen-subjects. Focusing attention on the relations of power that inform the social and political practices of youth of color, Kwon examines how after-school and community-based programs are often mobilized to prevent potentially "at-risk" youth from turning to "juvenile delinquency" and crime. These sorts of strategic interventions seek to mold young people to become self-empowered and responsible citizens. Theorizing this mode of youth governance as "affirmative governmentality," Kwon investigates the political conditions that both enable youth of color to achieve meaningful change and limit their ability to do so given the entrenchment of nonprofits in the logic of a neoliberal state. She draws on several years of ethnographic research with an Oakland-based, panethnic youth organization that promotes grassroots activism among its second-generation Asian and Pacific Islander members (ages fourteen to eighteen). While analyzing the contradictions of the youth organizing movement, Kwon documents the genuine contributions to social change made by the young people with whom she worked in an era of increased youth criminalization and anti-immigrant legislation.
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front cover of Unequal Freedom
Unequal Freedom
How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Harvard University Press, 2004

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.

After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

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front cover of Unsettling Archival Research
Unsettling Archival Research
Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives
Edited by Gesa E. Kirsch, Romeo García, Caitlin Burns Allen, and Walker P. Smith
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023
HONORABLE MENTION, 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in Edited Collection!

A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.
 
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
 
Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
 
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.
 
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front cover of Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States
Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States
Elizabeth Huttman, Juliet Saltman and Wim Blauw, eds.
Duke University Press, 1991
This book provides an expert examination and comparison of housing segregation in major population centers in the United States and Western Europe and analyzes successes and failures of government policies and desegregation programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and West Germany.
The collection begins with a review of the historical development of housing segregation in these countries, describing current housing conditions, concentration of housing in each country’s leading cities, minority populations and the housing they occupy—specifically public, nonprofit, and owner-occupied dwellings. When focusing on the United States, the contributors assess housing segregation, antisegregation measures, and institutional racism toward blacks in the Midwest and South, and toward Mexican-Americans throughout American cities. Chapters dealing with Western Europe include housing segregation of South Asian and West Indian immigrants in Britain, immigrants in Sweden, Turkish, and Yugoslav “guest workers” in West Germany, and Algerian and other Arab groups in France. The book concludes with discussions of public housing policies; suburban desegregation, resegregation, and integration maintenance programs; specific integration stabilization programs; and desegregation efforts in one specific place.

Contributors. Elizabeth Huttman, Michal Arend, Cihan Arin, Maurice Blanc, Wim Blauw, Ger Mik, Clyde McDaniels, Jürgen Friedrichs, Hannes Alpheis, John M. Goering, Len Gordon, Albert Mayer, Rosemary Helper, Barry V. Johnston, Terry Jones, Valerie Karn, Göran Lindberg, Anna Lisa Lindén, Deborah Phillips, Dennis Keating, Juliet Saltman, Alan Murie

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front cover of Usable Pasts
Usable Pasts
Traditions and Group Expressions in North America
Tad Tuleja
Utah State University Press, 1997
In Usable Pasts, fourteen authors examine the manipulation of traditional expressions among a variety of groups from the United States and Canada: the development of a pictorial style by Navajo weavers in response to traders, Mexican American responses to the appropriation of traditional foods by Anglos, the expressive forms of communication that engender and sustain a sense of community in an African American women's social club and among elderly Yiddish folksingers in Miami Beach, the incorporation of mass media images into the "C&Ts" (customs and traditions) of a Boy Scout troop, the changing meaning of their defining Exodus-like migration to Mormons, Newfoundlanders' appropriation through the rum-drinking ritual called the Schreech-In of outsiders' stereotypes, outsiders' imposition of the once-despised lobster as the emblem of Maine, the contest over Texas's heroic Alamo legend and its departures from historical fact, and how yellow ribbons were transformed from an image in a pop song to a national symbol of "resolve."
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