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A Bed Called Home
Life In The Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town
Mamphela Ramphele
Ohio University Press, 1993
In the last three years the migrant labor hostels of South Africa, particularly those in the Transvaal, have gained international notoriety as theaters of violence. For many years they were hidden from public view and neglected by the white authorities. Now, it seems, hostel dwellers may have chosen physical violence to draw attention to the structural violence of their appalling conditions of life. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the majority of hostel dwellers are peace-loving people who have over the years developed creative strategies to cope with their impoverished and degrading environment.

In this challenging study, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele documents the life of the hostel dwellers of Cape Town, for whom a bed is literally a home for both themselves and their families. Elaborating the concept of space in its many dimensions—not just physical, but political, ideological, social, and economic as well—she emphasizes the constraints exerted on hostel dwellers by the limited spaces they inhabit. At the same time, she argues that within these constraints people have managed to find room for manoeuvre, and in her book explores the emancipatory possibilities of their environment.

The text is illustrated with a number of black-and-white photographs taken by Roger Meintjes in the townships and hostels.
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Between Voice and Silence
Women and Girls, Race and Relationship
Jill McLean Taylor, Carol Gilligan, and Amy M. Sullivan
Harvard University Press, 1995

More than any other psychologist, Carol Gilligan has helped us to hear girls' voices just when they seem to be blurring and fading or becoming disruptive during the passage into womanhood. When adolescent girls--once assured and resilient--silence or censor themselves to maintain relationships, they often become depressed, and develop eating disorders or other psychological problems. But when adolescent girls remain outspoken it is often difficult for others to stay in relationship with them, leading girls to be excluded or labeled as troublemakers. If this is true in an affluent suburban setting, where much of the groundbreaking research took place, what of girls from poor and working-class families, what of fading womanhood amid issues of class and race? And how might these issues affect the researchers themselves? In Between Voice and Silence Taylor, Gilligan, and Sullivan grapple with these questions. The result is a deeper and richer appreciation of girls' development and women's psychological health.

In an urban public school, among girls from diverse cultural backgrounds--African American, Hispanic, Portuguese, and white--and poor and working-class families, the authors sought a key to the relationship between risk, resistance, and girls' psychological development and health. Specifically, they found cultural differences that affect girls' coming of age in this country. In Between Voice and Silence, the story of the study parallels another, that of African American, Hispanic, and white women who gathered to examine their own differences and to learn how to avoid perpetuating past divisions among women. Together, these two stories reveal an intergenerational struggle to develop relationships between and among women and to hold and respect difference.

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Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness
Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons
Jane Lazarre
Duke University Press, 1997
“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.
Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.
With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.
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Black, Jewish, and Interracial
It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity
Katya Gibel Azoulay
Duke University Press, 1997
How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity? This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial. Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.
Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, "passing," intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness. Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.
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The Blood of Guatemala
A History of Race and Nation
Greg Grandin
Duke University Press, 2000
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades.
Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants.
This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.
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Border Identifications
Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the U.S.-Mexico Border
By Pablo Vila
University of Texas Press, 2005

From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and "hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race.

In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how religion, gender, and class also affect people's identifications of self and "others" among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Juárez-El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are how the perception that "all Mexicans are Catholic" affects Mexican Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse about proper gender roles may feed the violence against women that has made Juárez the "women's murder capital of the world"; and why class consciousness is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of "hybridity" is only partially adequate to define people's identity on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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The Border Next Door
New York Migraciones, Volume 24
Carlos Ulises Decena and Margaret Gray, eds.
Duke University Press
Addressing how national immigration concerns play out at urban, rural, and suburban levels in the state of New York, this special issue of Social Text offers new insight into an area of study that has long been focused primarily on cities. As new Latino/a immigrants change the culture and social fabric of small communities and reshape policy concerns, suburban and rural regions are becoming key locations for anti-immigrant acts and immigrant social justice organizing. This special issue presents immigrant stories and community and advocacy responses that underscore the need to recognize the diversity of Latino/a immigrant experiences, and it explores the widely varying responses of towns, counties, and both new and established immigrant groups to the race, ethnic, and class tensions usually associated with cities.

While focusing on Central American and Mexican immigrants in New York state, the contributors to this issue—scholars, activists, artists, and filmmakers—situate their work within a national context and consider the paradox of the experience of Latino/a immigrants, who face increasing repression on the one hand and emerging opportunities on the other. Essays address the experience of transnational mothers who leave their children in the care of extended family to pursue low-wage U.S. jobs; the politics of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities; the social practices of day laborers as they wait for work on street corners; and the unlikely pairing of the Virgen de Guadalupe and New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer as figures to whom Mexican immigrants appeal in their demands for rights and dignity. Other articles address the upsurge of immigrant mobility, anti-immigrant activities, and immigrant advocacy in non-urban locations.

Contributors. James E. Claffey, Carlos Ulises Decena, Alyshia Gálvez, Margaret Gray, Angela Martínez, Melanie Nicholson, Pilar A. Parra, Max J. Pfeffer, Michele G. Shedlin, Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky

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The Broken Compass
Parental Involvement with Children's Education
Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2014

It seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The study's surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and improved student performance.

Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. Some of the associations they found between socioeconomic status and educational involvement were consistent with past studies. Yet other results ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned with education than other ethnic groups--or that "tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. In fact, many low-income parents across a wide spectrum want to be involved in their children's school lives, but they often receive little support from the school system. And for immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem.

While Robinson and Harris do not wish to discourage parents' interest, they believe that the time has come to seriously reconsider whether greater parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing their children's education today. This provocative study challenges some of our most cherished beliefs about the role of family in educational success.

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Buddhist Revitalization and Chinese Religions in Malaysia
Lee Ooi Tan
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Buddhist Revitalization and Chinese Religions in Malaysia tells the story of how a minority community comes to grips with the challenges of modernity, history, globalization, and cultural assertion in an ever-changing Malaysia. It captures the religious connection, transformation, and tension within a complex traditional belief system in a multi-religious society. In particular, the book revolves around a discussion on the religious revitalization of Chinese Buddhism in modern Malaysia. This Buddhist revitalization movement is intertwined with various forces, such as colonialism, religious transnationalism, and global capitalism. Reformist Buddhists have helped to remake Malaysia’s urban-dwelling Chinese community and have provided an exit option in the Malay and Muslim majority nation state. As Malaysia modernizes, there have been increasing efforts by certain segments of the country’s ethnic Chinese Buddhist population to separate Buddhism from popular Chinese religions. Nevertheless, these reformist groups face counterforces from traditional Chinese religionists within the context of the cultural complexity of the Chinese belief system.
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