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59 books match the query 'San Francisco' and 5 start with d

cover of Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction

Dahlia's Iris

Secret Autobiography and Fiction

Leslie Scalapino

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Detectives are investigating the death of Dahlia Winter's husband and also looking into the mysterious deaths of young boys who are imported for labor in a future-time San Francisco. Citing the plots of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner as proof that our sense of inner and outer is tied to rebellion and slavery, the novel appears at first to be a detail of these films all at once, like a colonization of them from the inside. But almost immediately the plot assumes its own life. Based on a conception of the Tibetan written form called Secret Autobiography--which is not the chronological events or actions of a life, but an individual's seeing outside any frames--the novel makes a time-space in which sensation, actions, and thought-memory are occurring alongside our present-day space.
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cover of Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American "Oriental"

Discriminating Sex

White Leisure and the Making of the American "Oriental"

Amy Sueyoshi

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular.

Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental.

Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.

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cover of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area

Dockworker Power

Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area

Peter Cole

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) and the Cornell ILR School, 2019
A Black Perspectives Best Black History Book of 2018

Dockworkers have power. Often missed in commentary on today's globalizing economy, workers in the world's ports can harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote their labor rights and social justice causes. Peter Cole brings such overlooked experiences to light in an eye-opening comparative study of Durban, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Path-breaking research reveals how unions effected lasting change in some of the most far-reaching struggles of modern times. First, dockworkers in each city drew on longstanding radical traditions to promote racial equality. Second, they persevered when a new technology--container ships--sent a shockwave of layoffs through the industry. Finally, their commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism. Dockworker Power not only brings to light surprising parallels in the experiences of dockers half a world away from each other. It also offers a new perspective on how workers can change their conditions and world.

 

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cover of Doing What Had To Be Done

Doing What Had To Be Done

Soo-Young Chin

Temple University Press, 1999

The first biography of an American-born Korean woman, Doing What Had to Be Done is, on the surface, the life story of Dora Yum Kim. But telling more than one woman's story, author Soo-Young Chin offers more than an unusual glimpse at the shaping of a remarkable community activist. In addition -- as she questions her subject, introduces each chapter, and reflects on how Dora's story relates to her own experience as a Korean American who immigrate to this country as an adult -- she carves around Dora's compelling story and courageous life story a story of her own and one of all Korean Americans.

Born in 1921, Dora, as she tells Chin her story, chronicles the shifting salience of gendered ethnic identity as she journeys through her life. Traveling through time and place, she moves from San Francisco's Chinatown -- where Koreans were a minority within a minority -- to suburban Dewey Boulevard where Dora and her family attempt to integrate into mainstream America, and where she becomes a social worker in the California State Department of Employment. As the Korean immigrant community grows in the late 1960s, Dora becomes deeply involved in community service. She remembers teaching English to senior citizens and preparing them for their naturalization exams, finding jobs for the younger Koreans, and founding a community center and meals program for seniors.

A detailed and inspiring lens through which to view Korean American history, Dora's life journey echoes the changing spaces of the American social landscape. And the grace and ease with which Dora just "does what has to be done" shows us the importance of everyday acts in making a difference.
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cover of Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Driven by Fear

Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Guenter B. Risse

University of Illinois Press, 2015

From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, authorities required San Francisco's Pesthouse to segregate the diseased from the rest of the city. Although the Pesthouse stood out of sight and largely out of mind, it existed at a vital nexus of civic life where issues of medicine, race, class, environment, morality, and citizenship entwined and played out. Guenter B. Risse places this forgotten institution within an emotional climate dominated by widespread public dread and disgust. In Driven by Fear, he analyzes the unique form of stigma generated by San Franciscans. Emotional states like xenophobia and racism played a part. Yet the phenomenon also included competing medical paradigms and unique economic needs that encouraged authorities to protect the city's reputation as a haven of health restoration. As Risse argues, public health history requires an understanding of irrational as well as rational motives. To that end he delves into the spectrum of emotions that drove extreme measures like segregation and isolation and fed psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges to scapegoat and stereotype victims--particularly Chinese victims--of smallpox, leprosy, plague, and syphilis.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary scholarship, Driven by Fear looks at the past to offer critical lessons for our age of bioterror threats and emerging infectious diseases.

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