Results by title
152 books match the query 'New York (N.Y.)' and 4 start with g
Gastrodiplomacy
Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943Heather Ruth Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2027
Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age.
In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.
In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.
Gentile New York
The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish ImmigrantsRibak, Gil
Rutgers University Press, 2012
The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process.
Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.
Glenway Wescott Personally
A BiographyJerry Rosco
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901–1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York’s artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn’t finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.
In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott’s long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott’s private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.
God In The Street
New York Writing from The Penny Press to MelvilleHans Bergmann
Temple University Press, 1995
In the fast changing culture of antebellum New York, writers of every stripe celebrated "the City" as a stage for the daily urban encounter between the familiar and the inexplicable. Probing into these richly varied texts, Hans Bergmann uncovers the innovations in writing that accompanied the new market society— the penny newspapers' grandiose boastings, the poetic catalogues of Walt Whitman, the sentimental realism of charity workers, the sensationalism of slum visitors, and the complex urban encounters of Herman Melville's fiction.
The period in which New York, the city itself, became firmly established as a subject invented a literary form that attempts to capture the variety of the teeming city and the flaneur, the walking observer. But Bergmann does not simply lead a parade of images and themes; he explores the ways in which these observers understood what was happening around them and to them, always attentive to class struggle and race and gender issues.
God in the Street shows how the penny press and Whitman's New York poetry create a new mass culture hero who interprets and dignifies the city's confusions. New York writers, both serious and sensationalist, meditate upon street encounters with tricksters and confidence-men and explore the meanings of encounters. Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrinever" underlines the unrelenting isolation and inability to control the interpreter. Bergmann reinterprets Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of how a complex literary form arises directly from its own historical materials and is itself socially symbolic. Bergmann sees Melville as special because he recognizes his inability to make sense of the surface of chaotic images and encounters. In mid-century New York City, Melville believes God is in the street, unavailable and unrecognizable, rather than omnipresent and guiding.