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Review Essays
INVENTING AMERICA: ETHNIC IDENTITY AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE
| Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction. By Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: New York University Press, 2006. x + 301 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, appendix, and index. $70.00 (cloth); $21.00 (paper).Alien Encounter: Popular Culture in Asian America. Edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. vi + 365 pp. Table, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
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Our contemporary sense of globalization and its various mobilities (of capital, media, home, and cultural communities) has helped shape a popular reevaluation of what it means to be an immigrant and a cultural consumer. The American melting pot fantasy is running out of steam. Yet in the realm of popular culture, racial and ethnic influences and tensions mingle with globe-traversing commodities, practices, traditions, and cutting-edge technologies. As people organize their experiences according to their cultural affinities, how is the meeting of nation and culture reconfigured? How do such transformations help us make sense of racial, ethnic, and institutional relations of power? Two timely books take up these questions from complementary angles to offer focused consideration of how popular culture is made by and through ethnic differences and struggles. |
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America's cultural history, as it emerges in Immigration and American Popular Culture, has been fashioned through the ongoing twists of U.S. immigration law, labor history, foreign policy, and racial tensions between blacks and whites. In this eminently readable and insightful overview of U.S. cultural history in the last century, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick provide a view into the roiling production of American culture by tracing how political, social, and economic forces arrange themselves to form particular cultural moments and how such moments resonate to leave a lasting and often surprising imprint on future cultural transfigurations. |
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The book's chapters present six eras when immigrant ethnic cultures were uniquely influential: Hollywood Jews in the 1920s and 1930s, the Zoot Suit Riots and the forging of Chicano identity in the late 1930s, Puerto Rican representation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Vietnam-era hippie love affair with Ravi Shankar, Jamaican immigration and the birth of East Coast hip-hop in the late 1970s, and the 1990s Asian American webzine subculture. Although its attention is often focused elsewhere, one of the book's strengths is its continuous minding of white–African American relations as a structuring tension that shaped ethnic identities and representation in both obvious and subtle ways.1 |
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American preoccupation with minstrelsy, the authors argue, is an engine of cultural formation and a major theme in American popular culture. As they show throughout the book, the practice of racial and ethnic masquerade is one recurring cultural habit that served simultaneously to highlight and grapple with racial and ethnic differences. |
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