|
|
|
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).
|
|
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. |
1
|
|
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. |
2
|
|
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 |
3
|
|
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. |
4
|
|
The chapters on the gangster film genre and Puerto Ricans in West Side Story adeptly focus on the deployment of cultural minstrelsy as sublimation. In the complex history of minstrelsy, Jewish performers were linked most prominently to blackface performance from vaudeville to ragtime in a tradition that culminated in the first full-length talking movie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927.2 Considering this tradition and the self-conscious absence of Jews from the Hollywood narratives they created, the authors persuasively argue that gangster films of the 1930s were popular narratives about the complexities of immigrant mobility that also conveyed fascination with Jewish criminality and provided hidden vehicles conveying Jewish concerns in plain sight. Rubin and Melnick argue that the mostly Jewish actors who portrayed cinematic gangsters3 endowed their representations with accents of body language, gestural patterns, and vocal stresses—inflections now widely associated with screen portrayals of East Coast Italian Mafia. These performances were objects of shared pleasure with Jewish spectators in the know, with whom "closeted" Jews in the movie industry had a "secret conversation" about being Jewish in the U.S. in one way that Jewishness could be "out" in public. |
5
|
|
This ethnic dodge is also the focus of the authors' exploration of how West Side Story emerged as a stage and screen musical. The authors consider the long history of interracial and interethnic romances in American and Jewish culture and the gay and Jewish identities of the show's creative team to suggest that Puerto Ricans served as objects of double sublimation—as stand-ins for Jewish fantasies of unity and as sexual surrogates for forbidden same-sex romances. This chapter explores the conditions and causes of Puerto Rican migration—and the forging of Nuyorican identity in relation to blackness and Mexican American identities—and the radical dissonance between these and the casting of Puerto Ricans as "white ethnic immigrants" in the enormously popular Broadway play and Hollywood film. |
6
|
|
The authors explore a different cultural sublimation in the American hippie love affair with Ravi Shankar after the Hart-Cellar Act.4 This ruling encouraged immigration by Asian professionals and coincided with a popularization of Asian "exotica." The far-reaching appropriation of "Indianness" in music, fashion, and spiritual practices was epitomized by Shankar's ecstatic and reverent reception at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1967. This response, the authors argue, reflected both a longing for an "authentic" way of life and a means for young white audiences to access superficially U.S. policy in Asia and the increasing numbers of South Asian immigrants. Shankar functioned as a "super-immigrant" who complicated the interrelatedness of American traditions of minstrelsy (in all its conflicted meanings), global politics, and the consumption of popular culture. |
7
|
|
Rubin and Melnick also chart identity formations—most prominently that of Nuyoricans and Chicanos—as products of "pushback" to a network of various institutional and social powers and pressures. Their chapter on the Zoot Suit Riots, for example, traces racialized formations of identity through evolutions of the zoot suit along with postwar labor and migration policies. From its African American wartime origins, through its adaptation by the Mexican American "El Pachuco" and its varied deployment in art, films, and music, the zoot suit emerges as a complex sign of raced and defiant masculinity.5 |
8
|
|
Perhaps the most important achievement of this book is the authors' continued insistence on the interconnectedness of historical racial tensions, institutional policy, labor practices, cultural representations, and global politics. They elucidate foundational claims for cultural studies: that specific cultural products and practices cannot be understood outside their particular networks of meaning and that, in turn, cultural artifacts as singular or seemingly arbitrary as fashion, the fusion of musical styles, or the fantasy renderings of fiction are powerful players in a dynamic and loaded system of signification. The authors' ability to make these ever-shifting variables intelligible to undergraduate readers makes this book a natural classroom text. |
9
|
|
The global dimensions of such an intricate system of signification are aptly illustrated in the case of Cool Herc, whose elaboration of Jamaican-style beat mixing, track extension, dub, and MC styling formed the foundations for rap and hip-hop, which reflect the Jamaica island's cultural relationship with the islands of New York and England. The "Kingston style" resulted from U.S. influences on Jamaica in the form of rhythm-and-blues records brought by U.S. military personnel or returning laborers. This circulation forms the book's most vivid example of how cultural production is shaped at the intersection of political, economic, social, and historical pressures. |
10
|
|
The final chapter, on Asian American webzines, sits uneasily in this collection. The authors shift focus here away from interrelational analysis and quickly lose momentum. The chapter, further, feels oddly outdated, and the authors never acknowledge, in this book about immigrant culture, that one of the most lingering and pernicious stereotypes of Asian Americans is as perpetual immigrants and foreigners. Contemporary Asian American culture is surely part of a feedback loop that filters local cultural expression through the current popularity of Asian style as global pop, yet when the authors describe aspects of Asian American culture as "Asian culture from within" they conflate the two, often the very critique in the sites they profile. |
11
|
|
A more complete reflection on the issues introduced in Rubin and Melnick's final chapter is offered in Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, a collection that joins the growing field of work in Asian American studies that focus on popular culture and its Asian American producers and interpretive communities. Like many targeted collections, not all essays succeed or satisfy; nonetheless, the stronger chapters provide engaging perspectives on self-representation and identity politics, the stakes in authenticity, the complicated traffic in cultural appropriation, and the mutating systems of meaning that circulate around and through Asian American cultural production and its intersection with popular culture at large. |
12
|
|
One important theme that underlies much of the work here is an interrogation of self-presentation, cultural categories, and those who both cross and police them: How can Asian American cultural producers do more than merely "enter into" popular culture? Oliver Wang's contribution on Asian American rap performers and Kevin Fellezs's essay on Asian American jazz musicians explore how racial identity and self-presentation are worked out through aspects of African American culture. Wang examines changes in the rappers' self-conscious presentation of racial identity to explore the value of racial authenticity for hip-hop audiences and the industry's profitable investment in racial essentialism. Fellezs similarly positions the problematic of Asian Americans' location within the black-white divide when he asks, "Is there such a thing as Asian American jazz?" Joan Kee's excellent essay further complicates the tension between artistic sensibility and identity politics as she looks at Asian American visual artists' incorporation of mainstream pop culture. Kee reveals the persistent paradox in the interconnected struggle for self-expression and critique of exclusion: works that invoke identity politics quickly become unified (from a curatorial and critical perspective) under a single, preestablished organizing principle, thus losing the very expressive freedom they set out to claim. The result is "crystallizing images into iconographies of displacement and racial anxiety" (pp. 133–34). The Asian American artist is here reconfigured into the familiar binary of east-west, a psychological relief that puts the artist "back in her place" and into a familiar and legibly ordered system. |
13
|
|
Contemporary immigrant experience is increasingly associated with globalization and a de-territorialization of cultural and ethnic links. Immigrant experiences align with other "taste communities" in the global logic of cultural consumption and yet national consciousness is not so much diminished as experienced as a spreading out of national and cultural affiliations. Such collaboratively constructed geographies are all the more powerful because they can be flexible and customized. Nhi Lieu's chapter on the circulation of diasporic Vietnamese variety shows and Martin F. Manalansan's affecting ethnography on the role of the senses both powerfully express how vehicles for cultural meaning-making are potent examples of nostalgic constructions and long-distance negotiations with hybridity. |
14
|
|
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez offer a counter perspective onto the global economy of cool in their study of the "Rice Rocket," a pan–Asian American version of hot-rodding culture. Blending a Japanese aesthetic with hypermasculine identifications with African American hip-hop and Latino lowriders, the rice riders present a defiant "Americanness" that precisely articulates the custom melding of car culture with race and gender stereotypes and globally circulating goods. |
15
|
|
For several authors in this collection—as well as for Rubin and Melnick—the popularity of "Asian culture" is a loaded cultural dynamic that draws together global politics with Asian American identity through popular culture's aggressive commodification. Expressions of cultural appropriation of music, fashion, and body markings such as mehndi can be read both as aspirational masquerade and as resurgences of Orientalism.6 Sunaina Maira's rich and provocative contribution considers Indo-appropriation—which she reads as a neo-Orientalist imperial practice—as a cultural activity that is itself classed, raced, and gendered. Maira's argument takes up and extends Rubin and Melnick's emphasis on ethnic and racial masquerade but concludes with a sweeping indictment of the links between liberal diversity politics and the politics of cultural appropriation. Here, best-intentioned multiculturalism and international feminism are both party to an imperialist ideology of managing difference. |
16
|
|
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun concludes the volume by interrogating the neutrality of systems. Deconstructing articulations of race online as a consumer category for both marketing and consumption, Chun examines contemporary web installations that juxtapose racial categories and software interfaces. The web interventions she describes underscore that technology or software protocols are not outside ideology. Chun's urging that we keep such myths of neutrality in mind is an important conclusion to a collection that interrogates identity in the realm of shared imaginings. |
17
|
Immigrants and American culture have created each other. Popular culture can thus be mapped as much through its pangs of longing, hurt, struggle, and hope as through underlying structures of institutional and social power. Both of these volumes remind us that popular culture is always in process and that while networks of meaning can be charted and theorized, no blueprint exists. How these networks link up—and the shape, trajectory, and influences of their creation—constitute the heart of the inventive and illusive pleasures of culture.
Tasha Oren
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
|
18
|
|
NOTES
1. In this, the book works well to complement, take up, and move on from David Roediger's Working Towards Whiteness (New York, 2005) while adding important new insights about how such racial jockeying worked itself out in the production and consumption of popular culture.
2. See also Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, CA, 1996), for historical considerations of the role minstrelsy played in the construction of whiteness and national identity.
3. Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and John Garfield, who changed their names from, respectively, Emmanuel Goldberg, Muni Wisenfreund, and Jacob Garfinkle, are prominent examples.
4. This 1965 ruling established new professional immigrant preferences that dramatically increased immigration from Asia, and India in particular.
5. The zoot suit also had a second cultural life in the 1980s and 1990s, detached from its historical symbolism and redeployed in a white subculture of swing and retro-cool. In an unfortunate bid for shorthand, Rubin and Melnick term this unmoored appropriation the "zipless adaptation" (after Erica Jong's "zipless fuck") without providing adequate analysis of the important dynamic represented in the semiotic evacuation of powerful cultural signs and their recirculation into commercial culture.
6. Susan Gubar, Eric Lott, and Michael Awkward have all suggested progressive possibilities for cross-racial impersonation. See Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York, 1997); Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); and Awkward, Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality (Chicago, 1995).
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|