| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Color-Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies. Ed. by Johnnella E. Butler. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. xxvi, 310 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-295-98090-7. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-295-98091-5.)

Those of us who have taught in or administered interdisciplinary programs in ethnic studies, American studies, and women's/gender studies know too well how laborious and frustrating such endeavors are in universities still largely organized by departments and disciplines. Too many such programs, or even stand-alone departments, are barely tolerated and are certainly understaffed and under-funded. They are often intellectually marginalized, discounted, and disjointed; they are usually structurally isolated, weak, or wholly or at least partially dependent for faculty on "mainstream" departments. So I turned to this edited volume on the state, institutionalization, and practice of American ethnic studies with genuine interest, anxious to see whether my vexed and vexing experiences as a program director in American studies were shared by others and faintly hoping to find a magic recipe both for making such projects internally vibrant and coherent and for inducing enthusiasm externally among skeptical colleagues and indifferent-to-hostile administrators. I found that, with a few shining exceptions such as the ethnic studies programs at the universities of Colorado and Washington, yes, my problems were hardly unique, and no, there is no magic recipe for program success or even survival. Most of the authors of the chapters in the volume—which grew from a 1993 symposium and a subsequent series of conversations among directors, chairs, and key faculty from ethnic studies departments and programs in the United States—express the same sort of frustrations I experienced.

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