Browsing by Subject "Multiculturalism"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia
    (2019-08) Ding, Yuan
    Since the 1970s, the focus of the field of Asian American Studies has gone through dramatic shifts, from its early archival efforts to preserve the immigrant experience, repudiate orientalist stereotypes and demand for civil liberties, to a more recent turn towards globalization and transnationalism. Since the 1965 immigration reform, which abolished the long-standing discriminatory national quota system limiting Asian immigration into the US, Asian Americans have surpassed Hispanics to become the fastest growing minority group in the US. This influx of Asian Americans in the last half of the 20th century coincides with the ascension of Asia in the global economy, and both developments anticipate the adoption of neoliberal multiculturalist policies within the US nation-state. These developments challenge Asian American Studies to shift away from cultural nationalist debates over representational authenticity vs. cultural hybridity towards a more self-reflective engagement with the demands of the neoliberal literary and cultural market. Addressing this change of direction in the field, my dissertation, “Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia,” analyzes the ways in which race gets capitalized in the works by contemporary diasporic Asian writers, who deploy economic tropes and neoliberal logics to narrate the Asian diasporic identity and experience. In dialogue with other recent critical interventions that have sought to reframe the Asian American and Asian diasporic identity in relation to the proliferation of global capitalism such as Flexible Citizenship (1999), Economic Citizens (2007) and Liquidated (2009), “Capitalizing Race” argues that Asian diasporic agency is shaped by and in turn regulates the proliferation of flexible, transnational capital. Examining how contemporary fiction situates the Asian diaspora in the context of the global circulation of capital and mass media imaginaries, “Capitalizing Race” concludes that the rhetorical production of “ethnicity” is an economic process, governed by the neoliberal logic of the literary, cultural market. Delving into the ways in which human mobility is dictated by and signified through financial liquidity, “Capitalizing Race” illuminates the neoliberal multiculturalist aesthetics operating in some of the texts analyzed here. I’m weary of the uncritical celebration of their flexible accumulation of cultural capital, which, I argue, detracts from the Asian diasporic community’s effort to achieve greater political representation and equality.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Interview with Conrad Jones
    (University of Minnesota, 1999-07-19) Jones, Conrad; Pflaum, Ann M.
    Ann Pflaum interviews Conrad Jones, former director of the Student Activities Bureau.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Interview with Fred Lukermann
    (University of Minnesota, 1984-09-16) Lukermann, Fred E.; Chambers, Clarke A.
    Clarke A. Chambers interviews Fred Lukermann, graduate, professor and member of the administration at the University.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Interview with Josie Johnson
    (University of Minnesota, 1999-08-03) Johnson, Josie R.; Pflaum, Ann M.
    Ann Pflaum interviews the Honorable Josie Johnson, a former Regent of the University, former senior officer in Central Administration and a former instructor and former fellow in the College of Education.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Interview with Josie Johnson
    (University of Minnesota, 1995-01-10) Johnson, Josie R.; Chambers, Clarke A.
    Clarke A. Chambers interviews Josie Johnson, former member of the Board of Regents.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Interview with Robert Bergland
    (University of Minnesota, 1999-04-09) Bergland, Robert; Pflaum, Ann M.
    Ann Pflaum interviews the Honorable Robert Bergland, a Board of Regents members. He describes his education through college and his career in Washington.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Multicultural Community Building in an Urban Neighborhood
    (2015-06) Champe, John
    This is an anthropological ethnography of multicultural community-building among the almost all-white activists in Minneapolis' largest neighborhood, Whittier. It shows the effects that the discourses, theories, and activities of these neighborhood activists have on the social structures that reproduce class, racial, and ethnic inequality. The first chapter analyzes the acrimonious battle over the opening of an apartment building for homeless. It shows the construction of the symbols at play, including Stability, Burden, Stakeholders, Gentrification, and Over-concentration of the poor. Chapter two explains how politics in Whittier became so polarized between competing factions of white, liberal, middle-class homeowners, who all share a love of their neighborhood's diversity. The study also illuminates how the faction representing "homeowner interests"� achieved dominance. Chapter three shows that while many paint Whittier as very dangerous, statistically it is not. The chapter explains the role that fear, exaggerated talk of crime, citizen crime patrols, media sensationalism, personal identity, and class conflict play in the creation of place and racial segregation. Chapter four explains how ethnic identities and class hierarchies are socially constructed through neighborhood campaigns, and also how the meaning of "diversity"� itself gets produced. The chapter details how white and Somali ethnicities are manufactured by struggles over a Somali mall and the parking around it. Chapter five reveals the failures of democracy in Whittier politics, and argues that not only has elected, democratic governance failed, but that attempting it on the neighborhood scale is probably futile and destructive. Chapter six discovers that while the academic literature argues that Americans are largely ignorant of social structures that reproduce inequality, white Whittier activists of many viewpoints are actually cognizant of them, and of their own privilege. This study finds that the key to understanding the multiplicity of thought and policy on poverty and multiculturalism, is by investigating Whittier activists' theories on neighborhood development. For example, activists opposing more subsidized housing in Whittier espouse that Whittier's health requires more homeowners, fewer renters, and fewer residents needing housing subsidies. This activism modified class hierarchy, by re-imagining it along the lines of the housing one inhabits.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Multicultural Nests: Finding a Writing Voice about Literature by Women of Color
    (University of Minnesota, 1993) McNaron, Toni A. H.; Olano, Pamela J.
    This project was predicated on the belief that writing about literature written by nonwhite writers must entail a radically different approach. We know by now that it is insufficient and indeed mischievous merely to alter syllabi slightly to include literary works by women and/or ethnic writers. We must design innovative assignments that encourage students to build contexts into which such fictive creations may be placed with less danger of expropriation or simple misreading. Multicultural Nests, an honors course in Women's Studies, provided us an opportunity to design a unique multicultural literature course with an innovative writing component. Students read four fictive works, each by a woman from a different culture: Night-Flying Woman by Ignatia Broker (Native American), The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (Asian American), Beloved by Toni Morrison (African American), and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (Hispanic). In the first unit, cultural information was provided to students through lecture. For the remaining three, we organized students into four "families," each responsible for reporting to the class on one area of culture (visual arts; mythology, religion, and spirituality; music; and family and state structure/governance). The assumption behind all our writing assignments was that white students interacting with literature written by nonwhite authors require new critical criteria and modes for analyzing and discussing texts. Writing assignments were designed to empower students to find their voices, particularly by connecting the texts with their personal experience, and to deepen understanding of the texts by connecting them to their cultural contexts. We particularly wanted to block routine literary analysis and cultural expropriation ("they're just like us"). Our desire to propel students into the texts in unambiguous and respectful ways led us to design several fresh writing assignments. We first asked students to respond to an open-ended questionnaire about their attitudes, background, and self-concept. Students kept journals, reflecting on course material and on their own attitudes and experiences in relation to issues of diversity/multiculturalism. Students were also asked to write personal narratives, recount family legends, compare women's ways of knowing, select journal entries as examples of their best writing, and freewrite on provocative passages, characters, or thematic ideas in the novels. One writing assignment asked students to follow threads of their own experiences/perceptions in the personal narratives and weave a tapestry between/among the perceptions expressed by the texts they encountered in the class. At the end of the quarter, students were again asked to respond to the questionnaire. Based on student feedback and our own perceptions, this course was very successful. The combination of contextual nests and innovative writing allowed a class of mainly white students to discover fresh and non-appropriational modes for expressing their responses to the multicultural literature. For future offerings of this kind, we would focus on two cultures instead of four, allowing greater immersion in the culture and the opportunity to study several works from each, and we would spend more time building in mechanisms to foster trust and comfort among students.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Towards a multiculturalism for the 21st century : German and Scandinavian literary perspectives, 1990-2005.
    (2008-08) Karlsson, Elisabeth Helena
    This dissertation is a reading of literary texts from 1990-2005 by four authors of immigrant extraction in Germany and Scandinavia. I ask how these authors engage in both a reality of multiculturalism and a discourse of multiculturalism. The project is organized around the tension in these texts between negative experiences of ethnic and global disadvantage and positive representations of minority identity and cultural mixture. I argue that the four writers-Feridun Zaimoglu (Germany), Bertrand Besigye (Norway), Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Sweden) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Germany)-combine in their texts a serious critique of the dominant culture with a playful, critical, often provocative outlook on identity. In light of recent theoretical critiques of the terms "multiculturalism" and "minority", I defend the value of minority perspectives and sensibilities to contemporary German and Scandinavian society, identity and culture. I start my discussion with an analysis of the Kanak identities in two of the Turkish-German Feridun Zaimoglu's texts. I discuss how Zaimoglu's appropriation of the derogatory word for foreigner in Germany serves a critique of a dominant German culture reluctant to embrace its new ethnic minorities. Then I analyze the Ugandan-Norwegian Bertrand Besigye's prose poetry. I show how cultural and racial difference can be used playfully to insert difference into a national identity too narrowly and homogenously defined. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri's texts, I discuss how Khemiri criticizes the ethnic definitions assigned to immigrants by the Swedish majority culture and how he pushes for a more open, cosmopolitan national identity. Engaging with the Turkish-German Emine Sevgi Özdamar's texts, lastly, I examine how the author's conciliatory and humorous attitude toward the reality of multiculturalism potentially fosters cross-cultural identification and more open and generous identities. In the end, I show that a multiculturalism worth defending is one that acknowledges persisting ethnic and racial inequalities and prejudices while it at the same time expands the horizons of our cultural, national and individual identities.