Have you ever gone to Chinatown supposing to find a culture full of African Americans? Probably not, because that is not where they’re expected to be. We live in a world where colonies of different colored people are expected, or otherwise discriminated into populating distinct spaces; African Americans are supposed to be in the ghetto, Chinese belong in Chinatown, and Caucasians reserve more elite communities. For centuries, each race has been striving to belong in a society where people are accepted as equals and certain jobs are not handed out to favored ethnicities. This form of discrimination has somewhat dwindled down, however, it still has an undeniable impact on the lives of every single generation since mankind was created. In Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (WWALF), we view and contrast the lives of four different but very similar characters in which they negotiate different aspects of their lives in order to find their own unique and comfortable place in the powerful and diverse city of Toronto. The following essay examines the depiction of global spaces and the effects on diasporic identity through characters Tuyen and Carla from WWALF. I will analyze and contrast the adaptation of the characters to the city, the influence from the characters’ homes, and the connection to the emotional spaces; illustrating the effects on identification. Asian’s and Black’s struggle with the legacies of cruelty which in turn has reduced the value of human life to dust—the residue from refugee, slavery, and loss; all ties in together as we view souls who live in such a colorful place, but who originally viewed the world as black and white. Toronto embodies 2.5 million faces with many of whom originate from various places of the worl... ... middle of paper ... ...pecially for second generation Torontonians, but detangling themselves from the family past and unhomeliness allows for the city to be seen as a much brighter place that enables them to come out and discover themselves further. In conclusion, in order to find “What We All Long For”, it is within ourselves to discover and reflect influences in our lives that weighs us down, to then either deal or cope with the situation to finally live a life free of anxiety, loss and pain. Works Cited Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For. Toronto. 2005. Print. Nguyen, Karen. “Diasporic Approached to Home and Family in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.” Digital Commons At McMaster. Web. 8 Jan. 2008. Mckibbon, Molly. “Possibilities of Home: Negotiating Space in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.” Journal of Black Studies 38.3 (1998). JSTOR. Web. 3 Jan. 2008.
Throughout the early 1900s an American immigrant experience was subject to society’s opinion and the nation’s policies. Various ethnicities endured the harsh reality that was American culture while familiarizing themselves with their families. Immigration thrived off the strength and pride demonstrated by their neighborhoods. Notions of race, cultural adaptations and neighborhood represented the ways by which human being were assessed. In a careful interpretation of Mary Lui’s “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery” and Michael Innis-Jimenez’s “Steel Barrio”, I will trace the importance of a neighborhood in the immigrant experience explaining the way in which neighborhoods were created, how these lines were crossed and notions of race factored into separating these neighborhoods.
Wilson, William J. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
The history of racial and class stratification in Los Angeles has created tension amongst and within groups of people. Southland, by Nina Revoyr, reveals how stratification influences a young Asian woman to abandon her past in order to try and fully integrate herself into society. The group divisions are presented as being personal divisions through the portrayal of a generational gap between the protagonist, Jackie, and her grandfather. Jackie speaks of her relationship with Rebecca explaining her reasons why she could never go for her. Jackie claims that “she looked Asian enough to turn Jackie off” (Revoyr, 2003, p. 105). Unlike her grandfather who had a good sense of where he came from and embraced it, Jackie rejected her racial background completely. Jackie has been detached from her past and ethnicity. This is why she could never be with Rebecca, Jackie thought of her as a “mirror she didn’t want to look into”. Rebecca was everything Jackie was tr...
The novel Brown Girl, Brownstones is a fiction story that is about an immigrant family from the Caribbean country of Barbados and their struggles in America. The story is set in New York during the time between The Great Depression and also World War II and is told in a third person point of view so that the reader, being us, understands different components of the story. The story’s main character is a girl named Selina Boyce and the story is told through the stages of her life from when she was around ten years old up to when she was around her early twenties. Immigration, specifically race, played a large factor in the story, with race hindering opportunity, and different characters coping with race in different ways. (Thesis statement)
The Fed Up Honeys Re-Present the Gentrification of the Lower East Side” Professor Caitlin Cahill discusses the experience of economic urban restructuring from a group of young working class women in Lower East Side, New York City. Cahill goes out in finding the inside’ perspective of young women of color who have grown up in the Lower East Side in the 1990s. Cahill wants to know what is it like to live in a neighborhood that is constantly changing while these women are living in it. Some of the methods that were required in order to conduct this research were participatory action research that was done by women researches by the name of ‘Fed up Honeys’. This project engaged with six young women who were between the ages sixteen to twenty-two who lived in the Lower East Side neighborhood. Cahill conducted this research in a collective process of looking critically at their social and environmental context and trained them in social research methods. The women were able to frame the questions, design the research, analyze the date and develop research products. They decided to focus their research on stereotypes and how the community’s lack of resources feed into both stereotyping and young women’s well-being. Cahill is also looking into the connection between public representations of young working class women of color, white privilege, and privatization as they play out on the “color line” of the gentrifying Lower East Side. Cahill
Carol Stack finds herself in a curious place as a young white woman venturing into a black neighborhood in hopes of alleviating negative stereotypes and bringing illumination into a semiosphere that is altogether ignored or even despised. While she defined her purpose as the attempt to “illustrate the collective adaptations to poverty of men, women, and children within the social-cultural network of the black urban family” (28), her methods are not merely those of an outside observer spouting back information, but truly that of an actively engaged participant. Staying true to the guidelines of participant observation studies, Stack did not attempt to isolate or manipulate the culture she saw, and instead of donning the lab coat, as it were, and playing the role of the experimenting scientist, or simply sneaking in, Stack was very human in her interactions and dealings, participating as actively as possible in peoples’ real lives in The Flats. (Hedrick).
Literary text sheds light on different erasures through which a dominant Canadian national narrative of benevolence and tolerance emerges. In What We All Long For by Dionne Brand., this tolerance becomes more specific as readers are able to see a struggle in race, generational difference and identity. However, these concepts lead to the creation space negotiation in order to establish Toronto as a home. Through this negotiation there are two kinds of erasures that emerge: fictional and historical. The fictional erasures work to create an unconscious space for the characters. This means that the characters navigate spaces in an intangible manner where they face issues that are not directly impacting to them. It is brought on or is created by the issues they ‘actually’ face. The ‘actual’ issues that these characters face are then transposed into a greater erasure that presents itself as a historical erasure. The fictional erasure becomes a mirror of the historical erasure as it sheds light on how the text manoeuvre through space and time in the text. Though Brand addresses the issues of tolerance while enabling a dominant national Canadian narrative, the novel reveals the generational differences as the vehicle to the negotiation of space. The negotiation of space draws attention to the fictional and historical erasures that show white hegemony as Brand illuminate the issues of immigration, blackness and generational gaps.
The Statue of Liberty is an American icon because it symbolizes freedom, success, and the power of this nation. This image is what the U.S stands for to the outside world. Foreigners strive to move to America because of its wealth and acceptance towards all races and ethnicity. “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” recounts the story of how Carlos Garcia, Laura Garcia, and their four girls move from the Dominican Republic to the United States to escape a dictatorship, and establish a new life in flourishing New York City. Many unexpected culture shocks await them in their new country. Although the girls find it difficult to adapt at first, they soon begin to assimilate and Americanize. On the other hand, “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl” by Elizabeth Wong illustrates the life of an Asian American having to embrace two entirely different cultural identities. Both the Garcia family and Elizabeth Wong's family have to deal with two opposing cultures without losing too much of their heritage. The book and the essay are similar in that characters in each story lose much of their original tradition. However, they are different in that the families move to the states for distinctive reasons, and the cultural preference of “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl” is more evident than that of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”.
Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas addresses various constitutions of American identity, including ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The protagonist, Jolene, is illustrative of how these constitutions of identity are complicated as she travels west. In particular, traveling westward typically consists of white men who reject the constraints of middle class life and decide to get on the road in hopes of finding selfhood. Flaming Iguanas demonstrates that gender, class, and ethnicity tie into the ability or inability to finding one’s self of self. Therefore, Jolene is unable to find her true sense of self because she is a woman. Lopez directs her readers’ attention to situations in her protagonist’s life where her mixed ethnicity, and ambivalent
Most people are identified by where they are from and what type of background they are accustomed to. In the short story, “Soul Searching,” by Pythia Peay, the topic discussed relates to the city a person lives in and how it eventually becomes a part of their soul. Many rhetorical appeals are displayed throughout the article, and these methods are successful in expressing to the reader how much a city can become a part of an individual. Peay decides to use her home town of Washington, D.C. to demonstrate her argument of identifying with one’s home.
Safety, acceptance, and freedom are three things that every person wants to feel. Where is the place that makes someone feel these things? Bell hooks expands our minds and provides us with an idea of such a place that would provide individuals with a sense of safety, acceptance, and freedom. She calls these hope filled settings “homeplaces.” In hooks piece, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” she describes not only what a homeplace is, but also what the people who were involved in the homeplace endured and overcame. Hooks makes it clear that the hardships black women overcame, and the legacies they left behind are tremendously significant. Because of hooks personal and family’s experiences, her piece focuses on African American women , but clearly her understandings and principles also describe many other minorities as well as women in general. Women of all races, ethnicities, and religions have made leaps and bounds in positively impacting the world, and they will certainly not back down now.
The intersection of dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender are important in shaping my social location and experiences. By exercising my sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), I will argue how my social location as an Asian American woman with a working class background has worked separately and together to influence how I behave, how others treat and view me, and how I understand the world. The sociological imagination has allowed me to understand my own “biography”, or life experiences by understanding the “history”, or larger social structures in which I grew up in (Mills, 1959). First, I will describe my family’s demographic characteristics in relation to California and the United States to put my analysis into context. I will then talk about how my perceptions of life opportunities have been shaped by the Asian-American model minority myth. Then, I will argue how my working class location has impacted my interactions in institutional settings and my middle/upper class peers. Third, I will discuss how gender inequalities in the workplace and the ideological intersection of my race and gender as an Asian-American woman have shaped my experiences with men. I will use Takaki’s (1999) concepts of model minority myth and American identity, Race; The Power of an Illusion (2003), Espiritu’s (2001) ideological racism, People Like Us: Social Class in America (1999) and Langston’s (2001) definition of class to support my argument.
In this narrative essay, Brent Staples provides a personal account of his experiences as a black man in modern society. “Black Men and Public Space” acts as a journey for the readers to follow as Staples discovers the many societal biases against him, simply because of his skin color. The essay begins when Staples was twenty-two years old, walking the streets of Chicago late in the evening, and a woman responds to his presence with fear. Being a larger black man, he learned that he would be stereotyped by others around him as a “mugger, rapist, or worse” (135).
My response paper speaks directly to Murray Forman’s “Welcome to the City” essay, pecifically, the complex relationship the ghetto has with its inhabitants as well as outsiders. In the essay Forman says, “Youth continues to be framed against the American middle-class ideals of a liberated consumer culture” (47). Since our course is focused on black popular culture, I thought it would be interesting to examine the portrayal of domestic space occupied by black families on television sitcoms, a genre defined heavily by shows from the 1950s. Additionally, Forman specifically mentions Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects as an example of urban housing development, and that seemed like an invitation to analyze episodes of Good Times. Understanding the ghetto as both a real and imagined place needs to be contextaulized in the larger concept of homeownership and the American Dream.
All blondes are dumb. Gingers have no soul. All Jews are greedy. All Asians are bad drivers. Imagine living in a world where people are put into a category simply because of their appearance, race, or religion. It limits a person’s chance of expressing individuality through categorization. Desmond Cole’s article, “The Skin I’m In” introduces the struggles faced by black people through racial stereotypes in Canada— a country known for its diversity. Cole reveals the experiences of black people who are stereotyped as dangerous; as a result, they are victimized with prejudice, discrimination, and injustice by society.