Millennials come of age in immigrant families

In this blog entry, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez celebrates coming of age ceremonies and discusses what prompted her to write Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras

When I first pitched the project that has become Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras to my dissertation chair, the feminist in me worried that I might be judged as a phony because of my interest in traditions so associated with sparkles, poufy dresses, and curtsies.  Fortunately, my chair had just finished organizing her daughter’s bat mitzvah, so she didn’t need much persuading when I proposed studying “debuts” and “quinces” to better understand gender and American immigrant adaptation.  With this book, I now have the exciting opportunity to show readers how much more there are to debutantes and quinces than meets the eye.

In some ways, this task seems more daunting today than when I started my fieldwork—a decade before Joel Stein lead Time readers to consider whether young adults are more entitled than ever or “will save the world” (2013).  And long before internet commenters blasted Ms. magazine for daring to call pop superstar Beyoncé a “fierce feminist” (2013).  But, amidst the hand-wringing over young people and what advocating for women’s equality should look like, Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras shows how some American immigrant families have managed to indulge their daughters without producing narcissists. These families observe old-world female coming-of-age traditions without imposing old-school limits on what females (and feminists) can be in a number of creative ways:

1.     They tie personal success to collective success.  Although female coming-of-age parties are framed as “for the girl,” the immigrants I studied organized these events as collective endeavors, designed to showcase the beauty and success of their families and cultures, as well as that of their daughters.  This requires celebrants to recognize what they want as inextricable from their parents’ and communities’ desires, needs, and goals, and, ultimately, it imparts a sense of responsibility for the well-being of those around them. This is remarkable when one considers that the majority of my subjects are “millennials,” teenagers who have been accused of being  more self-involved and significantly less civically and politically engaged than the generations before them.

2.     Debuts and quinceañeras also re-establish first-generation authority.   Viewers of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 and Quiero Mis Quinces (which paint debutantes and quinceañeras as teenage divas who control their parents via tantrums and manipulation) might be shocked that the immigrant parents I observed actually exercised a good degree of influence and control over their daughters.  During preparation for their events, for example, daughters often came to appreciate their near-total financial dependence on their parents.  And, by stressing the “tradition” aspect of their daughters’ celebrations, immigrants asserted themselves as “cultural experts” who their daughters needed to properly understand the traditions they were taking part in. This is vital for children of immigrants who are at risk of “downward assimilation.”  Inter-generational collaboration is also healthy for all youth because of how “cyberculture” has enabled many young adults to evade meaningful contact with anyone beside their peers, though healthy maturation requires youth to relate to older people and things.

3.     And quinces and debuts enable daughters to experience obstacles and figure them out.   Though these events allow some parents to establish greater authority over their kids, the immigrants I studied were not “Tiger” or “helicopter” parents.  In fact, the young women who experienced the best outcomes in my study were those who were granted some autonomy during their debut or quince preparation and performances.  Letting young women to take some financial and/ or organizing responsibilities and enabling them to respectfully voice their disagreement during planning helped cultivate leadership, money-management, communication, and conflict-management skills.  And these are all aptitudes those on either side of the Beyoncé-as-feminist debate should be able to agree are vital to women’s social, political, legal, and economic equality.

Of course there are other ways immigrant-organized debuts and quinceañeras avoid (and do not avoid) producing millennial narcissists and chauvinists.  Nevertheless,Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras should give the hand-wringers some pause—and maybe a little hope.  Because, as I write in the last pages of my book, the advancement of the communities I studied, and of our society in general, depends on how we enlarge our culture to accommodate diverse forms of expression—including feminists in sparkle dresses, being American and Filipino and/or Mexican at the same time, and learning to care for others by organizing a birthday party.

Staging America’s First Contact with China

In this blog entry, John Haddad, author of America’s First Adventure in China, writes about The Empress of China, a play about an American voyage to China, that he saw in Hong Kong.

In 1784, the Empress of China sailed from Philadelphia to Canton, becoming the first American vessel to reach China.  This commercial voyage, undertaken mere weeks after the end of the Revolutionary War, marked the beginning of the Sino-U.S. relationship.  In 2011, the Hong Kong Reperatory Theater staged The Empress of China, a dramatic rendering of this historical journey.  The play was a big deal.  The Theater commissioned a production from Joanna Chan, a successful script writer and director of historical movies and television dramas.  In anticipation of the show, the city was festooned with banners and posters advertising the production.  After finishing its run in Hong Kong, it moved to New York for its American premiere.

I was not only living in Hong Kong at this time, I was writing a book specifically about Americans in China – America’s First Adventure in China.  When I saw the performance, I had recently finished writing a chapter on the very same voyage.  I knew as much of the actual history as anyone, and was well-equipped to compare the play with the historical record.  You may think I am one of those historians who takes pleasure in pointing out the factual inaccuracies in historically-themed plays and films, but that is not my aim here.  I understand that Joanna Chan had to take liberties to ensure that her production appealed to today’s audience.  That said, I do think that a comparison is meaningful.

Though Chan mostly stuck to the historical record, she made two big additions.  First, there is a scene in which the Americans demonstrate fencing to the Chinese, and the Chinese teach the Americans about Kung-Fu.  The scene is thrilling, funny, and acrobatic…but it never happened.  Second, the play includes a forbidden romance between Samuel Shaw, a dashing American, and the lovely daughter of a Chinese merchant.  This also never happened.  Why do I point out these additions?  Trust me: my purpose is not to say either “you want history to be exciting, but I’m here to crush your hopes by informing you the past was dry” or “you want meaningful cultural exchange to have taken place, but the truth was neither side showed any curiosity in the other.”   Actually, deep personal relationships and cultural exchanges did really happen – they just did not happen during the very first Sino-American encounter.

In the 1800s, Americans in China formed close relationships with the Chinese and engineered meaningful exchanges of culture.  Examples are plentiful, but I’ll share just a couple.  In the 1820s, Nathan Dunn, a merchant from Philadelphia, forged friendships with Chinese merchants and government officials.  Why did they like him?  Along with being affable, Dunn opposed on moral grounds the opium traffic that was making his peers rich.  These friendships came in handy.  When Britain’s East India Company tried to force Dunn out of the China trade, his Chinese friends stood by him and protected his business.  These friends also appreciated Dunn’s fondness for Chinese art and culture – though “fondness” does not adequately capture the obsessive nature of Dunn’s collecting.  Mania is more like it.  With the help of Chinese friends, Dunn amassed thousands of artifacts, which he shipped to Philadelphia.  This massive collection became the first serious exhibition of Chinese culture in America.

Another example involves  Anson Burlingame, a former congressman from Massachusetts, as U.S. Minister to China appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1860.  When Burlingame arrived in Beijing, China was in turmoil: the Qing Government had lost the First Opium War to England, was losing the Second Opium War, and was trying to quell a rebellion.  An ardent opponent of slavery, Burlingame saw China’s foreign affairs through the lens of America’s great debate over slavery.  Just as Southern whites unjustly used superior force to enslave blacks, so too did Britain use its superior military to bully the Chinese.  After befriending Chinese and European officials, Burlingame sought the unimaginable: to replace the West’s “gunboat diplomacy” with what he called the “Cooperative Policy.”  In a nutshell, the European powers and China would settle disputes not with warfare but rather by developing mutual trust, engaging in dialogue, and abiding by treaties.  Though the “Cooperative Policy” did not last, it did define Sino-Western relations during the 1860s.  As Burlingame prepared to return stateside in 1868, the Chinese fêted him with farewell banquets.  At one affair, they blindsided him with a remarkable request that shows the deepness of their trust.  Would Burlingame agree to represent China’s interests in Europe and America?  Burlingame agreed, was given an official Chinese rank, and embarked on an amazing diplomatic odyssey.

I will close by making one last observation about The Empress of China.  That the play exists at all shows that we in the twenty-first century are highly interested in – or concerned about – U.S-China relations.  Yet Chan’s additions suggest something else.  Our desire for this relationship to be about friendship, trust, and cultural exchange is so strong as to compel us to project these things onto the past.  But do we in the present really need to enhance the past so it can offer hope for the future?  If we look not at this single voyage but at the first 100 years of Sino-American interaction, we see much to encourage us.

What Huckleberry Finn teaches us about seeing past race and status

In this blog entry, John S.W. Park, author of Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, uses Mark Twain’s character to address lessons about illegal and undocumented immigrants

Huckleberry Finn has two interrelated problems: first, when he discovers that Jim is a runaway slave, he can’t bring himself to tell someone, and so he can’t seem to send Jim back into slavery even though he thinks that he ought to report fugitive slaves; and second, throughout Twain’s novel, Huck can’t seem to see Jim or other black people as full persons, as persons who deserve to be free.  Even at the end of the story, it’s not clear that Huck has changed his mind about slavery or its underlying morality, and Jim is free not because white people thought that slavery was wrong or that it ought to be abolished, but because Miss Watson had died and she had freed (just) Jim in her will.  Unlike many characters in 19^th and 20^th century novels, Huck doesn’t change in any fundamental way as a result of his adventures, nor does he reflect on what he’s experienced.  He doesn’t “solve” either aspect of his problem: Jim is free, so telling on him is moot, and when Jim saves Tom Sawyer, Huck concludes from this act of sacrifice that this black man was really “white inside.”  Huck never sees past Jim’s race or status.

The primary arguments within my book, Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, reflect on both aspects of Huck Finn’s problem. I’ve tried to show how these dilemmas have been and are still so intertwined.  After slavery, law continued to define people as “unlawful,” as out of place, and the example of illegal Chinese immigrants is but one example among many from the 19^th century.  They were not the only unlawful people during that time: Native Americans were sometimes described as “off of the reservation,” and so often that “off of the reservation” became a colloquial phrase in English to denote anyone who was dangerous, out of his mind, and out of place.  In the original meaning, it referred to a Native American who should have remained within a federal prison system designed for conquered Native American people.  “Reservation” had two common meanings: the first referred to Native American settlements controlled by the federal government; and the second referred to areas where wild animals were protected from hunting.  A Native American who was “off of the reservation” could, in theory and in practice, be killed, as if he were a wild animal.

A great many (white) Americans have had problems seeing people of color as people.  People of color have also had trouble seeing one another as people, as they too are often infected with white supremacist ways of thinking.  American law—once it defines a group as “illegal” or “unlawful” or “out of status”—can and did blind a great many people to the common humanity of the other, so much so that they can come to tolerate a level of abuse and degradation against the “illegals” that is shocking and unconscionable.  Law dehumanizes before it kills.  Because law and legal institutions can have this power, the objects of the law have attempted to hide their status, their stigma, and they have tried many different ways to “cover” their illegal status or to “pass” as someone who doesn’t have it all.  By the mid-20^th century, thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants lied about who they really were, all in attempts to “pass” as American citizens or legal residents.  Many people who are out of status now try to “pass,” too, and the ones who drive well below the posted speed limit or never mention legal status at all are doing their best to “cover,” just like other generations of “illegal” people.  Meanwhile, many Americans who complain about these “illegals” rarely bother to question the morality or justice of a system that gave them citizenship simply because they happened to be born here, which really isn’t an “achievement” nor reflective remotely of any kind of moral desert.

We all love Huckleberry Finn, especially when he decides to go to hell and to save Jim, but we should endeavor to be the opposite of him.  We should look past race and status, even if this means ignoring some of our own laws.  We should see and acknowledge, first and foremost, the humanity of everyone around us.  We should be reflective of our common history, and we should realize that we now celebrate people who have resisted American laws that once reduced people to things, or framed some immigrants as though they were a form of pollution or a dangerous kind of “problem” rather than a group of people.  We should stop criminalizing people for crossing international boundaries in search of a better life.  We should take seriously our common obligations to one another as human beings, either by helping to make a better life possible for all people irrespective of where they are, or by showing compassion to people coming among us when their homes and countries fall apart.  In other words, unlike Huck, we should grow up.

BEA 2013: ‘PW’ Rep of the Year: Bruce Joshua Miller

This week in North Philly Notes, we reprint Publishers Weekly‘s April 26 column honoring Temple University Press sales rep Bruce Miller as PW’s Rep of the Year.

Last summer, many industry observers considered Bruce Joshua Miller to be rather quixotic, vigorously tilting at the University of Missouri’s administration by leading a letter-writing and social media campaign after the university’s May 24 announcement that the 54-year-old University of Missouri Press’s scholarly publishing program would be dismantled and its editor-in-chief, Clair Willcox, fired.

Since Missouri rescinded its decision on August 28, and reinstated Willcox six weeks later, however, Miller has been lauded throughout the academic and book publishing worlds as, in the words of Johns Hopkins University Press director Greg Britton, “our David against a formidable Goliath.” And he’s PW’s Sales Rep of the Year.

PW received a record number of nominations for the 2013 award; the most impassioned, by far, were those for Miller, 58, a commission rep based in Chicago, who does business as a sole proprietor. Miller Trade Book Marketing represents 26 scholarly and independent presses to the trade in the Midwest—including, for the past 20 years, UMP, which publishes about 30 titles annually.

The words “hero” and “heroic” appear repeatedly in Midwest booksellers’ nominations, as well as those from less typical nominators for this award—university press directors and their marketing managers. UMP’s consulting director, Jane Lago, notes, “He served this press, and simultaneously all university presses, as an informed, engaged, articulate champion of what scholarly publishing does best.”

To read the rest of the article click:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/56991-bea-2013-pw-rep-of-the-year-bruce-joshua-miller.html

Wayne Brady, Bill Maher, and Black Men Who Remain Invisible

In this blog entry, Adia Harvey Wingfield discusses the themes and examples about black masculinity that form the basis for her book No More Invisible Man.

Several news headlines recently highlighted the relatively long-running tension between political comedian Bill Maher and actor/singer Wayne Brady. Maher, known among other things for questioning whether mogul Donald Trump is descended from monkeys and for using explicit epithets to describe politician Sarah Palin, has made several comments suggesting that Brady’s clean-cut, easygoing persona makes him antithetical to “real” black masculinity (a point Brady mocked in 2004 on an unforgettable episode of The Chappelle Show). Brady has responded by critiquing the racialized and gendered assumptions behind this statement, but also by suggesting that if Maher wants to continue this line of discussion, he would be willing to embody these stereotypes and “beat [Maher] in public.”

The dialogue between Maher and Brady reflects two of the images of black masculinity that I try to counter in my recent book No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work. I argue that in cultural imagination and even in much sociological research, black men are often cast as either tough, dangerous, and threatening, or as high-level elites who must be easygoing and appear completely assimilated. Yet these depictions represent two polar opposites, leaving the experiences, lives, and realities of middle class, professional black men understudied and ignored. No More Invisible Man attempts to correct this by drawing attention to these men who are invisible in sociological research, media, and much of America and highlighting the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities they face in professional, white male-dominated occupations.

In my book, I build on Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic theory of tokenism to understand black professional men’s work lives. Kanter argues that those in the numerical minority encounter certain perceptual tendencies that affect their interactions with members of the dominant group. These include increased pressures related to their performance, dominant group members’ efforts to emphasize their differences from those in the minority, and challenges subordinate groups face assimilating into the majority. In my study, however, I found that intersections of race, gender, and class, coupled with the gendered characteristics of the male-dominated occupations in which these men worked, meant that black professional men imperfectly fit the tokenization paradigm that Kanter describes. Instead, I argue that they experience a phenomenon I describe as partial tokenization, which impacts their interactions with women of all races, with other men, their performances of masculinity, their emotional performance, and their general challenges within the work environment.

This matters because we know so little about the occupational experiences of black professional men. As the United States becomes an increasingly multiracial society, it is important to be aware of the persistent challenges that remain for racial minorities in various sectors, and to be mindful of the ways that structural processes like partial tokenization may perpetuate inequalities. Having a clear sense of the ways black men experience the professional workplace can help to address ongoing patterns that make their occupational ascension more (or less) challenging than comparably situated others.

In writing No More Invisible Man, I hope to do several things. One is to add to the literature that explores the experiences black men face in the United States and to document the sociological realities of those who are not part of the urban underclass that generates the most attention. Another goal is to highlight that even though black professional men enjoy material and occupational success relative to working-class and poor blacks, they still undergo very particularized difficulties in the workplace. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that black men’s experiences at work and in society at large reflect not just race but the ways that race is shaped by gender and class, and that understanding the ways these categories overlap is essential for making sense of issues of power and inequality that persist in America today.

Why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

In this blog entry, Krista Jenkins, author of  Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College addresses how women’s roles have changed–or not–over the decades.

I’m endlessly interested in the state of gender relations in the 21^st century. The women’s movement remains with us, but its revolutionary panache has dissipated as gender equality sounds more passé than novel. Women are encouraged to live lives unconstrained by traditional gender roles, and yet when it comes to who does the lion’s share of domestic work even in households with working moms, it’s the women who remain the go to sex for cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, school volunteering, and the like. Look at the statistics. A recent Pew Research and American Time Use Survey found that within dual income households, working women spend almost twice as many hours engaged in housework and child care than their spouses or partners.

Not a big believer in stats? Ok, then consider the following: Back in April of 2010, Time Magazine included an article entitled “The Hazards Lurking at Home.” The story was about environmental toxins found in everyday household items, and was accompanied by a drawing of a home. Each room had items to identify its purpose, such as a crib in a baby’s room and television in the family room. The kitchen had the obvious items – refrigerator and sink, for example, but it also had a woman. The takeaway from this? Kitchens are unthinkable without a woman firmly ensconced in its environs.

So, what gives? If we’re almost four decades since the heyday of the modern women’s movement and women can be found in areas of life that were virtually unthinkable a generation ago, why does  a glass ceiling persist? Why are women disproportionately absent from certain high paying and high powered professions? Why do women with ambitious career goals choose to walk away once children arrive?  Why does dinosaur-ish behavior in the form of discrimination and harassment remain a part of the workplace for so many? And why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

To answer these questions, I did what social scientists often don’t do. That is, look at the forces in an individual’s life that are operative at the micro level. “Large N” surveys are the tool that’s most often used to examine the how and why behind a variety of political and social phenomenon. Although an invaluable tool, all too often we overlook what goes on at the micro level which, in the case of my book, means the influence of a mother on her daughter’s political development. Or, more specifically, what I consider in my book Mothers, Daughters and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College is the extent to which a mother influences whether her daughter accepts or rejects traditional gender roles.

My research is based on 23 paired interviews with mothers and daughters, both of whom attended the same women’s college a generation apart. They were selected because 1) their experiences at a women’s college should have made them especially receptive to the tenets of the women’s movement and 2) the mothers came from a cohort who were interviewed 25 years earlier while they were college undergraduates and experiencing the women’s movement during the peak of its heyday.

Ultimately, what I find is that mothers play an important role in how their daughters approach their understanding of gender roles. So, for example, I find a good amount of consistency between how a mother approached questions of professional and maternal responsibilities and how her daughter envisions her own life unfolding. If, despite her early career ambitions, a mother decided that caregiving was preferable for a variety of reasons to pursuing her professional goals, it was likely that her daughter would echo similar sentiments in her long term planning. This is just one of the interesting insights that I discovered through speaking with these smart, engaged, and verbose women.

Also considered is the role of coming of age during different political climates which, for the mothers, was an environment steeped in a revolutionary ethos while, for the daughters, post-feminism reigns. However, a central takeaway from my book is simply this: When it comes to the acceptance or rejection of traditional gender norms in one’s life, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

The Filadelfia Story

In this blog entry, Sabrina Vourvoulias, the managing editor of Al Día, describes the stories that can be found in the photo history, 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia. 

I am enamored with stories. My own and my family’s, certainly, but also the stories my friends and neighbors tell. And the ones I overhear when a grandparent explains to a child why something is significant, or a beloved custom.

Even more, I love the stories that emerge when many of us sit together leafing through photo albums — remembering food, festivals, people — in community.

For the past twenty years, Latinos in Philadelphia have read and seen their stories appear weekly in Al Día newspaper. The book 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia is simply an extension of that work of documentation. 

In it you’ll find stories about Latinos in Philadelphia that go back to the time of the founding fathers: Like Manuel Torres, for example, the first diplomatic officer from Latin America recognized officially by President James Monroe, who was a resident of the city and is buried at Old St. Mary cemetery alongside Commodore John Barry and Thomas Fitzsimmons.

You’ll see a cabinet card of of Samuel Cruz and his family, newly arrived from Puerto Rico. He would go on to become one of the best respected of the butchers working in the meat-packing district of Northern Liberties, and an integral member of the Puerto Rican community that opened bodegas and settled their families in North Philadelphia. You’ll also see photographs of community-wide celebrations, like the annual St. John the Baptist parade, that took place along Spring Garden Street because that’s where La Milagrosa — the first church in the city to hold a regular Spanish-language Mass and considered “the Plymouth Rock of Latino Catholic Philadelphia” — was located.

There are stories, too, in the photographs of the Puerto Rican community taken by local photojournalist David Cruz in the decade before the Al Día newspaper was established, and in the profoundly moving photo stories he’s shot for Al Día since. In these — many of them focused on the Mexican community — you’ll find stories of tragedy, and resilience, and of the hope for a better life every immigrant packs in his or her bags when they come here.

The value of this book isn’t as an exhaustive history — it isn’t one — but rather it is in the glimpses it provides of the everyday lives of Latinos of the city. It also handily refutes the erroneous assumption that all Latinos are recently arrived, unskilled laborers and undocumented immigrants. There is both honor and great joy in the way every member contributes to the vitality of our community, but our diversity is also a point of pride.

As you leaf through the pages of this book, I hope you’ll see what I did when I took on the task of editing it: There are a million stories in these images. They are worth telling. And worth hearing.

Finding “Home” Abroad

In this blog entry, Carol Kelley, author of Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home, explains how women immigrating to foreign countries find a sense of belonging in their new homes.

A surprising story in the news last week concerned a Norwegian television program about, of all things, wood. Not just how to chop and stack wood, but how to burn it. Eight straight hours of this twelve-hour program consisted of nothing more than watching a fire burn. Broadcast on Norway’s primary television station, NRK, the show was popular – twenty percent of the Norwegian population watched at least part of the broadcast. The Norwegian interest in wood astounded American media outlets. The New York Times ran an in depth article, there was at least one mention on NPR, and Steven Colbert had a field day.

Cultural quirks and differences are fascinating, and many of us dream of travel and adventure in order to experience them first hand. Imagine, however, that you are Anna, a young Maori woman who has never experienced winter. You arrive in a small Norwegian town with your Norwegian husband where you will live, very possibly for the rest of your life. You look different, speak differently and cannot begin to engage in a conversation about wood fires, not to mention lutefisk or skiing. How will you learn to belong in this culture, and how long will it take? Will you ever truly feel “at home” here? Or will you forever be an “outsider”?

I first became interested in how immigrants find a sense of belonging and home in middle school. I became friends with Susan, who with her parents had escaped from Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion in 1968. I remember how confused Susan’s mother was about how to raise her adolescent daughter in the suburban Mid-west. While Susan was getting ready to leave the house, her mother would often pull me aside and ask questions: “Do your parents let you date? What time do you have to be home? How much time do you spend studying?” Even as a teenager I understood how eager my friend’s mother was to fit-in in her new American home.

I will never forget the beaming faces of this family on the day they became American citizens. The joy and pride they found in creating a new home for themselves radiated across the room. Years later own my sister immigrated to Norway, where she has now lived for nearly 30 years. Over time her feelings about living in Norway have fluctuated. Sometimes she seemed to love her life there, enjoying Norwegian culture and appreciating their commitment to social equality. At other times the weather, food and social rules felt oppressive. Eventually she realized that her search for a sense of belonging would not end, but would be a life-long process.

When I began to study anthropology, I pursued my growing interest in immigration, home and belonging. I worked with immigrant populations, researching the effect of social policies and exploring how effective programs can be created for their health care and education. My interest in the emotional, as well as the practical, aspects of immigration continued, and I began to research immigrant’s life histories. My sister’s experience had taught me that to understand issues of belonging and home, I would need to learn how immigrants’ feelings evolve over a long period of time.

For Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home, I conducted in-depth interviews with four women, all of whom have lived in adopted countries for many years, including Anna. The results of the research surprised me. While all of the participants struggled with issues of belonging, not all faced that struggle abroad: two left home in the first place because they knew they would never belong in their country of origin. They discovered that a totally different culture could better support their values and worldviews.

Belonging is complicated. For some, it feels immediate in a new place, but never exists in their first home. For others it takes a lifetime to adjust to living away from early roots. The commonality is the striving to find a place to belong, and in the tension between commitments to two places. Arriving in the Turks and Caicos Islands a few years ago, I looked for the correct line to have my passport stamped. I expected to see designated lines for citizens and non-citizens. Instead, the signs read “Belongers” and “Visitors.” Despite my knowledge of Anna’s life and her feelings, I wondered: if the same signs existed in the Norwegian immigration line, which would she feel comfortable choosing? I suspect that her choice would be something she still had to contemplate, even after living away from New Zealand for most of her life. But one thing I am sure of – even though she loves Norway, and in many ways feels herself to be Norwegian – she wouldn’t be watching an eight-hour film of a wood fire.

Uncovering the life and work of Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim)

In this blog entry, Justin Gifford, author of Pimping Fictions, explains how he came to tell the story of African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

In my journey to uncover the life and works of Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim) I have made many surprising discoveries along the way.  I began my search by traveling to black neighborhoods in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and many other American cities in search of Beck’s books. Scouring used bookstores, thrift shops, and bootleg video stores, I discovered hundreds of black-authored paperback novels inspired by the works of Iceberg Slim.  I began collecting, reading, and categorizing them all in order to get a picture of the entire literary scene he helped create.

The next big breakthrough came in 2004, when I met Robert Beck’s second wife, Diane Millman.  She was selling all of Beck’s old pimp suits, alligator shoes, and silk shirts on ebay to raise money for charity.  I purchased all of these items, and then I flew to Los Angeles to interview her, as well as Beck’s publisher at Holloway House books, Bentley Morriss.  Millman and Morriss both supplied me with letters and other documents owned by Beck, and they have been ongoing resources for information for many years.

In 2008, Millman introduced me to Ice-T’s longtime manager, Jorge Hinojosa, who at the time was creating a documentary on Beck, titled Iceberg Slim:  Portrait of a Pimp.  Hinojosa brought me onto the project as a research consultant, and I was given the rare opportunity to appear in the film as a literary expert on Beck.  This is where my book really took off.  I suddenly had the chance to view rare archival materials that no other scholar had ever seen—FBI records, photographs, and even an unpublished Iceberg Slim novel, titled Night Train to Sugar Hill.

I also was fortunate to gain access the insider perspectives of the former editors, authors, family, friends, and fans that knew Beck and his works best.  I have had the privilege of talking to a range of important figures about Iceberg Slim and his legacy, including comedian Chris Rock, Los Angeles poet laureate Wanda Coleman, and pioneering author of underground black literature, Odie Hawkins.  Pimping Fictions is the result of countless people’s generous contributions over a period of ten years.  

 

 

 

 

Visions of the ENVISIONING EMANCIPATION authors

This week we showcase images of Envisioning Emancipation authors Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer at their recent events at the International Center for Photography in New York City, the National Archives in Washington D.C. and The Free Library of Philadelphia.

Captions (from top to bottom):

At the Free Library of Philadelphia: Barbara Krauthamer (left) and Deborah Willis (right); Deb Willis with Photographer William Williams.

At the International Center for Photography in New York City: Barbara Krauthamer (left) and Deborah Willis (right)

At the National Archives in Washington, D.C.: Barbara Krauthamer speaking with one of the curators of the “Discovering the Civil War” traveling exhibit ; The authors signing Envisioning Emancipation; the authors with Alelia Bundles, journalist and granddaughter of Madam CJ Walker.