On "groupness"

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 119-129

  Yans, Virginia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349141822     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. George J. Sánchez, "Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies," Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (Summer, 1999): 68.
2. For a concise discussion of the "race/ethnicity" debates, see Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, "Conceptual Confusions and Divides: Race, Ethnicity, and the Study of Immigration," in Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson, eds., Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 2004), 23-11;
3. Sánchez, "Race, Nation," also engaged elements of the race/ethnicity/nation debates. For pragmatic purposes, and in accordance with a commonly adopted practice, in this essay I will sometimes use ethnicity as the appropriate umbrella term to cover the trilogy of race, ethnicity, and nation. Arguments for subsuming race and nationalism under the rubric of "ethnicity" are contained in Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York, 2003), 6;
4. see also, Rogers Brubaker, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov, "Ethnicity as Cognition," Theory and Society 33 (2004): 31-64;
5. Theodore W. Allen, "On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness," Cultural Logic, 4, no. 2 (http://eserver.org/clogic/4-2/allen.html) presents a strong case for the white supremacist theme in the master narrative of American history.
6. Among those attempting to merge immigration and ethnic studies are the editors and authors in Foner and Frederickson, eds., Not Just Black and White.
7. See also Nancy Foner, In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (New York, 2005);
8. and Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
9. Earlier efforts appear in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, Politics (New York, 1990).
10. John J. Bukowczyk, "Polish Americans, Ethnicity and Otherness," The Polish Review 18, no. 3 (1998): 299-313, represents an early effort to understand ethnicity in Thompsonian terms, as a historical relationship.
11. Rogers Brubaker, "Ethnicity without Groups," Archives Europeenes des Sociologie 42, no. 2 (2002): 168, 168n.
12. Brubaker, "Ethnicity without Groups," 168;
13. Fredrick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker, "Identity," in Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2005), 85.
14. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 8, 11.
15. Brubaker, "Ethnicity," 164-65;
16. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 18-19.
17. Wilfried Fluck, "The Modernity of American and the Practice of Scholarship," in Thomas Bender, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002), 343-66.
18. Fluck, "Modernity of America," 348-50, 363, n. 20.
19. Cooper and Brubaker, "Identity," 62, 87 discuss how political and popular understandings of race and ethnicity essentialize.
20. Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, 43-44.
21. Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002).
22. See also Lon Kurashige, "The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese Identity and Festival Before World War II," Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (2000): 1632-54.
23. Kurashige, Japanese American, 7.
24. Cornell and Hartman, "Conceptual Confusions," 33, 36.
25. The reference is to David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995).
26. Cornell and Hartman, "Conceptual Confusions," offer a good analysis of primordialism.
27. See Cooper and Brubaker, "Identity," 292n, quoting Omi and Winant, 2d ed. (New York, 1994), 14-23.
28. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Brubaker, who takes a historical approach to ethnicity, states that he is less interested in "groupness across cases" than he is in "groupness over time."
29. For critiques of whiteness studies, see Allen, "On Roediger's Wages";
30. and Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002), on-line version http://www.historycooperative.org.: 1-41.
31. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London, 1997).
32. As an example of why "whiteness" did not have to happen and did not happen (in the American sense of its meaning), see Leo Lucassen, "Old and New Migrants in the Twentieth Century: A European Perspective," Journal of American Ethnic History 21, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 85-99. I am interested to read Lucassen's argument (p. 92) that within the context of modern, postcolonial Europe, "black clearly transcends its original ethnic meaning and has turned into a proxy for class."
33. "Language Ideology," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 58;
34. see also, 71. John J. Bukowczyk, "'Who Is the Nation?' Or, 'Did Cleopatra Have Red Hair?': A Patriotic Discourse on Diversity, Nationality and Race," Melus: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States 23, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 3-23, observes the decline of class as a category of analysis and offers interesting meditations on race, ethnicity, nation, and group that anticipate the revisionist approach discussed in this essay.