Author : Steven P. Erie
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 10,93 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780804751407
Examines the history of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, from its obscure 1920s-era origins, through the Colorado River Aqueduct and State Water Projects, to today's daunting mission of drought management, water quality, environmental stewardship, and post-9/11 supply security. Simultaneous.
Author : Mette Thunø
Publisher : NIAS Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 46,25 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 8776940004
- A sweeping study of Chinese migration past and present - Highlights the growing pride in their roots among ex-pat Chinese - Of vital interest to migration scholars, but also to the Chinese diaspora and to anyone interested in the issues of migration today A bachelor society, men brought in by the shipload to labour in harsh, slave-like conditions, often for decades. Aliens despised and feared by their hosts. The hope: to return home as rich men. This was the exceptional and ambivalent nature of much of Chinese migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries--quite different in nature to the permanent migration of families and individuals from Europe to the New World at that same time. But stay, some Chinese did; rough camps and shantytowns became more settled Chinatowns across the globe. Slavery is not dead. Thousands still leave China for the industrialized world, their freedom and livelihoods in pawn to people smugglers. But China has changed, transformed by decades of economic liberalization and rapid economic growth. Most migrants--both women and men--now leave China for a more promising future and often find ways to bring their families with them. Chinese migration is no longer exceptional, yet distinct. Today, China matters--all around the world. Both its insatiable demand for raw materials and its flood of exported manufactures affect everyone; distant corners of the Third World that once had never heard of China now have a thriving Chinese presence. And, suddenly, third-generation Chinese who once could not wait to escape their Chinatown now proudly proclaim their ethnic Chinese identity. Because it opens a new approach to the study of recent Chinese migration, this volume will be of vital interest in the field of both general and Chinese migration studies. But, bringing to life as it does the momentous changes sweeping the Chinese world in all parts of the globe, it will also attract a far wider readership.
Author : Diana Giese
Publisher : National Library Australia
Page : 64 pages
File Size : 24,44 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 0642106339
Overview of the history of the Chinese in Darwin, based mainly on the oral history of Chinese Australians in the 'Top End', and to a lesser extent on European documents, official reports, newspaper articles, administrators' letters and contemporary theses. Includes references. The author is organising an oral history project on the Chinese in north Australia for the National Library of Australia, and has published many articles about her work.
Author : Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
Publisher :
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 44,60 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN :
American Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation) The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"--the ghettoization of Chinese American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: "How dare they make their ignorance our inscrutability!" Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a "reading horizon"--a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text--to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation. With attentive readings not only of literary texts but also of book reviews and publishers' marketing materials, Partridge enables us to chart and to understand the changes in Chinese American literature and its reception in the past fifty years. In doing so, he threads a new path forward in the discussion of race and ethnicity in America, one that encompasses the historical valence of multiculturalism and the cross-fertilizing perspectives of postmodern hybridity theory while remaining cognizant of the persistence of racist and racialized thinking in contemporary American society. Beyond Literary Chinatown demonstrates how Chinese American literature has come to negotiate the tensions between the expression of ethnic identity and a resistance to racialization. This important contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.
Author : Jan Lin
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 11,27 MB
Release :
Category : History
ISBN : 9781452903569
In the American popular imagination, Chinatown is a mysterious and dangerous place, clannish and dilapidated, filled with sweatshops, vice, and organizational crime. This volume presents a real-world picture of New York City's Chinatown, countering the "orientalist" view by looking at the human dimensions and the larger forces of globalization that make this neighbourhood both unique and broadly instructive.
Author : Sam Wasson
Publisher :
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 48,27 MB
Release : 2021-10-07
Category :
ISBN : 9780571370269
Author : Charles Yu
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 37,35 MB
Release : 2020-01-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307907198
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Author : Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 12,42 MB
Release : 2017-01-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0252099001
Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019 Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Author : Bonnie Tsui
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 38,8 MB
Release : 2009-08-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1416558365
CHINATOWN, U.S.A.: a state of mind, a world within a world, a neighborhood that exists in more cities than you might imagine. Every day, Americans find "something different" in Chinatown's narrow lanes and overflowing markets, tasting exotic delicacies from a world apart or bartering for a trinket on the street -- all without ever leaving the country. It's a place that's foreign yet familiar, by now quite well known on the Western cultural radar, but splitting the difference still gives many visitors to Chinatown the sense, above all, that things are not what they seem -- something everyone in popular culture, from Charlie Chan to Jack Nicholson, has been telling us for decades. And it's true that few visitors realize just how much goes on beneath the surface of this vibrant microcosm, a place with its own deeply felt history and stories of national cultural significance. But Chinatown is not a place that needs solving; it's a place that needs a more specific telling. In American Chinatown, acclaimed travel writer Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate and attentive look at the neighborhood that has bewitched her since childhood, when she eagerly awaited her grandfather's return from the fortune-cookie factory. Tsui visits the country's four most famous Chinatowns -- San Francisco (the oldest), New York (the biggest), Los Angeles (the film icon), Honolulu (the crossroads) -- and makes her final, fascinating stop in Las Vegas (the newest; this Chinatown began as a mall); in her explorations, she focuses on the remarkable experiences of ordinary people, everyone from first-to fifth-generation Chinese Americans. American Chinatown breaks down the enigma of Chinatown by offering narrative glimpses: intriguing characters who reveal the realities and the unexpected details of Chinatown life that American audiences haven't heard. There are beauty queens, celebrity chefs, immigrant garment workers; there are high school kids who are changing inner-city life in San Francisco, Chinese extras who played key roles in 1940s Hollywood, new arrivals who go straight to dealer school in Las Vegas hoping to find their fortunes in their own vision of "gold mountain." Tsui's investigations run everywhere, from mom-and-pop fortune-cookie factories to the mall, leaving no stone unturned. By interweaving her personal impressions with the experiences of those living in these unique communities, Tsui beautifully captures their vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what "Chinatown" means to its inhabitants, what each community takes on from its American home, and what their experience means to America at large. For anyone who has ever wandered through Chinatown and wondered what it was all about, and for Americans wanting to understand the changing face of their own country, American Chinatown is an all-access pass.
Author : Kay Anderson
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 42,53 MB
Release : 2019-01-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1786608995
‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an interconnected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
