Can we abolish the death penalty?

Posted on May 8, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Austin Sarat, editor of Death Penalty in Decline?, considers how attitudes about capital punishment have changed over the decades since Furman v. Georgia.

I have been studying America’s death penalty for almost 50 years. When I started doing so it seemed almost unimaginable that this country could, or would, ever give up its apparent love affair with capital punishment. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court brought a temporary halt to capital punishment in Furman v. Georgia. Four years later, however, the Court approved new procedures for deciding on death sentences and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. And by the 1990s, fueled by a “tough on crime” political climate, the number of death sentences and executions steadily climbed.

I have been inspired in my work on capital punishment by what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Furman. He believed people supported the death penalty because they did not know very much about it. Marshall argued that the more people knew about the death penalty, the less they would like it. He thought that scholars could play an important role in the work of educating the public about the grim realities of state-sponsored killing.

So I had my charge. Write about the workings of the death penalty system. Inform my fellow citizens about what the government does when it puts people to death.

I have written many books and scholarly articles about America’s death penalty. Recently, I added to my repertoire a series of op eds and commentaries designed to make my scholarship accessible to a public audience. I have not been alone in this work. Many distinguished scholars have lent their voices to the conversation about capital punishment. Lawyers, activists, and politicians have done the crucial work of mobilizing opposition to state killing.

They have alerted us to the fallibility of, and flaws in, the death penalty system. Sixty-three percent of the American public now believe that an innocent person has been executed in the past five years, and confronting the sheer fact of miscarriages of justice has led many Americans to reconsider their views about the death penalty. The fear of executing the innocent, the continuing specter of racial discrimination in the death penalty system, and the difficulties encountered with lethal injection executions have led to the perception that the death penalty system is broken from start to finish.

As a result, what was unimaginable 50 years ago is today very much on the horizon of possibility, namely that the United States may soon find a way to live without the death penalty. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a national reconsideration of capital punishment and on the road to its abolition. Signs of progress in the fight against capital punishment are everywhere.

Since 2007, more states have abolished the death penalty than at any other 17-year period in American history. As the Death Penalty Information Center noted in its 2022 annual report, “public support for capital punishment and jury verdicts for death remained near fifty-year lows. Defying conventional political wisdom, nearly every measure of change—from new death sentences imposed and executions conducted to public opinion polls and election results—pointed to the continuing durability of the more than 20-year sustained decline of the death penalty in the United States.”

The Death Penalty in Decline? looks back over the last half-century and offers an analysis of the enduring significance of Furman. It takes up the facts of the present moment in the hope of offering a portrait of where we are on the road to abolition. It continues the work that Justice Marshall inspired.  

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The Cost of Beauty Bias in India

Posted on May 1, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, coeditors of Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, write about their awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct.

“I have read that Indian women bleach their skin to appear lighter. Is that true?” 

“You should reduce a bit, else no one will marry you!”

When asked, we invoke colonialism, colorism, and a caste bias to explain the light-skin preference in India. But we may not confess that perhaps some of us bleached our skin as teenagers or had even used the highly controversial but bestselling Indian face cream, Fair and Lovely*, for years! Nor would we confess that we were asked to avoid tea and coffee out of the irrational fear of making our skins darker. 

Similarly, India has no dearth of older men and women admonishing younger girls to appear slim and pretty. Fat shaming in schools and colleges is rampant and goes unchecked. Ironically, in a tropical country where women’s bodies are genetically wired to be voluptuous, girls and women are perpetually reminded of the desirability of the slim body. No doubt, many of us have at various periods, practiced stringent diet regimes and succumbed to exercise mania to obtain popular body proportions. 

The beauty bias runs deep, and while we often subscribe to it, we rarely own up to it!

We grew up in India in the 1990s, when the country was ushering in economic liberalization. We were bombarded with images of Euro-American bodies through satellite television and print and digital media. We saw increasing airtime given to beauty contests. We even celebrated in 1994 when both Miss Universe and Miss World were women of Indian origin. The pageants perhaps had a momentous influence on our adolescent selves. We knew what a universal beauty ideal was and realized, with some despair, how impossible it was for us to attain those ideals realistically.

Beauty pageants were indeed not the first exposure we had to beauty bias. Women and girls have been routinely scrutinized over skin tone, weight, and youthfulness, to name a few, in our communities. We were keenly aware that girls who were not conventionally “good looking” could be perceived as a liability by their parents for being rejected by the marriage market. Looks matter in cases where dowry is concerned. Furthermore, if a girl child is disabled, then the premium goes up many notches.

An awareness that the beauty ideal is a societal construct came quite late for us. We studied feminist scholars and read feminist fiction and films to understand how women and females with alternate sexual identities are conditioned to internalize self-loathing. Our lived experiences with our body image in many ways pushed us to pursue academic interests in exploring the vexed issue of body image in creative ways.  

Body image issues could seem like a trivial issue when women in India grapple with burning problems, beginning with domestic violence, female foeticide, and caste-based violence to income inequality, nutritional inequality, and so on. However, if we were to look at the scale of the number of women who suffer body shaming and the emotional cost of beauty labor, the count would far outweigh the tactile and material forms of violence and injustice mentioned. And this being the case, the implications of body shaming being a trivial matter vanishes.   

In Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, we bring together essays by expert feminist scholars of the field that analyze literary texts, memoirs, magazines, blogs, advertisements, and Bollywood films, among others. We chose essays from the post-liberalization era to the present. These essays showcase how body image shapes women’s lives and identities in contemporary India. They also explore how the subject position of women, their age, fertility, caste, sexual orientation, sexual expression, physical ability, and class have unequal repercussions on a body image.

In conclusion, we claim that “body positivity” has been a buzzword on social media in India and worldwide. On one hand, young women are handed down the message that accepting one’s body is essential; on the other, celebrity culture and social media fetishize hard-to-attain beauty standards mediated with expensive beauty regimes, surgical interventions, extreme diets, and image manipulation.

Would we have grown up differently if we knew how beauty politics manipulate us and what body positivity truly entails? We surely may have been more comfortable in our bodies or our skins. Our book, then, starts the crucial conversation toward understanding the cost of beauty bias in India, and aspires to a day when women and girls feel more empowered in their bodily selves. 

 *Now Glow and Lovely

Filed under: Anthropology, asian american studies, Asian Studies, ethics, gender studies, health, literature, Mass Media and Communications, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Celebrating Independent Bookstore Day!

Posted on April 24, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we honor the independent bookstores that support Temple University Press. Please visit them on April 27 for Independent Bookstore Day!

Harriet’s Bookshop, 258 E. Girard Avenue in Philadelphia, PA, celebrates women authors, women artists, and women activists.
While you’re there, grab a copy of BLAM! Black Lives Always Mattered.

Headhouse Books, 619 South 2nd Street, in Philadelphia, PA, was founded in 2005 on the belief that no community is complete without the inspiration and exchange of ideas that only a locally-owned, independent bookstore can provide.
Shop there for Jim Murphy’s Real Philly History, Real Fast.

Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books, 5445 Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, PA, offers Cool People. Dope Books. Great Coffee.
Swing by to get Amy Jane Cohen’s Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape.

Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Lane, Mt. Airy Village in Philadelphia, PA, has a full selection of thousands of titles—and take advantage of their booksellers’ decades of experience to discover what your next great read might be.
Stop by and buy Beth Kephart’s My Life in Paper.

The Doylestown Bookshop, 16 South Main Street in Doylestown, PA, is a locally owned and operated bookstore dedicated to preserving the heritage and traditions of independent bookstore ideals. 
Pick up Rebecca Yamin’s Digging in the City of Brotherly Love.

Towne Book Center and Cafe, 220 Plaza Drive, Suite B-3, in Collegeville, PA, has been serving the greater Trappe & Collegeville area for almost 30 years.
Go there to get a Ray Didinger’s One Last Read.

Words Matter Bookstore, 52 South Broadway, in Pitman, NJ, is your local portal to the Universe!
Visit and ask for Bob Angelo’s The NFL Off-Camera.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, economics/business, Education, gender studies, History, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, sports, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Preserving the Past, Building the Future

Posted on April 17, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight Preserving the Vanishing City author Stephanie Ryberg-Webster’s upcoming panels and appearance at the Urban Affairs Association conference.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster will be at Temple University Press’ booth in the exhibit hall at the 2024 Urban Affairs Association annual conference on Friday, April 26 from 10:00 to 11:00AM to talk with attendees about her new book, Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio.

The book chronicles the rise of the historic preservation sector in Cleveland during the 1970s and 1980s and is set against the backdrop of the city’s escalating decline. Historic preservation grew in popularity in the mid-20th century as demolition stemming from urban renewal and highway building increasingly threatened older and historic buildings across the nation’s central cities. In the Industrial Midwest, forces of deindustrialization compounded the population and economic contractions spurred by an exodus of residents to suburban areas. In cities like Cleveland, a city with an oversupplied built environment combined with concentrated poverty and reduced municipal coffers, historic preservationists confronted unique challenges.

Preserving the Vanishing City tells a highly local story to convey the history of historic preservation within the context of decline. The book chronicles the rise of Cleveland’s local preservation movement, which had seeds in growing awareness about architectural heritage in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately, Cleveland created the Ohio’s first local preservation commission, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission, in 1971. As preservationists navigated how to establish a preservation ethos in the city, they confronted local policies that heavily prioritized demolition, local skepticism that the city had much of anything of historic value, and a lack of resources that made their work a constant uphill battle. In response, they adopted an entrepreneurial approach that relied on cultivating advocates who had a deep passion for the city’s history and future, establishing local partnerships, engaging with national networks, and finding creative sources of funding.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cleveland’s preservationists tackled an array of preservation challenges, with varying degrees of success. They were deeply passionate about the city’s industrial heritage, which included unique infrastructure and machinery, the preservation of which often remains in question today. They engaged in physical planning and urban design to transform the city’s downtown Warehouse District, while simultaneously working to change state and local zoning and building codes to support, rather than ban, creative adaptive reuse. Preservationists worked in neighborhoods across the city and neighborhood preservation was often led by resident activists and neighborhood organizations. At the same time, Cleveland’s preservationists, like many of their peers around the nation, struggled to engage with the city’s Black residents and lacked the tools and ability to navigate the city’s changing racial landscape. This was particularly evident in the Buckeye neighborhood, once the nation’s largest Hungarian enclave, which underwent rapid racial change from the 1960s through the 1980s and is now a predominantly Black neighborhood. Preserving the Vanishing City also dives into the landscape of residential rehabilitation by stepping outside of traditional preservation to explore if and how other public and nonprofit initiatives support the retention and rehabilitation of Cleveland’s vast residential landscape.

You can also find Stephanie in two sessions on Thursday, April 25. At 1:00 pm in the Booth room (on the 5th floor), she will present “Redlining, Revitalization, and Preservation Practice: Uncovering Connections in Cleveland and St. Louis,” co-authored with Dr. Kelly Kinahan (Florida State University). Following this, at 3:00 pm, Stephanie is part of a colloquy session on Democratic Practice, Organizational Resilience, and Equity in Urban Arts Ecosystems, where she will be talking about a new project that looks at how arts and cultural districts around the nation support diversity, equity, and inclusion in their organizations and neighborhoods also in the Booth room.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster is a Professor of Urban Affairs and the Associate Director of the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs in the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. Her research focuses on urban historic preservation and its intersections with neighborhoods, community development, equity, and revitalization. Her work places a particular emphasis on preservation within the context of urban decline and legacy cities, such as Cleveland. She earned a PhD in City & Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland, and a Bachelor’s in Urban Planning from the University of Cincinnati. She can be reached at s.ryberg@csuohio.edu.

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A Hopefully Realistic Take on the Future of Democracy

Posted on April 10, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, David Campbell, author of Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, writes about the cultures of the bureaucratic and communal worlds.

It’s a little intimidating to have your book published on the same day that Taylor Swift’s new album drops. Even if everyone reading this blog rushes out to buy my book, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, it will be hard to keep up in the sales competition!

But Taylor and I share something in common. We both use small, everyday stories to tell a larger story worth hearing. While the particular stories can stand on their own, it is their accumulation that packs a narrative punch.

My stories were gathered over three decades and draw on over 2,000 interviews with local bureaucrats, nonprofit directors, and other community leaders. I use their highly particular accounts of daily hassles to tell a larger story about democratic governance—what it requires, why it is so routinely difficult, but also why it often works better than we might expect. In this story, the bureaucrats we have been taught are narrow-minded rule followers often turn out to be the creative agents rescuing policy from implementation roadblocks. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are worthy of our attention.

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is a hopefully realistic book that counters the current pessimism about the future of democracy. Much of that pessimism stems from our division into two warring tribes. But instead of a left-right distinction let us imagine that the names of the two tribes are bureaucracy and community.

The culture of the bureaucratic world is captured in terms like standardization, specialization, formality, and uniform treatment. Its language is primarily metric—things exist to be counted, measured, and controlled.

The culture of the communal world is captured in terms like craftsmanship, social networks, local knowledge, and informal agreements. In this world communication is infused with stories. Nuance and discretion are always necessary because we are dealing with individual human beings and unique local circumstances.

Now imagine that these two worlds routinely meet and often collide, often in grants designed on high and implemented locally. Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is about the governance spaces where these collisions happen and the people who work in those spaces. These “heroes” live with a foot in both the bureaucratic world and the communal world and the burden of their work is to reconcile those worlds, however difficult that reconciliation may be. This burdened work is the secret sauce without which public policy will fail, not matter how well-intended or well-funded.

The protagonists in my story—government and foundation funders, on the one hand, and participants in networks of benevolent community care, on the other—share the common goal of improving the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. They are partners in a quest to produce tangible results, driven by their own civic motivations and increasingly by accountability demands imposed by others. The funders have the resources and some types of expertise that the community partners need. Network participants have local knowledge without which the funders’ initiatives cannot be adapted successfully to place and personal circumstance. If they could find a way to bring their capacities together, we could reasonably expect better policy and programmatic outcomes and with them a badly needed uptick in public trust in government.

By paying attention to the way the hidden heroes reconcile these two worlds—their way of embracing contraries—we can learn profound lessons that inform our politics, policy processes, and democratic culture. We learn how to become conversant in two distinct languages of public life and how to balance the alternative forms of knowledge on which bureaucracy and community networks rely. We learn to emphasize crossover roles: experts as community members; community members as experts. We learn to put more stake in learning from experience and less on pre-set strategies. We learn how to treat rules as starting points for negotiation. We learn to evaluate short-term programs not in isolation but in light of the dynamics of the community networks in which they are embedded and long-term trajectories of community change. These are the sorts of strategies and approaches needed to navigate difference democratically.  

The hidden heroes know that the voice of the people has no efficacy if there are not resources and staffing and expertise to turn that voice into programs and policies that work. They also know that the policy wonks and bureaucratic experts will always be wielding blunt instruments, such that the work of fitting policy to people and place will always be critical to achieving the results we want.

And here’s the good news: we already have a huge cadre of mid-level bureaucrats and nonprofit directors who have extraordinary experience in finding a way to marry the best of bureaucracy with the best of community voice. Hopefully, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes will play a role in introducing their collective wisdom to a broader audience of academics, students, and practitioners. 

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, economics/business, Education, ethics, History, Labor Studies, law & criminology, political science, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Fraudulent Papers? Illegal Business? An American Success Story

Posted on March 27, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, William Gee Wong, author of Sons of Chinatown, writes about his father’s immigration.

My father used partially fraudulent papers to legally enter the United States more than a century ago. In Oakland, California, where he landed in its cozy, tight-knit Chinatown, he operated an illegal business, selling lottery tickets, to survive the Great Depression.

Because he broke some laws, was he “vermin” who “poisoned the blood” of America? Or was he more an innocent, naïve outsider who wanted to be an insider in the fabled American Dream and who left a legacy of four generations of productive, law-abiding Americans of full or partial Chinese descent?

I’m biased, of course, but I look upon Pop – the English-language name I used when we shared 20 years together in Oakland’s Chinatown before he died in 1961 – as a typically hard-working immigrant who had to survive numerous pratfalls to grow a family in his adopted country that didn’t exactly embrace him and his kind.

Immigration is an issue that endures as an emotionally fraught political and cultural issue that was birthed in the last quarter of the 19th century when the overwhelmingly white male U.S. Congress decided to exclude the ethnic group that Pop and I belong to. Some of us descendants of exclusion-era Chinese and other Asian immigrants get the distinct feeling that some longer-standing descendants of white European immigrants still don’t want us to share the American Dream. (Witness the outbreak of anti-Chinese, anti-Asian hate during the coronavirus pandemic. To be fair, some of the haters were non-white people.)

Far be it from me — a retired print journalist who is more a generalist than a policy wonk — to offer a sensible, humane formula to solve our immigration conundrum, when numerous legislators, scholars, and other experts haven’t yet been able to effectuate. But maybe Pop’s case offers to hint as to why many people from other countries are willing to break U.S. laws to come here for a better life.

Pop was a mid-teenager when he was processed through the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1912, 30 years after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and a year after the Qing dynasty fell to a republican revolution. To circumvent the exclusion law’s restrictions, Pop and his sponsor had to lie about aspects of his family and village life.

One category of Chinese immigrant that could legally enter under the Chinese Exclusion Act was “son of a native,” meaning an American-born citizen. Pop’s sponsor, his “father” on paper, was allegedly born in San Francisco in the late 19th century. (Pop’s real parents spent their lives in isolated rural villages west of Hong Kong and Macao in a much poorer and chaotic China than today’s Superpower.)

U.S. immigration officials couldn’t disprove Pop’s paper father’s American birth claim in part because records were destroyed during the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fires in 1906. “Father” and “son” used coaching papers to create partially false stories of their personal and village lives to satisfy U.S. authorities that my future father was indeed eligible for legal entry. These paper son (and daughter) schemes were Chinatown’s civil disobedience to an unjust racist law.

Pop was far from unique. Chinese American scholars estimate that a large majority of Chinese immigrants during the exclusion era (1882-1943) were directly related only on paper. They had to take this “crooked path” to gain legal entry.

He learned English at the (American) public school. He returned to China several times, starting in 1919 to marry, grow a family, and start a business to help aspirational migrants find their way to America. Finally, in 1933, he brought his young family of wife, posing as his sister, and three young daughters to be with him permanently in Oakland, where three other girls and I, the only son, were born.

In the 1930s, he sold lottery tickets, an illegal business at that time. Many other Chinatown denizens did the same. Oakland’s white political and police officials were classic hypocrites in that they knew about these illicit activities but allowed them to exist after bribes and staged raids. In fact, the gambling industry powered much of Chinatown economically until the U.S. government imposed a punishing tax in the 1950s. Ironic, isn’t it, that the lottery is perfectly legal – and thriving – all over America today.

Pop made a bad decision that sunk his lottery business and tipped our family into temporary poverty. World War II helped save our family’s fortunes – Pop and his oldest daughter worked in a shipyard, then he and Mom opened a restaurant that fed hungry wartime civilian workers, catapulting us into the beginnings of American middle-class. Yes, a modest immigrant success story.

You would think many Americans of all ancestral heritages would celebrate this Good America. Somehow, collectively, we can’t seem to rest on those laurels. Instead, as America becomes less white by the day, a goodly number of descendants of white European immigrants want to go backwards to a whiter, more Christian America.

Those trying to fix our broken immigration system should keep in mind examples like Pop’s story to craft a solution that is fair, just, and understanding of why so many people still want to come here. These policy makers must also acknowledge that almost all these migrants are desperate for a safer, better life and aren’t sociopathic criminals and lowlifes, as labeled by a certain sociopathic criminal lowlife former president who wants to be president again.

Filed under: american studies, asian american studies, Asian Studies, civil rights, cultural studies, History, immigration, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Welcome to the Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on March 20, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey, our latest title published by North Broad Press, a joint open access imprint of Temple University Libraries and Temple University Press.

 

North Broad Press,has published a new textbook. Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood, by Dr. Terry Rey.

Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood explores the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas, that of the zombie and that of the apocalypse. The former is a modern idea rooted in Haitian Vodou and its popular African and European religious antecedents, while the latter is an ancient one rooted in Zoroastrianism and the Bible and widely expanded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is arguably one of the most influential ideas in world history. Today the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse has pervaded popular culture, with the zombie surpassing the vampire and Frankenstein as the most prolific monster in popular American consciousness.

Drawing on biblical studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology and history of religion, Parts I (Holy Land) and II (Haiti) explore the religious origins of these ideas. Part III (Hollywood) uses aspects of cultural studies, literary analysis, critical race theory, and cinema studies to document the (primarily) American obsession with the zombie and the zombie apocalypse.

The apocalypse and the zombie have been momentous intellectual, historical, and cultural realities and social forces in both very ancient and very recent human history and culture. As such, Zombie Apocalypse provides a focused analysis of certain fundamental aspects of human existence. It challenges readers to cultivate their critical thinking skills while learning about two of the most compelling notions in human religious history and the impact they continue to have. 

Terry Rey is Professor and Undergraduate Chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University, where he specializes in the anthropology and history of African and African diasporic religions. His current research projects focus on violence and religion in Central African and Haitian history. Rey developed the Temple course “Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood,” which he began teaching in spring 2020. 

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, Anthropology, cultural studies, Education, ethics, History, immigration, Latin American studies, latinos, literature, Mass Media and Communications, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Displacing kinship

Posted on March 13, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Linh Thủy Nguyễn, author of Displacing Kinship, write about family history in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

I have a clear memory of the day that, at 18, I realized that my parents were refugees from the Vietnam War. Struggling to order more rice at a Chinese restaurant, confusing the waiter as I spoke mixed Chinese (mom) and Vietnamese (dad), my sister laid out the details. She had for several years been taking college courses about the history of the region and the war. It sounds like a ridiculous thing, to be so detached from family and national history, but mine is a typical second-generation immigrant story about children not knowing about their parents’ pasts. This version is now, perhaps, difficult to imagine for the generations having grown up consuming Vietnamese American cultural productions, as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, and Thao Nguyen have reached mainstream popularity.

What I encountered about the history of this instance of forced displacement and the US response to it was a vast gulf in what the children of refugees, the second generation, knew about their parents and their pasts and what policymakers and social scientists knew about them. When the first cohort of 130,000 mostly Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975, few expected a diaspora that would amount to over 2.2  million Vietnamese Americans. Policy makers and scientists made quick work of predicting their successful assimilation into the country, speculating that their ties with the US government, projected model minority status, and proximity to white values would spare them the “downward assimilation” faced by their Black and brown neighbors. This inclusion, of course, came at the cost of their own histories and relations.

Why does it seem that so much of the art and writing of children of Vietnamese refugees is singularly focused on searching for origins and longing for parental affection? Social science and policy framings of refugee successes in America are matched in volume by narratives of familial discord and trauma by the second generation. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production is my response to emerging dominant narratives about family history and that war. The book was inspired by seemingly constant popular culture evocations and my students’ comments about what they called the intergenerational trauma of the war – an idea that seemed to do more to mask than explain the alienation they experienced from their parents. It is my attempt to contextualize for the children of refugees from the wars in Vietnam, but also for all children of immigrants, that the reasons for our disconnect from our histories is structural, though it is experienced interpersonally.

Second-generation texts situate themselves in relation to the past and their family history, and squarely in the war. My close readings of Vietnamese American art, music, and writing revealed that behind the emotional weight and heaviness of the texts was a sense of mourning for the family relationships that were destroyed. These were destroyed not only by the specificities of the war and its aftermath, including environmental destruction and economic embargoes, but also, as I emphasize, the larger systems of white supremacy and racial capital that shape U.S. interventions and the day-to-day lives of refugees after they have been resettled. Much of the pain and suffering described in the texts I analyze was much more about everyday experiences of fighting to make it in the U.S., stories of parents struggling to make ends meet, scenes of watching white neighbors yell racist vitriol, in short, the experiences of poverty and racism.

In Displacing Kinship, I explore the reasons the Vietnamese diaspora feels separated from family histories and ultimately call for new ways to relate to ourselves and our own communities. It is my hope that once we can identify the conditions that have alienated us from these histories, we can forge new liberatory cultural politics rooted in connection and attachment to radical possibilities, rather than increasingly conservative identity politics.

Filed under: american studies, asian american studies, Asian Studies, cultural studies, ethics, History, immigration, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Posted on March 6, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase titles for Women’s History Month. Use promo code TWHM24 for 25% off all our Women’s Studies titles. (Sale ends April 1, 2024.)

Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States, by William J. Scarborough, reveals how distinct cultural environments shape the patterns of gender inequality

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by Sharon D. Wright Austin, examines the crucial role that Black women have carried out in the cities they govern

Solidarity & Care: Domestic Worker Activism in New York City, by Alana Lee Glaser, shows how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in the domestic work sector and other industries

Forthcoming Titles:

Proper Women: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran, by Fae Chubin, provides an intersectional analysis of Iran’s feminist activism through an ethnographic study of an NGO-led women’s empowerment program (May)

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity (May)

Refounding Democracy through Intersectional Activism: How Progressive Era Feminists Redefined Who We Are, and What It Means Today, by Wendy Sarvasy, theorizes a useable radical past for intersectional activists today (June)

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, asian american studies, Asian Studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Education, ethics, gender studies, History, immigration, Labor Studies, Mass Media and Communications, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

A Book Celebrating Black History in Philadelphia

Posted on February 28, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Amy Jane Cohen, author of Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, writes about Philadelphia’s African American experience.

When Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926, he was not advocating for Black history to be the focus of only seven days of the year. In his view, “Negro History Week is the week set aside by the Association for the Study of Negro Life & History for the purpose of emphasizing what has already been learned about the Negro during the year.” Unfortunately, Woodson’s vision did not come to fruition. Even when expanded to a month in 1976, far too many American educators came to think of February as the one time of year to pay attention to the Black experience.

Fortunately, however, students in Philadelphia’s public high schools have the privilege of spending an entire year studying African American history. In 2005 the School Reform Commission unanimously passed a mandate making African American history a graduation requirement. I had the privilege of teaching that course from its inception until I retired from the school district in 2013. I have continued, however, to read and write about Black history, with an emphasis on the Philadelphia experience.

I’ve been particularly interested in how that history—much of which has received increased attention in recent years—is reflected in the landscape. Whether through the many blue and gold historical markers sprinkled through the city, or as a full-fledged monument such as the Octavius V. Catto memorial at City Hall, Philadelphia is full of information about the long and continuing presence of Black Philadelphians.

When Black History Month 2024 began, my book, Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, had just been published. The book is meant for anyone with an interest in Philadelphia history. For those not familiar with the city’s Black history, the nineteen chapters will provide a solid overview of African Americans in Philadelphia from the late seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth century. People already knowledgeable about this history will be able to view it through a new lens.

Consider, for example, Reverend Richard Allen. Born enslaved to Benjamin Chew, the first Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Allen later bought his freedom and became a Methodist preacher in late 18th century Philadelphia, the national center of free Black life. Along with Absalom Jones, Allen founded the Free African Society, a mutual aid society that was the first independent Black organization in the United States.

After being part of a group of Black worshippers evicted from St. George’s United Methodist Church (still an active congregation at Fourth and Vine Streets), Allen purchased a lot at Sixth and Lombard Streets that has been home to what became known as Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church since before the turn of the nineteenth century. No other property in the nation has been Black owned for this long a time. The name of the church is a reference to its being the founding home of the AME denomination of Christianity, a sect that has spread throughout the country and the world.

A remarkable leader, Richard Allen has long been honored in the Philadelphia landscape. Philadelphia’s first federally funded public housing project, the Richard Allen Homes, was named in 1941. Historical markers for both Mother Bethel and the Free African Society were installed at Sixth and Lombard in the early 1990s thanks to an effort by the late Charles Blockson. To commemorate the bicentennial of the founding of the AME denomination, in 2016 a statue of Allen was installed at the corner of Sixth and Lombard in the Mother Bethel parking lot, and a large mural of Allen was painted at 38th and Market Streets.

An additional mural depicting Richard Allen was recently unveiled on Washington Avenue in Queen Village. In 1830, the last year of Allen’s life, he organized the first Colored Convention, a meeting of Black leaders to strategize on improvements to the lives of African Americans. Colored Conventions continued to be held until the 1890s, and eight of them took place in Philadelphia. The mural depicts Richard Allen perched atop a triangle-shaped pantheon of Colored Convention leaders and participants.

Most significant to me as a resident of Allens Lane in Mount Airy, one block of Allens Lane (named for William Allen, a Philadelphia mayor and an enslaver) was renamed Richard Allen Lane in February 2022. Eight months later, our SEPTA Regional Rail station was renamed Richard Allen Lane station and two informational panels about Allen and Mother Bethel were installed nearby. There is poetic justice in the fact that this station is situated less than half a mile from Chew Avenue, the street named for Allen’s enslaver.

These alterations to the landscape may seem small and insignificant, but as State Representative Chris Rabb said at the dedication ceremony for Richard Allen Lane, “When we take time to research our history, it gives us a chance to reflect and correct choices made with the inclusion or consideration of a diversity of stakeholders. We must closely examine the history we choose to memorialize and honor, especially versions of the past validated by false narratives that marginalize the value of Black people and other communities of struggle.”

As Black History Month 2024 comes to a close, I hope you’ll join me in seeking out, and perhaps even advocating for, reflections of Philadelphia’s African American experience. Please check my website for upcoming speaking engagements or to inquire about inviting me to speak (amyjanecohen.com).

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