Contemporary commentators have observed that postmodern America is less a melting pot than a buffet table. In American Identities people of diverse ethnic, religious, social, gender, and sexual backgrounds "refuse to merge but insist on a multiplicity of well-maintained identities," editors Robert Pack and Jay Parini explain. This sixth volume in the popular Bread Loaf Anthology series gathers more than three dozen voices who testify that there is no single American Experience, but instead a multiplicity of experiences. These poems, stories, and essays describe in occasionally stark, sometimes humorous, and often moving terms what it means to be black and American, or gay and American, or Latino and American, or Jewish and American within this society.

Based on interviews with second-generation Chinese- and Korean-Americans, “this book is filled with a number of illuminating empirical findings” (American Journal of Sociology). In Becoming Asian American, Nazli Kibria draws upon extensive interviews she conducted with second-generation Chinese and Korean Americans in Boston and Los Angeles who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s to explore the dynamics of race, identity, and adaptation within these communities. Moving beyond the frameworks created to study other racial minorities and ethnic whites, she examines the various strategies used by members of this group to define themselves as both Asian and American. In her discussions on such topics as childhood, interaction with non-Asian Americans, college, work, and the problems of intermarriage and child-raising, Kibria finds wide discrepancies between the experiences of Asian Americans and those described in studies of other ethnic groups. While these differences help to explain the unusually successful degree of social integration and acceptance into mainstream American society enjoyed by this “model minority,” it is an achievement that Kibria’s interviewees admit they can never take for granted. Instead, they report that maintaining this acceptance requires constant effort on their part. Kibria suggests further developments may resolve this situation—especially the emergence of a new kind of pan–Asian American identity that would complement the Chinese or Korean American identity rather than replace it.

Devised by individual ethnic leaders and spread through ethnic media, banquets, and rallies, these myths were a response to being marginalized by the dominant group and a way of laying claim to a legitimate home in America."--BOOK JACKET.

"Including the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and their Creoles, and encompassing an interdisciplinary range of sources, this volume is a dictionary of 21,000 terms related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality used in Latin America over the past five centuries"--

The civil rights movement and immigration reform transformed American politics in the mid-1960s. Demographic diversity and identity politics raised the challenge of e pluribus unum anew, and multiculturalism emerged as a new ideological response to this dilemma. This book uses national public opinion data and public opinion data from Los Angeles to compare ethnic differences in patriotism and ethnic identity and ethnic differences in support for multicultural norms and group-conscious policies. The authors find evidence of strong patriotism among all groups and the classic pattern of assimilation among the new wave of immigrants. They argue that there is a consensus in rejecting harder forms of multiculturalism that insist on group rights but also a widespread acceptance of softer forms that are tolerant of cultural differences and do not challenge norms, such as by insisting on the primacy of English.

Why is national identity such a potent force in people's lives? And is the force positive or negative? In this thoughtful and provocative book, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse develops a social theory of national identity and uses a national survey, focus groups, and experiments to answer these important questions in the American context. Her results show that the combination of group commitment and the setting of exclusive boundaries on the national group affects how people behave toward their fellow Americans. Strong identifiers care a great deal about their national group. They want to help and to be loyal to their fellow Americans. By limiting who counts as an American, though, these strong identifiers place serious limits on who benefits from their pro-group behavior. Help and loyalty are offered only to 'true Americans,' not Americans who do not count and who are pushed to the periphery of the national group.

The nine essays in Asian North American Identities explore how Asian North Americans are no longer caught between worlds of the old and the new, the east and the west, and the south and the north. Moving beyond national and diasporic models of ethnic identity to focus on the individual feelings and experiences of those who are not part of a dominant white majority, the essays collected here draw from a wide range of sources, including novels, art, photography, poetry, cinema, theatre, and popular culture. The book illustrates how Asian North Americans are developing new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves by eluding imposed identities and creating spaces that offer alternative sites from which to speak and imagine. Contributors are Jeanne Yu-Mei Chiu, Patricia Chu, Rocio G. Davis, Donald C. Goellnicht, Karlyn Koh, Josephine Lee, Leilani Nishime, Caroline Rody, Jeffrey J. Santa Ana, Malini Johar Schueller, and Eleanor Ty.