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摘要
摘要
In Common Ground , Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less rigid and more embracing set of stories on which to ground a national history. Influenced by European hierarchical thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo Americans increasingly categorized other newcomers to the United States. Binaries formed in the American imagination, creating a sense of coherence among white citizens during times of rapid and far-reaching social change. Within each binary, however, Asian Americans have proven disruptive: they cannot be fully described as either Eastern or Western; they challenge the racial categories of black and white; and within the gender and sexual binaries of man and woman, straight and gay, they have been repeatedly positioned as neither nor.
Okihiro analyzes how groups of people and numerous major events in American history have generally been depicted, and then offers alternative representations from an Asian-American viewpoint--one that reveals the ways in which binaries have contributed toward simplifying, excluding, and denying differences and convergences. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, from the Chicago Exposition of 1898 to The Wizard of Oz , this book is a provocative response to current debates over immigration and race, multiculturalism and globalization, and questions concerning the nature of America and its peoples. The ideal foil to conventional surveys of American history, Common Ground asks its readers to reimagine our past free of binaries and open to diversity and social justice.
评论 (2)
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Is there an "American" culture or are our supposed common experiences and assumptions merely a social construct largely created by a dominant white European elite? Okihiro, professor of international and public affairs and director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, examines traditional fissures in American life from an Asian American perspective. Okihiro provocatively suggests that our view of nineteenth-century transcontinental expansion from East to West ignores the role of Asian immigrants moving in the opposite direction. Similarly, his portrait of the 1993 Columbian Exposition suggests it extolled the advance of white civilization, viewed African civilization as barbaric, and virtually ignored the role of East Asian civilizations in forming American "character." Okihiro paints with a broad brush and probably draws unwarranted conclusions from scanty and disputable data. Still, his willingness to think "out of the box" offers an original perspective upon how and why we define ourselves. --Jay Freeman
Choice 评论
Okihiro (Columbia Univ.) argues that the US's past has been wrongly viewed in terms of certain imaginary, but powerful, "binaries" that reflect matters of geography, race, gender, and sexual preference. The preferred image of the US has been white, Western (specifically the American west), male, and heterosexual. Although Okihiro discusses various minority groups, he especially uses the Asian American experience to defy the comfortable notion of such a unified national character. Believing that Asians are categorized as nonwhite, feminine, and homosexual, Okihiro cites abundant evidence of a complex role for them that demonstrates the simplistic nature of binary classification. Whether the particular binaries he suggests accurately represent how American history is conceived is questionable. For example, his belief that gender roles and sexual identity have been assigned to specific groups of people is not easily accepted. One has the impression that Okihiro tilts at windmills of his own creation in attempting to show that his binaries resist change. Using J. Phillippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior (CH, May'95) to show that binary classification remains significant is questionable, especially given Okihiro's admission that Rushton's thesis has been widely rejected. Nevertheless, the book is interesting, offers creative analytical approaches, and certainly provides an alternative to traditional treatments of American history. Graduate students and faculty. J. P. Rodechko Wilkes University
目录
List of Illustrations | p. ix |
Preface | p. xi |
Chapter 1 West and East | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 White and Black | p. 28 |
Chapter 3 Man and Woman | p. 55 |
Chapter 4 Heterosexual and Homosexual | p. 87 |
Chapter 5 American History | p. 114 |
Notes | p. 139 |
Index | p. 153 |