Read more
"Ethnic Studies has drawn higher education, usually kicking and screaming, into the borderlands of scholarship, pedagogy, faculty collegiality, and institutional development", Johnnella E. Butler writes in her Introduction. This collection of lively and insightful essays, with contributions from some of the most prominent scholars in Ethnic Studies today, explores varying approaches, multiple methodologies, and contrasting perspectives within the field. Essays trace the historical development of Ethnic Studies, its place in American universities and the curriculum, and new directions in contemporary scholarship. The legitimation of the field, the need for institutional support, and the changing relations between academic scholarship and community activism are also discussed.The institutional structure of Ethnic Studies continues to be affected largely by national, regional, and local attitudes and events, and Ronald Takaki's essay explores the contested terrains of these continuing culture wars. Manning Marable delves into theoretical aspects of writing about race and ethnicity, while John C. Walter surveys the influence of African American history on U.S. history textbooks. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Craig Howe explain why American Indian Studies does not fit into the Ethnic Studies model, and Lauro Flores traces the historical development of Chicano/a Studies, forged from the student and community activism of the late 1960s.Ethnic Studies is simultaneously discipline-based and interdisciplinary, self-containing and overlapping. This volume captures that characteristic as contributors raise questions that traditional disciplines ignore. Essays include Lane Ryo Hirabayashi andMarilyn Alquizola on the gulf between postmodernism and political and institutional realities; Rhett Jones on the evolution of Africana Studies; and T V. Reed on the trajectories of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies and their relations with marginalized communities. Shirley Hune
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction | Color-Line to Borderlands
Part One | Ethnic Studies as a Matrix: Moving from Color-Line to Borderlands
Multiculturalism: Battleground or Meeting Ground?
Ethnic Studies as a Matrix for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Common Good
The Problematics of Ethnic Studies
The Influence of African American history on U.S. History Survey Textbooks since the 1970s
Part Two | Institutional Structure and Knowledge Production
Ethnic Studies in U.S. Higher Education: The State of the Discipline
From Ideology to institution: the Evolution of Africana Studies
The Dialetics of Ethnicity in America: A View from American Indian Studies
Whither the Asian American Subject?
Thirty Years of Chicono and Chicana Studies
Part Three | Changing and Emerging Paradigms
Asian American Studies and Asian studies: Boundars and Borderlands of Ethnic Studies and Area Studies
Reimaginging Borders; A Hemispheric Approach to Latin American and U.S. Latino and Latina Studies
Bridges to the twenty-first century: Making Cultural Studies-- and making it work
Heavy Traffic at the Intersections: Ethnic, American, Women's, Queer, and Cultural Studies
Contributors
Index
About the author
Edited by Johnnella E. Butler
Summary
A collection of essays by prominent scholars examining the place of Ethnic Studies in American universities
