A study of first generation Chinese youth and their parents who have immigrated to Houston, Texas reveals that identity for this group (Chinese youth in particular) emerges from the opposition of the submissive connection to the authority of networks, and the dominant American (United States) individualism which promotes private self-interest and, hence, tends to sever communal relations. Identity is thus a consideration of opposition/contingency and same/different. An examination of identity requires recognizing that cultural inheritance impacts one's determination and ability to function within the given world. For the Chinese in this study, "ghosts" of their past remind and connect them to their cultural inheritance; they take with them what they remember leaving behind. Yet, whereas an established history and sanguinal traditions are advantageous to perpetuate facts and myths, an evolving culture which is creating new identities with and within each new generation is unfolding beyond, even in spite of, the established Chinese traditions. Furthermore, the Chinese in this study group lack the amphibolic, unstable footing characteristic of liminars who straddle two cultures, producing in themselves hybrid positioning, generating for themselves ambivalence and alienating identification. Rather than assimilate to the Western milieu, the Chinese accommodate themselves and live as a paracommunity with the dominant culture of their host city. Chinese parents' most apodictic means of countering Western influence on their children is with Chinese language schools, having the youth participate in Chinese community events, encouraging the younger Chinese to develop a network of Chinese friends, and insisting that the youth retain the Chinese values they have exemplified for them at home. By applying linguistic considerations, particularly functionalism, to create meaning, clearly there is space within the appetite for dialectics of immigration to this country (and others) and the cultural processes which ensue to resist lumping all diasporic people as liminars and hybrids.

Within contemporary anthropology, the tradition of the single site ethnography is being challenged as inadequate to the task of representing the complexity of modern social life. A multi-site ethnography examines the network of complex connections within a system of places and the implications for the formation of group identity through popular cultural practices. Low riding is a popular culture organized around the activities of fashioning and showing baroquely customized automobiles by men and women from 13 to 45 years of age and is considered to be a distinctly "Chicano" (Mexican American) form. Low riding originated largely in the 1960s in Los Angeles, a center of industry, mass media communication, and Mexican American culture in the United States. There low riding practices serve to remap the bounds of mobility to correspond to experienced limits and to express and facilitate preferred forms of sociality. In Houston, Texas, low riding became popular in the late seventies simultaneous with the oil industry boom and regional distribution of Low Rider Magazine. It served as a way for Mexican Americans dispersed throughout the city, many only recent residents, to create a community. In Espanola, New Mexico (also known as "Little L.A."), a largely Hispano town located between the art and tourist centers of Santa Fe and Taos, Chicano low riding is part of the regional intensification of ethnic identity that has been born from the potentially alienating experiences of labor outmigration to California and other areas of the Southwest coupled with increased ethic and recreational tourism in northern New Mexico. Low rider car culture has created an alternate cultural space for performance, participation and interpretation, one that allows for the reworking of the limitations placed upon "minority" cultures in the United States, but one that also indicates how racial discrimination and class identification become divisive to the assertion of cultural identity.

In this work, I make three very important assertions. First, whites were fanatical about keeping black men and white women sexually separated. In the white mind, no contamination of the Caucasian race could result unless white women came into sexual contact with black men. As a result, whites used both lawful and extra-legal methods to keep black men from their white women, despite taking sexual licenses with black women. Second, whites assumed that black men desired white women sexually. This assumption increased white hysteria and strengthened the resolve of whites to keep blacks segregated and subjugated. Finally, although whites assumed that blacks wanted to sexually intermingle, black leaders repeatedly disavowed any desire to do so. Blacks were content with being black and had no aspirations of losing their color or their culture.

On the basis of field and archival research on Sakhalin Island, and in Moscow, Tomsk and St. Petersburg, conducted over a twenty-four month period between 1989 and 1992, this project offers ethnographic and historical accounts of the production of Soviet culture among a Siberian indigenous people, the Nivkhi. Through Nivkh oral accounts, archival documents, as well as Russian and Soviet ethnographic sources, the dissertation charts a dramatic series of policy shifts in the governance of Nivkh life in the twentieth century, shifts which were in effect organized state campaigns of cultural invention and cultural erasure. By highlighting two dominant and often contradictory streams of official state narratives which counterposed Siberian indigenous peoples as being both children of nature and the most authentic of modern proletarians, the dissertation finds a population in late perestroika whose own views of Nivkh culture were largely underwritten by statist interpretations. The project argues for a closer reading of the nature of Soviet cultural construction than is often found in writings on Soviet nationality policies, and of the very hybrid identities which the Soviet period, and now the post-Soviet period, have produced.

My dissertation, "'A Most Terrible Spectacle': Visualizing Racial Science in American Literature and Culture, 1839--1929," uses a wide range of visual artifacts---books, cartes-de-visite , and photographs---to chart how an emerging nineteenth-century visual culture develops and disseminates scientific accounts of race. Taking seriously Robyn Wiegman's contention that any broad analysis of race must analyze "the visual moment as itself a complicated and historically contingent production" (American Anatomies [1995] 24), my project explores how developing nineteenth-century scientific accounts of race depend on the often-overlooked interdependencies between visual and literary cultures in order to solidify the idea of essential racial difference. More particularly, I analyze how literary depictions of race by Anglo-American writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and African American writers like Pauline Hopkins and Martin R. Delany engage with contemporary visual media in their literary depictions of race. A wealth of critical commentary on nineteenth-century visual culture by scholars such as Laura Wexler and Shawn Michelle Smith has attended to visual culture's myriad representations of racial difference, but has tended to overlook, first, the complex interplay between nineteenth-century visual forms like photography and literary forms like the novel, and second, how this dialogue helps to disseminate popular scientific theories of race. By analyzing such diverse texts as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Truth's cartes-de-visite, Delany's African American ethnology, and Hopkins' Contending Forces, I show how evolving visualizations of race circulate through and shape nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. culture. As my chapters collectively suggest, we cannot fully understand nineteenth-century literary texts without recognizing their vital engagement with visual culture. This engagement, as I have shown, is one integrally involved in disseminating to a popular audience shifting scientific models of race. Recognizing literary reliance on the visual enables us to recognize the full extent to which literary texts engage in debates about race.

Although critics believe the language variety Spanglish to be a corruption of one or both of the standard languages with which it is associated as well as a language of inadequacy spoken by the poor and uneducated, this thesis seeks to support the idea that it is used by Hispanics in the United States as a marker of identity. An examination of previous studies shows that it is not associated with a lack of linguistic ability on the part of its speakers. Demographic information provided by two Tejano stations that broadcast in Spanglish, KQQK of Houston and KXTN of San Antonio, demonstrates that listeners, when compared to the national averages among Hispanics, actually live under better socioeconomic circumstances. Interviews with radio station personnel reveal that, in their opinions, Spanglish is related to the identity of the Tejano, differentiating him or her from the Anglo as well as the recently-arrived immigrant.

Several recent findings suggest that there are racial differences in organizational attraction. This study examines these differences using a sample of 258 undergraduate and graduate students. In an Internet "virtual site visit" to a fictional company, the level of racial structural integration (SI), salary, and the presence/absence of a diversity management program (DMP) were manipulated. SI, proposed by Cox (1991), is a means of describing the racial/ethnic diversity present among the employees of a firm, whereas diversity management programs are the successors to affirmative action plans. Black participants were most attracted to the organization with the highest level of SI. Furthermore, a type of ethnic identification, other-group orientation (OGO) significantly interacted with SI and participant race to predict organizational attraction. For Whites with low OGO, SI had a negative effect on attraction. For Blacks with high OGO, organizations high and low in SI (but not moderate) were the most attractive.

This dissertation reassesses key paradigms of Asian American literary studies in the interest of critically accounting for the cultural productions of mixed race Asian Americans. Over the last twenty years, Asian American literary criticism has focused narrowly on a small body of writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan, who achieved mainstream popularity with U.S. feminists and/or multiculturalists, or focused on authors like Frank Chin and John Okada whose literary personas and works lend themselves to overt appropriations for civil rights causes and/or identity politics. "Multiple Choice" participates in a renewed interest in the expansion of Asian American literary boundaries and critical inquiry. "Multiple Choice" addresses the complex racial formations of select mixed race Asian American authors and subjects from the turn of the century to the present. My study situates, both theoretically and historically, the diverse ways in which mixed race peoples variously represent themselves. As the dissertation's metaphorical title suggests, self-representations, or an individual's ethnic choices, especially in the case of mixed race Americans, are constantly adjudicated by others (e.g. cultural critics, the media, or U.S. census designers and evaluators). Notwithstanding the omnipresence of these external forces, "Multiple Choice" also engages the complex sets of choices made from within specific Asian American communities, particularly those choices that come in conflict with other Asian American identities. The dissertation looks at writers both well-known and virtually unknown: Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, Sadakichi Hartmann, Aimee Liu, Chang-rae Lee, Amy Tan, Shawn Wong, Jessica Hagedorn, Peter Bacho, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Paisley Rekdal.

During the nineteenth century, both black women and white women were at the mercy of the white patriarchy, albeit at differing degrees to and natures in which they experienced bondage, marginality, and empowerment. In Minnie's Sacrifice, Frances E. W. Harper addresses the roles these women played in confronting and defeating the patriarchy. We first encounter Camilla Le Croix, the daughter of a white slave owner. Her actions parallel and reflect the evolving role of the nineteenth-century female in America: Camilla moves from the domestic sphere into the public sphere, becoming the author of a new moral code. Bernard Le Croix, Camilla's father, tries to silence Camilla's voice when she pleads to place the young orphaned slave, Louis, in their home, but Camilla prevails. Because of her involvement in their world, she witnesses the slaves' survival techniques. Drawing strength from her experiences, Camilla creates a new world for herself and her two slaves, Miriam and her grandson Louis, who is actually Camilla's step-brother. Camilla and Miriam unite to forge a new society. While Louis is being groomed by these two women for entrance into the public sphere, his future wife, Minnie, is being prepared for the same by her mother, Ellen, "the beautiful quadroon." Ellen begins her bid for empowerment when she presents her mulatto daughter, fathered by her master to visiting Northern guests. Fully aware of the physical similarities between Minnie and the slave owner's other daughter, Marie, Ellen places Minnie in a prominent position dressed so as to reveal the girls' likenesses. When the slave mistress demands that Minnie be sold, Ellen prevails in her appeals to the master. She gains freedom for Minnie, who is sent North to live as a white child, only to be reunited much later with her mother, at which time, Minnie sacrifices her rights as a white woman and embraces her black heritage. She later marries Louis, who has gained his freedom and rightful inheritance. Together, they represent a new order, one won by the works of two women, one white, one black.

French Caribbean along with other Third World intellectuals have examined from different perspectives not only the oppositions, but also the interconnections between the colonial subject and the colonized other. In their discussions, which are enlightening to all other respects, the role and the significance of women are, nevertheless, undermined or even totally forgotten. In this work I am focusing on "autobiographical" novels written by three Guadeloupean authors, Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, who address the absence of female discourse on and from history. In their books, the female subject constitutes itself through its search for historical rehabilitation. This rehabilitation is hindered by a past of violence against the female body. Physically abused, during slavery and even after, the Caribbean woman succeeds in organizing her resistance. The latter functions as a "detour" that challenges the authority of colonial and patriarchal structures. Her confidence is nevertheless tested when she tries to build the cultural "arriere pays" she lacks. Although the idea of a return to Africa seems appealing at first, her trip to the maternal land turns out to be nothing more than the discovery of a world she does not understand and that is slowly disappearing in the midst of political turmoil. Her constant wanderings lead her to Europe or to America but fail to provide her with a real sense of identity. Twice colonized, victim of an endless movement of migration, she remains a prisoner of the Hegelian dialectics of the master and the slave. She finds, however, a way to penetrate the realm, ferociously protected by her oppressors, and uses their tools to deconstruct the legend of the impenetrability of colonial power. The realization of her hybrid subjectivity allows a new relationship with the island. This land of exile becomes also associated with images of a nourishing and caring mother and, therefore, helps her establish her own genealogy and create her own myths. Finally, writing becomes crucial in the process of constructing female subjectivity. Language and narrative structure build the foundations for the development of a "poetics of relation" that privileges plurality and fragmentation.