Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction

Rachel Lee Rubin; Jeffrey Melnick

Published by New York University Press 2006

Immigration and American Popular Culture

An Introduction

Rachel Lee Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick

Volume 4 in the series Nation of Nations

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814769089.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

How does a 'national' popular culture form and grow over time in a nation comprised of immigrants? How have immigrants used popular culture in America, and how has it used them?
Immigration and American Popular Culture looks at the relationship between American immigrants and the popular culture industry in the twentieth century. Through a series of case studies, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick uncover how specific trends in popular culture—such as portrayals of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema, the zoot suits of the 1940s, the influence of Jamaican Americans on rap in the 1970s, and cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s—have their roots in the complex socio-political nature of immigration in America.
Supplemented by a timeline of key events and extensive suggestions for further reading, Immigration and American Popular Culture offers at once a unique history of twentieth century U.S. immigration and an essential introduction to the major approaches to the study of popular culture. Melnick and Rubin go further to demonstrate how completely and complexly the processes of immigration and cultural production have been intertwined, and how we cannot understand one without the other.

Author / Editor information

Rubin Rachel Lee :

Rachel Lee Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Jeffrey Melnick, NYU Press) and Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, and co-editor of American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction.Melnick Jeffrey :

Jeffrey Melnick is Associate Professor of American Studies at Babson College. He is author of A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South.

Reviews

W. T. Lhamon, Jr.,author, most recently, of Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture:
Rachel Rubin and Jeff Melnick show us the skinny on pop's melting pot. The cauldron does not burn off immigrant character, creating American sameness, but intensifies its many tastes. Ladle after ladle of ethnic infusions go into the potScarface to Gypsy Punks, pachuco zoot suiters to Ravi Shankar, Jimmy Cliff to West Side Story. They compound the terms of race and place until they reform the mainstream. And, suddenly, that old wasp canon has become just another ethnic style.

Rachel Ida Buff,University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:
A sprawling and uniquely synthetic account of the role immigrants have played as performers, entrepreneurs, and as the subjects of the mass culture industry. Brings a stunning, transnational array of immigrant cultural forms, immigration policies, and cohorts together in new and important ways.

Norma Coates:
Immigration and Popular Culture: An Introduction is an excellent and very necessary contribution to American Studies and to the complex and important relationship between the two topics in its title.

This books account of the interaction of immigration, popular culture, and mainstream America is loaded with brief chronicles of different levels of historieshistories of American immigration, popular culture forms, immigration laws, American cultural imperialism, and mainstream representations of immigration.

A thought-provoking examination of immigration history.

Eloquently written.

In this eminently readable and insightful overview of U.S. cultural history in the last century, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey provide a view into the roiling production of American culture.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Aliens, Inc. Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 Hollywood, 1930: Jewish Gangster Masquerade Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Chapter 2 Los Angeles, 1943: Zoot Suit Style, Immigrant Politics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
Chapter 3 Broadway, 1957: West Side Story and the Nuyorican Blue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
Chapter 4 Monterey, 1967 The Hippies Meet Ravi Shankar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
Chapter 5 South Bronx, 1977 Jamaican Migrants, Born Jamericans, and Global Music Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	176
Chapter 6 Cyberspace, Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
Afterword: Chelsea, 2006 Wandering Popular Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248
Appendix: timeline. Prepared by Daniel Rodriguez Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
Works cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
About the authors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	302

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Keywords: Immigration; American; popular; culture; looks; relationship; between; immigrants; industry; twentieth; century; through; series; case; studies

eBook

Published: December 6, 2006
ISBN: 9780814769089