The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period [794-1185]. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in “authorial crossdressing” to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. It is especially the portrayal of what Marjorie Garber has delineated as a “category crisis” that links Japanese medieval writing and early fictional accounts by Japanese American authors. This article demonstrates that cross-dressing originates in moments of personal crisis and that its practice is sustained by the anxiety of cultural dislocation. The parallel identified between The Pillow Book and The American Diary —both texts largely ignored by academia—promises to clarify further early Japanese immigrants' experimentation with their bodies, citizenship, and other markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity.

This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, both Chinese and Jewish women shared many common experiences, such as mother-daughter conflict and identity crisis, and both of them faced a difficult challenge in assimilating into American life.

“For Heart, Patriotism, and National Dignity”: The Italian Language Press in New York City and Constructions of Africa, Race, and Civilization” examines how mainstream and radical newspapers employed Africa as a trope for savage behavior by analyzing their discussion of wage slavery, imperialism, lynching, and colonialism, in particular Italian imperialist ventures into northern Africa in the 1890s and Libya in 1911-1912. The Italian language press constructed Africa as a sinister , dark , continent, representing the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy. In expressing moral outrage over American violence and discrimination against Italians, the press utilized this image of Africa to emphatically convey its shock and disgust. In particular, Italian prominenti newspapers capitalized on this racial imagery to construct a narrative of Italianness and Italian superiority in order to combat unflattering depictions of Italian immigrants arriving in the United States.

The region of Southern Africa has been part of the global capitalist system since its inception in the late 15 th century, when Portugal incorporated Angola and Mozambique into its empire. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a “refreshment station” at the Cape of Good Hope for ships travelling between Europe and the Far East. 1 From that time the region has experienced several periods of deepening incorporation into the global system.

In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, the elderly, wellrespected and fastidious Franklin “Doc” Hata begins an introspective journey toward a revitalized and reimagined identity. For Lee, this journey affords the chance to address ethnicity and immigration under a unique transnational context. The novel chronicles how an identity can be recuperated (i.e., healed) through personal and cultural reconnections to the body and to memory. I purposefully use the word “recuperate” in both the traditional and theoretical senses. “Recuperation” results from Hata's moving back into his past to grow forward in self. Simultaneously, he “heals” his self, physically and psychologically, from various “afflictions” he endures. By exploring Hata's various afflictions against the novel's ways to counteract these ailments, I will show how Lee's novel becomes a narrative of recuperation and identity change.

Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.

When you begin to consider the Finns of New York State, there are two obvious foci that have received the majority of attention in the ethnic literature. The presence of some estimated 20,000 Finns in New York City during the 1920s provided a large population with its myriad cultural, religious and social organizations and activities. The heyday of the large Finnish population has passed, and as of 2000, a total of 3,466 Finns lived in New York City. 1 This number remains the highest population within the state. Due to this large population size, much has been written about their existence, for example, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. 2 A second significant concentration of Finns within the state has always been the Finger Lakes region in western New York State. Here, in cities and towns such as Van Etten, Spencer, Millport, and Ithaca, activities and organizations have existed for decades and have also received academic interest. 3

A late nineteenth-century trade card, or a color-printed circulating advertisement, touts Shepherd and Doyle's new “Celluloid” waterproof collars, cuffs and shirt bosoms (Fig. 1).1 These “economical, durable, and handsome” clothing items require less starching and washing, and so remove the need for Chinese laundries. The text on the reverse side includes directions on how “to remove yellow stains,” and the image enacts a kind of literal version of this removal. The slovenly laundryshop (the clothes overflowing the basket, the linens hung up askew, the steaming basins), the mix-and-match, gender-ambiguous garments of the workers, and their thin, slouching bodies all participate in the racist stereotype of Asians as dirty, effeminate and alien others. The caption proclaims the product to be “The Last Invention”; the “last” indicates finality, both in terms of modernity as the final stage of history and of a solution to the problem of unwanted immigrants. A group of Chinese male laundry-workers are so taken aback by this product that their pigtails stand in erect consternation. Their reaction stems both from the realization that they must return to China because their services have become unnecessary as well as from pure awe at the invention itself; in both cases, the scenario and its appeal apparently rely on these acts of recognition by the Chinese characters. Furthermore, the advertisement's status as such - merely advertisement - hides the illogicality of the celluloid salesman's presence in the laundry at all. The salesman, wearing a garish plaid suit and a bowler hat, appears to be one of those traveling salesmen who might peddle patent medicines, yet he bears the product eliciting such awe and consternation. Rather than selling the product to the Chinese workers, he appears simply to be taking gratuitous pleasure in introducing the workers to the agent of their impending misfortunes.

The idea of the arranged marriage has always seemed “exotic” yet has fascinated the American public. Recent media coverage of arranged marriages is evident in popular periodicals such as the New York Times Online (August 17, 2000) and Newsweek (March 15, 1999). Foner highlights that the arranged marriage is an example of “the continued impact of premigration cultural beliefs and social practices” that South Asian immigrants have transported to the United States (Foner 1997, 964). She offers an interpretive synthesis by showing that “[n]ew immigrant family patterns are shaped by cultural meanings and social practices that immigrants bring with them from their home countries as well as by social, economic, and cultural forces in the United States” (Foner 2005, 157).

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word “borderland” to refer to the meeting of two cultures, and she defines the borderland as a “place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (n.p.). While Anzaldua's discussion focuses on the borderland encountered by Mexican Americans, she believes that many share this painful experience:

According to the 2000 census, over 12 million Asian Americans, almost 70 percent of them either immigrants who came to the U.S. after 1970 or their children, comprised an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population that was more regionally dispersed throughout the U.S. than ever before. (Lai and Arguelles, 2003). Despite these transitions and increasing heterogeneity, discourses about Asian American communities have focused on ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and Little Saigons where coethnic residents, businesses, services, institutions and organizations exist and interact in urban or suburban physical spaces of the bicoastal United States (Fong, 1994; Li, 1999; Zhou and Bankston, 1988). According to Kathleen Wong (Lau), these tangible markers tied to space are often privileged as authentic Asian American communities while those without demographic concentrations and geographically bound enclaves are “less advanced” communities; as a result, “[w]hat is not recognized in the literature is the ‘localness' of this production.’ [1997:83].

I can't tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can't say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which “I” - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to possess. No words for the blobs of light and shadow shifting or parking before me. No words to rank or relate the garbage - my own memories - blasting against my consciousness, randomly, insistently. Names shouted inside my head - my family, my lover, my own name; places - my hometown in America, the name of the mission hospital I'd eventually find my way to. An eleven-thousand foot mountain rose in front of me. A backpack pulled at my shoulders. A Nepali woman stroked my arm. I had no words to weave any of these into a safety net of story or meaning. All were uncontrollable, unpredictable, stimuli, which somehow, suddenly, had complete, and therefore sinister, power, and struck again and again against - some other thing - me - a thing I couldn't name or inhabit, for I had no words. I remember this sensation now when I want to know what it must have been like for my immigrant mother when, as an eight-year-old Slovak peasant child, she first arrived in America in 1929.

Since the early 1960s, large numbers of Haitians have emigrated from their native island nation. Changes in federal immigration legislation in the 1970s in both the United States and Canada enabled immigrants of colour a facilitated entry into the two countries, and this factor contributed to the arrival of Haitians to the North American continent. These newcomers primarily settled in cities along the eastern seaboard, in Boston, Miami, Montréal and New York. The initial motivator of this two-wave Haitian migration was the extreme political persecution that existed in Haiti under the iron-fisted rule of the Duvalier dictatorships and their secret police (popularly known as the “tontons macoutes”) over a thirty year period from the late 1950s to the mid 1980s.

Although a compelling and award-winning voice in contemporary American literature, the work of Frank Xavier Gaspar (1946-) has not received the attention it deserves. Apart from an article by Alice R. Clemente,(1) to my knowledge, there are no other scholarly publications touching upon his writings, all of which published in the course of the last seventeen years. While his work appeals to all audiences in the United States of America and even abroad — Portugal in particular — his poems dealing with issues related to his ancestral culture and ethnic background are the ones which have sparked the attention of Portuguese Americans. Prompted by Clemente's pioneer article on Gaspar's poetry and prose, in this essay my goal is to touch upon quintessentially Portuguese American issues left unaddressed in her piece. Furthermore, while I view Gaspar as a native-born American writer who resists ethnic tags, his Portuguese American background provided him with relevant materials and — to a certain extent — the impulse for writing. This is evident in his first volume of poems, The Holyoke (1988), where “ethnic signs”(2) loom more forcefully compared to his most recent work, Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004). Although it is possible to detect traces of his ethnic background in all of his published works, in The Holyoke and Leaving Pico, however, these certainly strike the reader in a more forceful manner than in his other three titles.

Recently, my 21 year old son and I returned to California to visit my father, sister and extended Shinagawa clan during the winter holiday season. Three months earlier, my mother had passed away after several years of illness fighting off the twin demons of tuberculosis and pneumonia. My father was recovering slowly from the loss of my mother and my sister was doing her best to keep up his spirits. During the illness and after my mother's passage, a reverend of the local Japanese American Buddhist church helped enormously with the pain, sense of loss, and the need to let go. My father and sister were so impressed with the compassion and dedication of this reverend that they resolved to attend the Buddhist church services from there on out.

This article considers the social and economic conditions under which Creoles of Color left the state of Louisiana from 1920-1940.1 Because Creoles in the years following 1920 were legally reclassified as black, many lost their land, social and legal rights, and access to education as well as the possibility of upward mobility to which they had previously had access when they were accorded the status of a distinct/legal ethnic group. Creole families had to make decisions about the economic, social, religious, and cultural futures of their children and the community as a whole. As a form of resistance to colonial and neocolonial rule, thousands of Creoles left Louisiana, following the pattern established by members of the previous generation who had anticipated the advent and implications of the new legal racial system as far back as the mid to late 1800s and had engaged in the first wave of migration from 1840-1890, moving primarily from rural ethnic enclaves to larger urban cities within the US and to international sites such as Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America where racial lines were more fluid (Gehman, 1994).

Christine Garcia's The Aguero Sisters and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents are novels that revolve around the conflicts and tensions among the members of the two immigrant families, the Aguero sisters from Cuba and the Garcia sisters from the Dominican Republic, arising mainly from their need to come to terms with their ambiguous identities. This article focuses on the ways in which the Aguero and Garcia sisters through their hybrid identities overcome boundaries and exclusive categories so as to challenge homogenizing, hegemonic systems, and open vistas into new, non-essentialist modes of identity that still can be represented in their specific configurations.

Hmong Americans, who came from a pre-literate society and rural background, went through many acculturation barriers and have had many successes between the time they first arrived in 1975 and the year 2000. Their first decade was preoccupied with their struggle to overcome cultural shock and acculturation difficulties. The second decade is their turning point to be new Americans, beginning to run for political office, establish business enterprises, achieve in education, and reduce their high rate of unemployment and welfare participation. Hmong Americans in 2000 appeared to have achieved much, yet have some serious challenges still ahead.

Various scholars have treated ethnic newspapers in the United States as if they all have evolved from an immigrant press.(i) While one may accept their analysis of the functions of the ethnic press, there is a substantial and qualitative difference between newspapers that were built on an immigration base and those that developed from the experience of colonialism and racial oppression. Hispanics were subjected to “racialization”(ii) for more than a century through such doctrines as the Spanish Black Legend and Manifest Destiny during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were conquered and incorporated into the United States and then treated as colonial subjects as is the case of Mexicans in the Southwest and the Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean. Some were incorporated through territorial purchase as was the case of the Hispanics in Florida and Louisiana. (I would also make a case that, in many ways, Cubans and Dominicans also developed under United States domination in the twentieth century.) The subsequent migration and immigration of these peoples to the United States was often directly related to the domination of their homelands by the United States. Their immigration and subsequent cultural perspective on life in the United States, of course, has been substantially different from that of European immigrant groups. Hispanic native or ethnic minority perspective has manifested itself in the political realm, often as an attitude of entitlement to civil and political rights.