Recent studies about resistance music in the United States primarily focus on the hip-hop movement. However, it does not offer the only musical discourse contesting contemporary injustices. Even though the debate about hip-hop is a crucial one that deserves full attention, it seems necessary to widen the current conversation on music to take into account a wider array of musical genres and artists. This will in turn allow us to see the revolutionary power of music in its full force. In the United States, black music, from the Spirituals to Rhythm and Blues, has undeniably been a potent agent for social change. Because they enable strangers to identify with each other through a common discourse, songs from many different genres have fostered what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities.”

Charles Townsend's 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison's stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O'Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is “key to this capital farce,” and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert's spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O'Wang, the main character's background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring.

As a constructed category of human difference, ‘ethnicity’ has given way to ‘culture’ in its shared genealogy in the new millennium. Public knowledge about such phenomena as ‘ethnic cleansing’, debates on immigration, and the use of ethnicity as both a dependent and independent variable in research and policy are central realities in the domestic and foreign policies of many nations. The social psychology of group affiliation, nationalism, and the use of ethnicity (as well as gender) in workplace diversity, or the deployment of ethnicity in electoral politics continues to perplex and complicate human social interaction.

In an urban neighborhood with a large Jewish population near my home, there is an Arabic restaurant. Name, menu and ownership mark its ethnic identification, yet its politics are otherwise obscured. An American flag, permanently placed in the restaurant's window since 9/11, greets American customers with a message of reconciliation. I am one of you, it says: come; eat; you are welcome here. In a climate where “Arabs, Arab-Americans and people with Middle Eastern features, everywhere are struggling to merely survive the United States' aggressive drive to ‘bring democracy to the Middle East'’ (Elia 160) and where the hostility toward Arab Americans is manifest in covert “othering” and aggressive acts of surveillance, detainment and bodily harm, the steady bustle of my neighborhood eatery is of consequence.

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

In this opening issue of volume 31 we are presented with both nuanced and bold entry into several long enduring issues and topics stitching together the interdisciplinary fabric comprising ethnic studies. The authors of these articles bring to our attention social, cultural and economic issues shaping lively discourse in ethnic studies. They also bring to our attention interpretations of the meaning and significance of ethnic cultural contributions to the social history of this nation - past and present.