INVENTING AMERICA: ETHNIC IDENTITY AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE

Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction. By Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: New York University Press, 2006. x + 301 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, appendix, and index. $70.00 (cloth); $21.00 (paper).

Alien Encounter: Popular Culture in Asian America. Edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. vi + 365 pp. Table, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).


Tasha Oren
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Our contemporary sense of globalization and its various mobilities (of capital, media, home, and cultural communities) has helped shape a popular reevaluation of what it means to be an immigrant and a cultural consumer. The American melting pot fantasy is running out of steam. Yet in the realm of popular culture, racial and ethnic influences and tensions mingle with globe-traversing commodities, practices, traditions, and cutting-edge technologies. As people organize their experiences according to their cultural affinities, how is the meeting of nation and culture reconfigured? How do such transformations help us make sense of racial, ethnic, and institutional relations of power? Two timely books take up these questions from complementary angles to offer focused consideration of how popular culture is made by and through ethnic differences and struggles.