Elda María Román

Race and Upward Mobility

Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mexican American and African American cultural productions have seen a proliferation of upward mobility narratives: plotlines that describe desires for financial solvency, middle-class status, and social incorporation. Yet the terms "middle class" and "upward mobility"-often associated with assimilation, selling out, or political conservatism-can hold negative connotations in literary and cultural studies. Surveying literature, film, and television from the 1940s to the 2000s, Elda María Román brings forth these narratives, untangling how they present the intertwined effects of capitalism and white supremacy. Race and Upward Mobility examines how class and ethnicity serve as forms of currency in American literature, affording people of color material and symbolic wages as they traverse class divisions. Identifying four recurring character types-status seekers, conflicted artists, mediators, and gatekeepers-that appear across genres, Román traces how each models a distinct strategy for negotiating race and class. Her comparative analysis sheds light on the overlaps and misalignments, the shared narrative strategies, and the historical trajectories of Mexican American and African American texts, bringing both groups' works into sharper relief. Her study advances both a new approach to ethnic literary studies and a more nuanced understanding of the class-based complexities of racial identity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 312
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. November 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 408g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603783
• ISBN-10: 1503603784
• Artikelnr.: 47776224

Autorenporträt

Elda María Román is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction begins by comparing the representations of two
Georges-George Jefferson and George Lopez-on their respective sitcoms, The
Jeffersons (CBS, 1975-1985) and the George Lopez show (ABC, 2002-2007) to
argue that they exemplify the class conflicts and crises of affiliation
that ethnic upward mobility narratives take on. Contextualizing the
discursive histories of African Americans and Mexican Americans in relation
to other racial-ethnic minorities reveals why it is fruitful to compare
these two groups. Next, it segues into discussions of several key concepts
in the book, including the genre of the upward mobility narrative, the
significance of symbolic wages and identity taxes, the relationship between
the identity tax and what sociologists call the "minority culture of
mobility," and debates about ethnic literature and identity labels. It
concludes with an explanation of the four figural types and a chapter
overview.
1Mortgaged Status
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes representations of intragroup class differences in
novels about home ownership by Black writers. It explores how Black social
mobility is portrayed through the pursuit and appraisal of status symbols
in Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (1948), Paule Marshall's Brown Girl,
Brownstones (1959), and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985). These novels
create status-seeking characters who desire houses in certain neighborhoods
to differentiate themselves from others who are racialized and hope
subsequent generations will keep up the monetary, cognitive, and social
payments required to maintain or increase their status, which include
keeping poorer coethnics at a distance and pursuing only profitable
professions. The chapter discusses how these texts develop characters
standing in for ascension through prevailing value systems, alongside
characters trying to imagine alternatives to intragroup stratification and
material accumulation.
2Class Suicide
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 analyzes Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969),
John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), and Oscar Zeta
Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) to discuss how they
imagined mediating characters willing to give up middle-class jobs and
commit what Amílcar Cabral called "class suicide," in order to implement
radical politics informed by Black Power and Chicano movement ideology.
These texts grapple with the question of what kind of relationship
middle-class minority activists could or should have with disenfranchising
institutions such as the government or academia. Written in the nationalist
era-when liberation movements were closely linked with working-class
politics-these novels construct characters wholeheartedly embracing the
revolutionary route or wavering between revolution and institutional reform
to envision ways to work for cross-class social change.
3Cultural Betrayal
chapter abstract
Taking into account how identity groups are formed and maintained, this
chapter focuses on class politics and the use of the figural types in
Chicano cultural production. Since upward mobility is associated with
assimilation, individualism, and materialism, ideals that Chicano
nationalism labored to counter, upward mobility and middle-class status
have been largely overlooked or associated with betrayal in Chicano studies
even as desires to get out of poverty resonate across texts. After
demonstrating how Chicano class politics informs texts even in the
postnationalist period through a reading of the film My Family (1995), this
chapter analyzes Helena María Viramontes's novel Under the Feet of Jesus
(1995) as another text produced in the 1990s that reinforces Chicano
working-class collectivity but depicts upward mobility allegorically. By
doing so, the novel reconciles Chicano movement concerns in the context of
postnationalism, when the Mexican American population was becoming more
economically heterogeneous.
4Status Panic
chapter abstract
This chapter examines mass-market ethnic texts seeking mainstream status
and responding to anxieties about people of color in historically
exclusionary spheres such as workplaces or network television. Attempting
to counter perceptions of Mexican Americans and Blacks as poor and the
middle class as white, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982), the
sitcom George Lopez (2002-2007), Michele Serros's Honey Blonde Chica
(2006), and the sitcom black-ish (2014-present) centralize ethnic and class
conflicts and expand upon what C. Wright Mills termed "status panic." The
reach of these cultural productions signals greater acceptance for their
representations, but the strategies they employ in speaking to the
mainstream and to the history of ethnic politics discloses the conditions
upon which that acceptance rests.
5Racial Investments
chapter abstract
This chapter centers on both the profitability of racial discourses and how
such discourses can be divisive. Among other texts, it analyzes Percival
Everett's novel Erasure (2001) and Lynn Nottage's play Fabulation, or the
Re-Education of Undine (2004) as texts that use satire and the figural
types to highlight the commercial and ideological power of narratives that
conflate race with class and, moreover, that conflate Black poverty with
pathology. In dramatizing the deep investments that individuals and
industries have in Black pathology narratives, they attempt to expand ideas
about ethnic identity to include middle-class experiences, and work to
strengthen group cohesiveness by countering class divisions.
6Switched Allegiances
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the function of narratives depicting characters who
switch allegiances to identify with, rather than against coethnics. First
it examines immigration films taking up this task to counter anti-immigrant
sentiment. The Gatekeeper (2002), Sleep Dealer (2008), and Machete (2010)
are films initially thematizing ethnic betrayal through Mexican American
Border Patrol agents who have distanced themselves professionally and
ideologically from Mexican migrants. By depicting gatekeepers becoming
mediators, they imagine scenarios to integrate outsiders into an affective
community for political purposes. This chapter concludes by demonstrating
that while Mexican American law enforcement figures can get redeemed in
Latino films, if we look at correlating Black characters in film-Black
police officers depicted as sellouts-the option of redemption gets
foreclosed, except in the case of Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield
(1994).
Epilogue
chapter abstract
The preceding chapters traced the historical circumstances contributing to
the development of figures and plotlines used to render and work through
class and racial conflicts. They demonstrated how the figural types serve
as allegorical pathways of social incorporation, exemplifying ways of
dealing with race and class and dramatizing how economic and social group
boundaries are formed, reinforced, or permeated. The epilogue recounts the
patterns associated with each of the character types and ends with a
reading of the film The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) to demonstrate how the
film, as a post-race fantasy about class mobility, stands as a
countercurrent to all the texts examined throughout the book.