- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Over 500,000 migrants from Portugal to the US span the complexities of Portuguese history and society The earliest were Sephardic Jews fleeing from Brazil to New Amsterdam (New York) (1624). Later, migrants from the islands of the Azores and Cape Verdes became attached to New England coastal fishing towns and the codfish industry Humberto Medeiros, a Portuguese American, later became Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. Bishop C.R. “Daddy” Grace, a Cape Verdean, became a charismatic black religious leader from the 1930s until his death in 1960. Portugal has also proven one of the most active European nations in post-1965 immigration.
Industry:Culture
PACs are political organizations that collect money, either from their members or the general public, and redistribute it to political candidates or parties that support their interests. Although some form of political action committee probably existed as early as the late 1940s (the Committee on Political Education is considered one such early example), PACs were only formally authorized with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974. There are two types of PACs: segregated fund PACs, which are allowed to collect money only from their members, and non-connected PACs, which raise their money from the voting public. PACs in modern American politics represent a wide variety of interests, ranging from environmental groups to conservative religious churches to pro-choice advocates.
PACs increase democratic participation in that they allow their members and contributors to effect political decision-making, at least indirectly, but their influence on the democratic process has become extremely controversial. For one thing, like political lobbyists more generally they are often suspected of subverting the public good for sectarian ends. Thus PACs representing occupational groups such as teachers or lawyers find themselves accused of directing legislation to the advantage of their members’ interests but to the detriment of the public good. Moreover, as their influence has grown, and more particularly as their monetary contributions have skyrocketed, they have helped increase the importance of fundraising generally As a result, professional politicians must now spend much of their time and energy raising money to help finance their campaigns, at least if they wish to be elected or to stay in office. This obviously reduces the amount of time and attention they can devote to the actual business of the legislature. It also raises the question of to whom, exactly the politician is beholden: the general public, or the special-interest PACs that provide the bulk of the campaign’s financial support? A related issue arose in the 1990s with the advent of so-called “soft money.” In an effort to reduce the importance played by money in politics, particularly in campaign advertising, some legislatures attempted to place restrictions on the amount that a candidate could spend in a campaign. However, as long as they advertised not directly for a particular candidate but for some issue or set of issues, special-interest groups such as PACs could spend unlimited amounts of money. These so-called “soft-money” expenditures seemed to allow campaigns to subvert the intent of the restrictions with highly charged and often partisan ads. In the 1996 federal congressional campaigns, for example, the AFL-CIO spent millions of dollars attacking Republican candidates.
Moreover, whereas candidates must account to the Federal Election commission for all of the money that they spend within their campaigns, PACs are not always under such requirements.
As with political lobbying more generally however, there are constitutional issues relating to freedom of speech and of assembly that have hampered most attempts to curtail the influence of soft money and of PACs more generally. As a result, many potential candidates for public office in modern American politics are judged on their viability that is whether and how well they can raise PAC and other special-interest money. This has only contributed to a growing cynicism about the ability of some private groups and individuals to “buy” politicians in order to determine public policy.
Industry:Culture
Part of a long-term effort to dislodge communists from the Western Hemisphere, President Reagan’s 1984 invasion of Grenada was ostensibly undertaken to rescue American medical students studying on the Caribbean island following the overthrow of Maurice Bishop’s government. The major concern, however, was the building of the Point Salines airport by Cubans. Instability came to the island following a coup by General Hudson Austin, one consequence of the US blockade that had weakened the Bishop government, and forced him to turn increasingly to Castro for aid. The invasion was a diplomatically difficult mission as Grenada was a former British colony and the assault was condemned by the United Nations. But it proved an easy operation even for the Pentagon at that time; the US Army quickly deposed Austin and established a new government. It also established new limits on media coverage which would create problems for the flow of information in the Gulf War. The medical students were saved, too.
Industry:Culture
Part of the lingering nightmare of Vietnam in American consciousness has been the silence and uncertainty about those who were imprisoned and those who did not return.
While every global war has resulted in these missing friends and loved ones (hence, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), a general sense of a lack of resolution kept alive beliefs of Americans left behind in Southeast Asia decades after formal withdrawal, and made this a major political issue in 1990s campaigns. This was exacerbated by mass media portrayals like Rambo II (1985) and continual rumors of secret POW camps. Government investigations and technological cooperation with the Vietnamese government, anxious for increased recognition and investment, have generally alleviated the intense anxiety and distrust this issue once aroused. Pete Peterson, the first American ambassador to a united Vietnam, is himself a former POW; his office has worked actively with the Vietnamese government to find and repatriate the remains of roughly five servicemen every other month.
Industry:Culture
Pastoral ideals embodied in the stately mansions of Jefferson and Washington created a baronial relationship to the landscape difficult to replicate in mass housing. Yet the cultural ideal of the private, detached home, its domestic and public spaces, scarcely ends at the door. A well-tended grass front lawn, for example, became the ornament of American homes after the Civil War. Its setback from the streets shapes a characteristic American urban residential geography: lawns, sweeping or minute, landscaped with trees, bushes, ornaments and fences but often left to flow as a green sward along the street. This green sea reached its acme in suburban developments demanding one- to five-acre lots.
Lawns are simultaneously private and public display spaces with their own technologies and investments, ranging from the lawn mower—pushed, powered or ridden—to chemicals and irrigation that create grass in deserts, at the cost of ecology and energy.
In cities, especially in working-class neighborhoods, this lawn abuts on places of semi-private sociability engaging windows, porches, stoops and alleyways that mesh street and home (as in Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing). As suburbs sprawled, these front areas became engulfed and isolated by the gaping lawn—vestigial spaces for guests, vendors and other callers.
“Back” spaces are rather different. Urban homes may have sheltered gardens, service porches or multipurpose yards (with kitchens or bathrooms). In postwar suburbia, backyards grew in size, physical features and equipment to integrate them into the home and to extend domestic life into the healthy outdoors. Concrete or flagstone patios and wooden decks, connected to living areas by glass doors, epitomized a “California” style (associated with Richard Neutra), copied even in less welcoming climates. Barbeques, redwood, wicker, wrought-iron or plastic lawn furniture and children’s play sets convert the yard into an entertainment area for summer holidays, while flower and vegetable gardens provide hobbies and occasional resources. After the war, even swimming pools came within the reach of the middle-class home, especially in the Sunbelt.
These outdoor yet domestic areas have become common backdrops for family comedies on television and in movies (especially when male characters take over the gendered tasks of outdoor cooking). Landscaping and fences ensure familial boundaries and privacy as well as security for children, invited guests and pets. While some backyards are connected from house to house, shared outdoor spaces are more likely to be found in parks, around schools and at country clubs.
Apartment houses, motels, office parks and even urban housing complexes have came to provide similar outdoor spaces: balconies, tiny patios and community-access gardens allow some negotiated privacy. Yet, these developments also create public/private outdoor spaces for a casual American community whether poolside conversations or structured neighborhood events. Nonetheless, such outdoor spaces (sometimes indoors) often generate noise and conflict.
Since the 1980s, New Urbanism has championed the porch and yard as spaces of sociability Urbanists have also played with attaching aban-doned urban-spaces to nearby homes and institutions to create a fabric of domesticated nature in the city. Yet the dialectic of public and private, individual ownership and community, are continually played out in complicated ways in these interstices of home and nature.
Industry:Culture
People of South-Asian origin living in the United States have emigrated mostly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. Some scholars of South Asia also include Burma and Tibet in this group, while others see them as being part of East and Southeast Asia. Immigration to the United States from South Asia can be divided into two main phases. The early phase, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s, was marked by the arrival in California of immigrant farmers and laborers from the state of Punjab in India. Initially absorbed into the economy as cheap labor, these Punjabi farmers made significant contributions to the development of large-scale agribusiness in California. This was the period during which the immigration laws in the US discriminated against Asian immigration. Many of the Punjabi men, who had arrived single in America, married Mexican women leading to the creation of that awkward category of people called “Mexican Hindus.” Members of the PunjabiMexican second generation imbibed both cultures, but defined themselves consciously as Americans.
The second phase of South-Asian immigration to the US was ushered in by changes in the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965. Large numbers of Indians started entering the country as, for the first time, a person’s right to enter the United States did not depend on race. The new Act allowed people with skills to immigrate and, subsequently professionals from various countries took advantage of the legal welcome.
By 1995 there were approximately 1 million Asian Indians, constituting the largest group among South Asians in the United States. The post-1965 immigrants came from different parts of South Asia, but still predominantly from India and, particularly from the states of Gujarat, Punjab and the four Southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Those with professional educational training took advantage of opportunities in medicine, engineering, business management and computer science, and established themselves as the group with the highest annual income in the US; many others set up successful businesses in New York City, NY, Chicago, IL and California. Besides nostalgia and memory strong socio-economic and cultural investments link the new immigrants with their countries of origin. In the new economic regime of liberalization in South Asia, national governments, eager for investments from South Asians abroad, are seeking to create a favorable atmosphere by speaking of transnational communities and unified diasporic entities. Satellite television, video and the Internet have accelerated the pace of cultural exchanges between the parent country and the diaspora.
South-Asian Americans, as one of the more economically successful groups in the United States, have turned their attention and resources to establishing several religious and cultural centers of distinctively South Asian origin. Hindu temples, Islamic community centers, Sikh gurudwaras, ethnic churches and electronic communication links have enabled the establishment and maintenance of thriving diasporic communities.
While participation in the political life of the US has been limited to fundraising and small-town politics, many South-Asian organizations in the US are known to sponsor actively a range of political activities in South Asia. Right-wing Hindu political formations in India as well as Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Pakistan enjoy considerable support from their respective diasporic communities.
Presently the South-Asian community in America is engaged in a fascinating intergenerational negotiation about identity and other cultural values. While an unambiguous “Indian” or “Sri Lankan” identity was crucial for their parents’ selfdefinitions, the second generation of South Asians seems comfortably to embrace hyphenated identities, calling themselves American with an “In-dian” or “Sri Lankan” background or origin. Among children of Indian origin, for example, “Indianness” is not foregrounded in their self-perceptions, and there seem to be divergent understandings of what it means. Many respect their heritage and even don’t hesitate to flaunt it in the new multicultural marketplace of ethnic America. Racial identity is as much a reality to them as it has been for their parents, although, unlike their parents’ hesitant approach to matters of race, the second generation South-Asian Americans engage with race much more explicitly and confidently. Race, ethnicity class, religion, language, gender and sexuality are some of the components of their identities that shape their perceptions of who they are and how they like to be perceived by others.
Industry:Culture
Performance art is surprisingly difficult to define. It requires that an artist perform an action over time (even if very brief), either in a public or a private place, with or without an audience present, which may or may not be documented photographically or by other means. Performance art thus lacks the stylistic continuity of such avant-garde artistic movements as abstract expressionism or pop art. Nevertheless, performance in one form or another has appeared in relation to every post-1945 avant-garde movement (critic Harold Rosenberg even referred to the abstract expressionist’s canvas as an arena). It has included participatory multimedia events such as Allan Kaprow’s “happenings” of the late 1950s and Carolee Schnee-man’s erotic rituals of the 1960s. Extreme events include Chris Burden having himself shot in the arm and Vito Acconci masturbating while hidden under a gallery floor, in the early 1970s, and Karen Finley’s impassioned feminist theatrical monologues of the 1980s. There are also more familiar events, such as versions of dance or stand-up comedy which have been incorporated into art contexts.
In the American art world, performance art was most influential in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some performance artists were concerned with the reintroduction of ritual into aesthetic experience; some used performance to bring art and activism together.
Others developed from minimalism an interest in experience as embodied, and from both minimalism and conceptual art a concern with the production of meaning as a participatory process. In this regard, performance art appeared as a critical response to formalist, modernist orthodoxy, which required that art seek autonomy from social reality The strongest work from the period, by feminist artists and others including Acconci and Burden, brought into question normative assumptions about relations between public and private realms of behavior. At the same time, these boundaries were being tested by the counterculture, the women’s liberation movement, the continuation of the civil rights struggle and protests against the Vietnam War.
Industry:Culture
Performances based on cross-dressing, elaborated by celebrity imitations, lip-synching and ironic touches. Both males and females participate (although women’s representations of the other often underscore the limited ornaments and gestures of American masculinity). Such performances often raise questions about both gender and sexuality. They have become political statements in gay rights settings (e.g. the Gay Pride Parade of San Francisco, CA), but also attract mixed audiences. Indeed, they have become increasingly mainstream through events like Wig-stock, celebrities like Ru Paul, performance pieces by Lily Tomlin and other actors and even crossdressing vignettes by celebrities like New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or basketball star Dennis Rodman.
Movie depictions range from the comic (T0 Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, 1995) to documentary explorations of subcultures where race, class and sexuality are questioned Paris is Burning, 1990)
Industry:Culture
Perhaps no other urbanist innovation of American society in the twentieth century has gained such global interest—and critical opprobrium—as the “mall,” where the automobile, suburbanization and affluent consumerism converge. Yet, America’s variegated shopping complexes have now been replicated globally even in American (and other) urban centers. Malls, in addition, have become shapers of American life cycles.
Yet they remain simulacra—“Americas” in which the “other,” like bad weather, can be excluded and consumerism exalted.
Shopping centers emerged nationwide in the 1920s, via planned developments near Baltimore, MD, Cleveland, OH, and Kansas City and Northeastern train-based centers that also facilitated parking. Many were service-oriented, offering food stores, pharmacies, banks and perhaps a cinema or restaurant. This has remained the primary role of many “neighborhood” shopping centers, large and small, mushrooming at major intersections for drive-by errands. Yet, suburban consumers also attracted larger businesses, especially department stores, which established branches in automotive centers as well. Soon, these subsidiaries competed with downtowns, offering longer hours, convenience and class segregation of clienteles.
As suburbia grew, so did shopping centers. Victor Gruen Associates constructed the first enclosed two-story pedestrian malls at Southdale, near Minneapolis, MN, in 1955.
Malls later became differentiated in terms of their draw—local, regional and megaregional (Greater Philadelphia, PA’s mammoth King of Prussia has eight magnet stores in multiple buildings). As they grew, malls added attractions and services—food courts (with franchised food), movie cineplexes, office parks, theme parks, civic services and even hotels.
By the 1960s, downtowns not only competed with but imitated malls, as in Detroit, MI’s Renaissance Center or Chicago, IL’s multi-story Water Tower Place. Cities later found they could sell history or culture in festival marketplaces like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or add malls to train stations and airports. Less conscious “malling” expanded in the 1980s as franchised stores and styles transformed older urban neighborhoods like SoHo, where Eddie Bauer, Prada and Pottery Barn occupy historic storefronts. The latest urban innovations include multi-story amusement malls like Disney Quest and high-tech centers by Sony and Nike.
Suburban shopping has also diversified. Giant outlet malls—anchored by manufacturers, discount sales and department store remainders—compete with both downtowns and upscale malls for a range of consumers. New immigrants, Asian and Latino, have constructed ethnic shopping centers/malls, especially in the Sunbelt. Yet conspicuous omissions include the long-term absence of new shopping complexes in Harlem, NY and South Central Los Angeles, CA.
Meanwhile, malls have reshaped American behavior. For many they offer one-stop anytime family outings, escaping bad weather outside. Malls cater to children with stores and holiday events—showcasing Santa Claus (once the domain of downtown department stores), and, in the 1990s, “safe” Halloween. In American mass media, mall life and teenagers are inseparable. Where 1950s movies featured teens at drive-in movies and restaurants, by the 1990s cars would be parked (or kids dropped off) outside malls. Sales of music, clothes, food and entertainment have recast suburban social life and dilemmas like teen shoplifting. For elderly consumers, malls offer social outings and secure exercise space (mallwalks).
Urbanist and media analyses of malls often prove harsh (Sorkin 1992; Clueless, 1995), belying the consumption that sustains ever more centers. Yet malls are not vital new public spaces either; their managements limit free speech, political actions and entry supported by federal courts. Malls also create problematic built environments in their reliance on automobiles and highways (with mega-malls so large one can drive “within” them), especially when, in local or national recession, one must ask what to do with a dead mall. Ultimately,, the most serious problems arise when the mall, as a shrine to consumerism, becomes a metaphor for education, belief, politics or identity. Yet this is not intrinsic to the mall itself, but to the society that finds its pleasures and reflections there.
Industry:Culture
Personal goods multinational founded in 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio for the manufacture of candles and soap. Intensive advertising has made its products household staples, from Ivory Soap (1879) moving through Crisco shortening (1923), detergents (Tide, 1946), toothpaste (Crest, 1955), Pampers disposable diapers (1961) and other products that have kept baby boomers clean, healthy sweet-smelling and good-looking. Indeed, P&G is famous for creating brands competing against its own products—producing not only Tide but Cheer, Dash, Bold, Era and Oxydol as well as many subtypes of each to keep the consumer constantly involved. P&G also pioneered sponsorship of radio cooking shows and soap operas, which cemented its loyal fan/consumer base. Consumers now reach 5 billion worldwide, with P&G operations in seventy countries and profits of $3.7 billion on $37 billion in sales in 1998. Despite its wholesome image, P&G has been attacked for the environmental impact of its products and the need for cleanliness it sells. Its star and moon logo, inherited from its candle-making days, was also briefly and erroneously identified as a Satanic symbol.
Industry:Culture
