Each year in the United States, millions of mass-produced greeting cards proclaim their occasional messages: "For My Loving Daughter," "On the Occasion of Your Marriage," and "It's a Boy " For more than 150 years, greeting cards have tapped into and organized a shared language of love, affection, and kinship, becoming an integral part of American life and culture. Contemporary incarnations of these emotional transactions performed through small bits of decorated paper are often dismissed as vacuous cliches employing worn-out stereotypes. Nevertheless, the relationship of greeting cards to...

Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun--entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging.

The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and...

Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun--entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging.

The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and...

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to--and making money for--a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the highly charged lyrics, public battles, and hard, fast lifestyles that characterize the genre have incited the anger of many public figures and proponents of "family values." Constantly engaging questions of black identity and race relations, poverty and wealth, gangsta rap represents one of the most...

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to--and making money for--a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the highly charged lyrics, public battles, and hard, fast lifestyles that characterize the genre have incited the anger of many public figures and proponents of "family values." Constantly engaging questions of black identity and race relations, poverty and wealth, gangsta rap represents one of the most...

In this new work, Linda Espana-Maram analyzes the politics of popular culture in the lives of Filipino laborers in Los Angeles's Little Manila, from the 1920s to the 1940s. The Filipinos' participation in leisure activities, including the thrills of Chinatown's gambling dens, boxing matches, and the sensual pleasures of dancing with white women in taxi dance halls sent legislators, reformers, and police forces scurrying to contain public displays of Filipino virility. But as Espana-Maram argues, Filipino workers, by flaunting "improper" behavior, established niches of autonomy where they...