[Review of] Raymond L. Hall (Ed.). Ethnic Autonomy -- Comparative Dynamics: The Americas, Europe and the Developing World

Hall has done us a service in putting together this wide-ranging collection of essays on ethnic separatist movements. The volume is particularly timely because of the twentieth century paradoxes of the drive for global unity and nationalism, and nationalism and a blossoming of ethnic separatist movements. (The book is not unique. See, 6.9. Chester L. Hunt and Lewis Walker, Ethnic Dynamics: Patterns of Intergroup Relations in Various Societies, Learning Publications, Inc., 1979.

Critique [of Ethical Problems in Evaluation Research]

“Ethical Problems in Evaluation Research” by Elisabeth J. Johnson summarizes some of the salient ethical concerns in social science research such as the relative positions of power between researcher and subject, confidentiality and privacy, and “political interests” or the use of research findings by sponsors. The author concludes with proposals and cautions; of special relevance to readers of this journal is Kelman’s “participatory research” which enables people being studied to participate in the research design and implementation

[Review of] Harold K. Schneider, The Africans: an Ethnological Account

Schneider’s The Africans offers a provocative interpretation of African society. Unlike other introductory texts, Schneider is not concerned with an exhaustive or even representative survey of African life; rather, his concern is to put forth a non-Marxist social-cultural-economic theory of African society which would provide a broad analytical framework. He succeeds in sketching, in this comparatively slim volume, a sweeping new view of African society. (Cf., G. P. Murdock, Africa, Its Peoples and Their Culture History, New York, 1959; James L. Gibbs, Jr., ed., Peoples of Africa, New York, 1965; Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin, Africa and Africans, Garden City, New York, 1971; and Lucy Mair, African Societies, Cambridge, 1974.

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

Oral History and the Writing of Ethnic History: A Reconnaissance into Method and Theory

While ethnic historians have utilized oral history for a number of years, in varying degrees of sophistication, few have addressed themselves to the methodological problem of oral history as a tool for recovering history or the theoretical problem of what constitutes history which oral history proposes to answer. The intent of this paper is a modest one. It synthesizes the scattered body of literature on oral history method and seeks to show that oral history is not only method, but also is theory, in the loose sense of the word, and a way of conceptualizing history. The paper, therefore, is mainly concerned with the writing of history-particularly ethnic history-and is neither a primer on how to set up an ethnic oral history program nor a critical analysis of existing ones or the extant literature in ethnic studies. It is an essay on the writing of history and oral history as method and theory and is a reminder of oral history\u27s significance to ethnic history. Alternative Link Here

Letter of Support for Asian American Studies

Letter from Gary Y. Okihiro, professor of History and Director of Cornell University's Asian American Studies Program, addressed to Dean Ekland-Olson in support of the proposal for the establishment of an Asian American Studies Program at UT.Asian American Studie