America Through Foreign Eyes

America Through Foreign Eyes
Author: Jorge G. Castañeda
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190224495

"Foreigners have been writing about the United States ever since its foundation. Now it is my turn. But please don't hold this against me: the United States itself is at fault. Like a great many people on earth, I've long been fascinated by this remarkable phenomenon which calls itself America. My fate -or perhaps good fortune- has been that of a foreigner who for half a century lived the American experience-as a child, as a student, as an author, as a recurrent visitor and as a university professor. Being Mexican places me in a special category: having lost half its territory to the United States in the 19th century, having found itself caught up in the maelstrom of America's current identity crisis, Mexico can never ignore what happens north of the border. Further, while serving as Mexico's Foreign Minister from 2000 to 2003, I had the privilege of peeping inside the machinery of power that makes this great nation tick. That said, this book is not written from a Mexican perspective but rather from that of a sympathetic foreign critic who has seen the United States from both inside and outside. And its hope is to contribute something to how Americans view themselves and are viewed by the world. Before embarking on this journey, I naturally looked back at some of my forebears, earlier foreigners who were drawn to visit or live in the United States and who then went on to offer their version of America to their home readers. Some like the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the early 19th century classic, Democracy in America, felt European nations had much to learn from the American democratic experiment. Others like Charles Dickens left dismayed by what he considered to be the country's singular obsession with money. But they are just two of dozens who have tried-and continue to try- to find a magic key that unlocks the complexities and contradictions of American society. Indeed, it is as if the United States seeks to challenge foreign writers to explain it, confident they will fail. And in taking it on, these outsiders have variously experienced frustration, hope, anger, excitement, disappointment and enlightenment- but never indifference"--

Bringing Outsiders In

Bringing Outsiders In
Author: Jennifer Hochschild
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2011-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801461979

For immigrants, politics can play a significant role in determining whether and how they assimilate. In Bringing Outsiders In, leading social scientists present individual cases and work toward a comparative synthesis of how immigrants affect—and are affected by—civic life on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as in the United States, large immigrant minority communities have been emerging across Europe. While these communities usually make up less than one-tenth of national populations, they typically have a large presence in urban areas, sometimes approaching a majority. That immigrants can have an even greater political salience than their population might suggest has been demonstrated in recent years in places as diverse as Sweden and France. Attending to how local and national states encourage or discourage political participation, the authors assess the relative involvement of immigrants in a wide range of settings. Jennifer Hochschild and John Mollenkopf provide a context for the particular cases and comparisons and draw a set of analytic and empirical conclusions regarding incorporation.

Learn about the United States

Learn about the United States
Author: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Publisher: Government Printing Office
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2009
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780160831188

"Learn About the United States" is intended to help permanent residents gain a deeper understanding of U.S. history and government as they prepare to become citizens. The product presents 96 short lessons, based on the sample questions from which the civics portion of the naturalization test is drawn. An audio CD that allows students to listen to the questions, answers, and civics lessons read aloud is also included. For immigrants preparing to naturalize, the chance to learn more about the history and government of the United States will make their journey toward citizenship a more meaningful one.

Citizen Outsider

Citizen Outsider
Author: Jean Beaman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2017-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520967445

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different picture. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Jean Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of Maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.

Outsider Citizens

Outsider Citizens
Author: Sarah Relyea
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135488797

Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together Wright and Beauvoir to reveal their common sources and concerns. Relyea's discussion begins with Native Son and then examines Wright's postwar exile in France and his engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis in The Outsider. Beauvoir met Wright during her postwar tour of America, chronicled in America Day by Day. After returning to France, Beauvoir adapted American social constructionist concepts of race as one source for her philosophical investigation of gender in The Second Sex, while also rejecting 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Relyea examines later representations of race and gender in a discussion of James Baldwin's critique of postwar American liberalism and ideals of innocence and masculinity in Giovanni's Room, which represents the remaking of white American identity through the risks of exile and the return of the gaze.

The Outsiders

The Outsiders
Author: S. E Hinton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1967
Genre: Fugitives from justice
ISBN: 9780137012602

Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States

Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States
Author: Avia Pasternak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197541038

"International and domestic laws commonly hold states responsible for their wrongdoings. States pay compensation for their unjust wars, and reparations for their historical wrongdoings. Some argue that states should incur punitive damages for their international crimes. But there is a troubling aspect to these practices: States are corporate agents, comprised of flesh and blood citizens. When the state uses the public purse to finance its corporate liabilities, the burden falls on these citizens, even if they protested against the state's policies, did not know about them, or entirely lacked channels of political influence. How can this "distributive effect" of state-level responsibly be justified? The book develops an answer to this question, which revolves around citizens' participation in their state. It argues that citizenship can be a type of massive collective action, where citizens willingly orient themselves around the authority of their state, and where state policies are the product of this collective action. While most ordinary citizens are not to blame for their participation in their state, they nevertheless ought to accept a share of the remedial obligations that flow from their state's wrongful policies. However, the distributive effect cannot be justified in all states. Specifically, in (some) non-democratic states most citizens are not participating in their state in the full sense, and should not pay for their state's wrongdoings. This finding calls then for a revision of the way we hold states responsible in both the domestic and international levels"--

Migration and Islamic Ethics

Migration and Islamic Ethics
Author: Ray Jureidini
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Asylum, Right of
ISBN: 9789004406407

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement

Turkish National Identity and Its Outsiders

Turkish National Identity and Its Outsiders
Author: Ozlem Goner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-06-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315462966

This book examines the ways in which states and nations are constructed and legitimated through defining and managing outsiders. Focusing on Turkey and the municipality of Dersim – a region that has historically combined different outsider identities, including Armenian, Kurdish, and Alevi identities – the author explores the remembering, transformation and mobilisation of everyday relations of power and the manner in which relationships with the state shape both outsider identities and the conception of the nation itself. Together with a discussion of the recent decade in which the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organisations, the author concentrates on three defining periods of state-outsider relationships – the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as ‘1938’; the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup d’état of 1980; and the rise of the PKK and the ‘state of exception’ in Dersim in the 1990s – to show how outsiders came to be defined as ‘exceptions to the law’ and how they were managed in different periods. Drawing on archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews and focus groups with three consecutive generations, this book offers a historical understanding of relationships of power and struggle as they are actualised and challenged at particular localities and shaped through the making of outsiderness. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and political science, as well as historians.

Conditional Citizens

Conditional Citizens
Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1524747165

A New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.