Between Melting Pot And Mosaic

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, University of Groningen, language: English, abstract: The paper is about Canadian and American immigration policies. It discusses differences, commonalities and such. Which country has the better immigration system? Over the last decade, the Canadian mosaic and the American melting pot have emerged in North American as concepts to explain Canada’s and America’s angle towards immigration and cultural pluralism. While many Canadians view the American melting pot as the total opposite of the mosaic, the two ideologies have much in common while examining the everyday realities of cultural pluralism in North America. In the following my intension is to illustrate on which concepts both immigration policies are based on, under which circumstances immigrants are allowed to move to the US and Canada by comparing the two immigration procedures, what the distinctive features between them are and in how far they are able to keep their promises towards new immigrants by looking at critics.

Author note: Andrés Torres is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Labor Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

First Published in 2004. This book provides a novel understanding of current thought and enquiry in the study of popular culture and communications media. The populist sentiments and impulses underlying cultural studies and its postmodernist variants are explored and criticized sympathetically. An exclusively consumptionist trend of analysis is identified and shown to be an unsatisfactory means of accounting for the complex material conditions and mediations that shape ordinary people’s pleasures and opportunities for personal and political expression. Through detailed consideration of the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and ‘the Birmingham School’, John Fiske, youth subcultural analysis, popular television study, and issues generally concerned with public communication (including advertising, arts and broadcasting policies, children’s television, tabloid journalism, feminism and pornography, the Rushdie affair, and the collapse of communism), Jim McGuigan sets out a distinctive case for recovering critical analysis of popular culture in a rapidly changing, conflict-ridden world. The book is an accessible introduction to past and present debates for undergraduate students, and it poses some challenging theses for postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers.

Preface from The Vertical Mosaic THIS BOOK is an attempt to examine the hitherto unexplored subjects of social class and power in Canadian society. However, because no one volume can present a total picture of a modern society, or even of some aspect of that society, there is much that is left unsaid in this study, and many fascinating paths that remain for later investigations. I have tried to suggest some of those which time and resources did not permit me to take. The class and power structure of a modern society arouses a great deal of interest. For example, there is the ethical consideration that class differences appear to contradict those values of a democratic society which emphasize equality. Another reason for the interest is psychological: people have ambivalent feelings about power; that is, men of power are respected, idolized, and often endowed with magical qualities, but as well they are viewed with suspicion, as conspirators against the public good. In the middle of the twentieth century there is also the more practical concern that only the ablest people get into top positions, for, at a time marked by keen international competition, no society can rely on a system of privilege as the basis of recruitment to the higher occupational levels. A system of privilege exists where higher occupational levels are preserved, or tend to be preserved, for particular social groups. Where privilege does exist it may be traced to differences in educational opportunity. Consequently, most modern industrial societies have introduced policies to democratize their educational systems, and so help to bring about more equality of opportunity and at the same time to increase the amount of trained ability that is available. At the level of institutional leadership, that is, of elite groups, it is even more crucial that there be no impediments to people of ability getting to the top. Class can be one such obstacle because it seriously impedes the development of skills in persons having initial talent. Those attracted to the subject of power by the "inside dope" that is often found in newspapers and popular magazines will be disappointed with this study. I have included little information that is not readily available to any other researcher. The benefit that I have received from discussions with powerful men is not that I can tell secrets about them, for that has not been my intent, but rather that I have become better oriented to the structures within which these men work. My academic colleagues may be disappointed that I have not presented extensive case studies of particular decisions which elites have made. Valuable and necessary to the understanding of power as such studies might be, my interest has been to look at the institutional context within which decisions are made and to learn something of the type of men who make them. However, I do refer frequently to important decisions, and in the last chapter I try to show how elites co-operate or come into conflict in reaching them. There are many places in this analysis of class and power where I have regretted the inadequacy of the data to give fuller support to the qualified assertions which I have made. Data rarely come in just the form we should like to receive them. Where appropriate I have drawn attention to the tentativeness of the conclusions which must stand as hypotheses for further testing in future investigations. Furthermore, data can be interpreted in different ways according to the theories which investigators use and the values which they hold. Throughout the book I have tried to make explicit the various theories or theoretical considerations about class and power in society which help to make sense of the evidence I have presented. Perhaps less explicit are personal values which have had an influence on the kinds of problems I have sought to analyze. I attach great importance to equality of opportunity on both ethical and practical grounds. I am aware of the criticisms which have been made of the possible development of meritocracies, but I am not convinced that recent extensions of opportunity, particularly in education, are having a detrimental effect on individuals or societies. I believe strongly, too, in the creative role of politics, and in the importance of political institutions as the means through which the major goals of the society can be achieved. Where these values have influenced my interpretation of the facts will, I think, be clear to the reader. In a society which is made up of many cultural groups there is usually some relationship between a person's membership in these groups and his class position and, consequently, his chances of reaching positions of power. Because the Canadian people are often referred to as a mosaic composed of different ethnic groups, the title, "The Vertical Mosaic," was originally given to the chapter which examines the relationship between ethnicity and social class. As the study proceeded, however, the hierarchical relationship between Canada's many cultural groups became a recurring theme in class and power. For example, it became clear that the Canadians of British origin have retained, within the elite structure of the society, the charter group status with which they started out, and that in some institutional settings the French have been admitted as a co-charter group whereas in others they have not. The title, "The Vertical Mosaic," therefore seemed to be an appropriate link between the two parts of the book. -- John Porter, Carleton University, January 1965

For the first time told in its entirety, the social and cultural experience of New York's Lower East Side comes vividly to life in this book as that of a huge and complex laboratory ever swelled and fed by migrant flows and ever animated by a high-voltage tension of daily research and resistance - the fascinating history of the historical immigrant quarter that, in Manhattan, stretches between East 14th Street, East River, the access to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Lafayette Street. Irish and Germans at first, then Chinese and Italians and East European Jews, and finally Puerto Ricans gave birth, in its streets and sweatshops, cafés and tenements, to a lively multi-ethnic and cross-cultural community, which was at the basis of several modern artistic expressions, from literature to cinema, from painting to theatre. The book, based upon a rich wealth of historical materials (settlement reports, autobiographies, novels, newspaper articles) and on first-hand experience, explores the many different aspects of this long history from the late 19th century years to nowadays: the way in which immigrants reacted to the new environment and entered a fruitful dialectics with America, the way in which they reorganized their lives and expectations and struggled to defend a collective identity against all disintegrating factors, the way in which they created and disseminated cultural products, the way in which they functioned as a gigantic magnet attracting several outside artists and intellectuals. The book thus has a long introduction detailing the present situation and mainly depicting the realities within the Chinese and Puerto Rican communities and the fight against gentrification, six chapters on the Lower East Side's past history (its social and cultural geography, the relationship among the several different communities, the labor situation, the literary output, the development of an ethnic theatre, the neighborhood's influences upon turn-of-the-century American culture in the fields of sociology, photography, art, literature and cinema), and a conclusion summing up past and present and discussing the main aspects of a Lower East Side aesthetics.

These essays include writings from Cornel West, Michael Omi, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua and Michelle Fine. The essays address the multiplicity and scope of oppressions ranging from ableism to racism and other less-well known social aberrations.

Canada's policy of multiculturalism has been the object of ongoing debate since it was first introduced in 1971. Decades later, Canadians still seem uncertain about the meaning of multiculturalism. Detractors insist that government has not succeeded in discouraging immigrants and their descendants from preserving their cultures of origin, undercutting a necessary identification with Canada, while supporters argue that immigrant groups' abilities to influence their adjustments to Canada has strengthened their sense of belonging. Beyond what often seems to be a polarized debate is a broad spectrum of opinion around multiculturalism in Canada and what it means to be Canadian. The Multiculturalism Question analyzes the policy, ideology, and message of multiculturalism. Several of Canada's leading thinkers provide valuable insights into a crucial debate that will inevitably continue well into the future.