East Meets Black

An interrogation of the harmful, binary stereotypes leveled against black and Asian men

East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and black men, confronting this important white stratagem to secure class and racial privilege, wealth, and status in the post-civil rights era. Indeed Asian and black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional. Through this opposition in the US racial hierarchy, Chong Chon-Smith argues that Asian and black men are positioned along binaries brain/body, diligent/lazy, nerd/criminal, culture/ genetics, student/convict, and technocrat/athlete--in what he terms "racial magnetism." Via this concept, East Meets Black traces the national conversations that oppose black and Asian masculinities, but also the Afro-Asian counterpoints in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures. Chon-Smith highlights the spectacle and performance of baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki within global multiculturalism and the racially coded controversy between Yao Ming and Shaquille O'Neal in transnational basketball. Further, he assesses the prominence of martial arts buddy films such as Romeo Must Die and Rush Hour that produce Afro-Asian solidarity in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Finally, Chon-Smith explores how the Afro-Asian cultural fusions in hip-hop open up possibilities for the creation of alternative subcultures, to disrupt myths of black pathology and the Asian model minority. In this first interdisciplinary book on Asian and black masculinities in literature and popular culture, Chon-Smith explores the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which the formation of Asian and black racial masculinity has affected contemporary America.

Shortlisted for a TASTE CANADA - Food Writing Award in the Regional/Cultural Cookbooks category. In February 2010, Conde Nast Traveler magazine declared Metro Vancouver home to the best Chinese food in the world. While foodies flock to the city for dumplings and dim sum, they leave having discovered a wealth of world-class Asian dishes, from sushi to sambar, banh mi to bubble tea. Almost one in five of Vancouver's two million residents is ethnically Chinese, and the city supports more than four hundred Chinese restaurants. Other Vancouverites bring with them the cuisines of their onetime homes in Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam or India. The first book of its kind, East Meets West is a celebration of the city's Asian food and a mouthwatering compilation of distinctive dishes from its most talented -- but often unheralded -- kitchens. Veteran food writer Stephanie Yuen brings together a collection of recipes showcasing both traditional Asian foods made with fresh ingredients from the Pacific Northwest Coast and modern classics inspired by Asian flavours and techniques. With an introduction to the history of Asian food in Vancouver, and profiles of the city's most exciting eateries -- many of them hidden gems, elusive to the uninitiated -- East Meets West is a delicious glimpse into one of the most complex and fascinating culinary landscapes in the world.

Understanding the political and socio-economic factors which give rise to youth recruitment into militant organizations is central to grasping some of the most important issues that affect the contemporary Middle East and Africa. In this book, Khalid Mustafa Medani explains why youth are attracted to militant organizations, examining the specific role economic globalization plays in determining how and why militant activists emerge. Based on extensive fieldwork, Medani offers an in-depth analysis of the impact of globalization, neoliberal reforms and informal economic networks on the rise and evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movements. In an original contribution to the study of Islamist and ethnic politics, he shows the importance of understanding when and under what conditions religious rather than other forms of identity become politically salient. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Bringing together cultural, economic and social historians from across Europe and beyond, this volume offers a consideration from a number of perspectives of the principal forces that further integrated the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe during the first century of industrialisation. The essays not only review and analyse the commercial, financial and monetary factors, negative as well as positive, that bore upon the region's initial stages of modern transformation, but also provide a ready introduction to major aspects the economy and society of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The outcome is a broad ranging consideration of how all these issues played a fundamental role in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Turkey as a modern state with links to both east and west.

This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

This book presents the first comprehensive overview of the Black Sea region in the prehistoric period. The Black Sea is a key transitional zone between Europe, Central Asia, and the Near East, which has long been divided by politics, language, and traditional boundaries of scholarly disciplines. This book cuts across disciplines and combines sources published in Eastern European languages with Western scholarly literature to give the Black Sea its rightful place in contemporary archaeological discourse.

During the Cold War, alternative globalization projects were underway: socialist Eastern Europe and left-leaning countries in the Third World maintained close economic relations. The two worlds traded and exchanged know-how and technology. This book examines the specific spaces of interaction of these exchanges and discusses the consequences for those projects of globalization undertaken in both world regions.