Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
Remaking the American Mainstream
Richard Alba
€ 48.79
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Remaking the American Mainstream
Paperback. Num Pages: 384 pages, 11 line illustrations, 6 tables. BIC Classification: 1KBB; JFFN; JFSL1. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 157 x 226 x 25. Weight in Grams: 638.
In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past. Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.
Product Details
Publisher
Harvard University Press United States
Number of pages
384
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2005
Condition
New
Number of Pages
384
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass, United States
ISBN
9780674018136
SKU
V9780674018136
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50
About Richard Alba
Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Victor Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor at Cornell University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society.
Reviews for Remaking the American Mainstream
Sociologists Alba and Nee provide a superb, comprehensive analysis of theory, data, and history to revise past and contemporary understandings of immigration and assimilation in the U.S. Their goal is to respond to skeptics' pessimism about new immigrants' assimilability, question misconception about the assimilation experiences of previous and current immigrant groups, reject normative baggage attached to notions of assimilation, and answer the question, 'What can assimilation look like in such a diverse and ethnically dynamic society?'
S. M. Green Choice 20040201 Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee have dusted off the idea of assimilation, updated it for the 21st century and found it to be a powerful force in contemporary America
even now. Staying clear of polemics, Messrs. Alba and Nee have contributed a much needed and dispassionate analysis of the current state of immigrant assimilation. They define assimilation not as a linear process of ethnic obliteration but a dynamic one in which minority and majority cultures converge...Like millions of earlier immigrants, in short, the newest immigrants are likely to change America at least as much as America changes them.
Gregory Rodriguez Wall Street Journal 20030731 A humane and imaginative book which combines social analysis with historical understanding. [Alba and Nee] examine how different groups have increasingly come to share a common culture, a melding that now happens at a faster pace than it ever has in the past. Not the least reason is that even immigrants from the other side of the globe arrive here already familiar with American ways.
Andrew Hacker New York Review of Books 20030814 There are, to be sure, varying degrees of success and different patterns of adjustment to America, but underlying them all is one powerful master trend : surprisingly rapid Americanization. The authoritative synthesis of the present processes of assimilation is Richard Alba and Victor Nee's sociological masterpiece, Remaking the American Mainstream. It shows that for nonblacks, assimilation is alive and well in America. It is not passive integration into a static, Anglo-Protestant mainstream (which was always a sociological fiction anyway), but an endlessly dynamic two-way cultural process.
Orlando Patterson New York Times 20090816
S. M. Green Choice 20040201 Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee have dusted off the idea of assimilation, updated it for the 21st century and found it to be a powerful force in contemporary America
even now. Staying clear of polemics, Messrs. Alba and Nee have contributed a much needed and dispassionate analysis of the current state of immigrant assimilation. They define assimilation not as a linear process of ethnic obliteration but a dynamic one in which minority and majority cultures converge...Like millions of earlier immigrants, in short, the newest immigrants are likely to change America at least as much as America changes them.
Gregory Rodriguez Wall Street Journal 20030731 A humane and imaginative book which combines social analysis with historical understanding. [Alba and Nee] examine how different groups have increasingly come to share a common culture, a melding that now happens at a faster pace than it ever has in the past. Not the least reason is that even immigrants from the other side of the globe arrive here already familiar with American ways.
Andrew Hacker New York Review of Books 20030814 There are, to be sure, varying degrees of success and different patterns of adjustment to America, but underlying them all is one powerful master trend : surprisingly rapid Americanization. The authoritative synthesis of the present processes of assimilation is Richard Alba and Victor Nee's sociological masterpiece, Remaking the American Mainstream. It shows that for nonblacks, assimilation is alive and well in America. It is not passive integration into a static, Anglo-Protestant mainstream (which was always a sociological fiction anyway), but an endlessly dynamic two-way cultural process.
Orlando Patterson New York Times 20090816