Author: Ariel Avgi

The Shadow Hero engages Asian stereotypes in an effective manner that exploits an underlying xenophobic American society. This is most poignant when Hank, in disguise as the Green Turtle, brings the criminal in place of Ten Grand to Detective Lawful. Moe Bender is literally painted yellow and has the buck teeth, slanted eyes and thin mustache of American’s Asian stereotype. But it’s when Detective Lawful refers to Chinese as “sneaky, slant-eyed bastards” that it becomes clear that this costume of sorts is truly how American society views the Asian community (118). Hank as an Asian superhero is not only challenging Chinese stereotypes but more importantly the American male stereotype as the sole macho, all-around good provider.

Stereotypes as a burden upon foreigners are demonstrated in The Shadow Hero to be obstacles in the way of integration into American society. Hank is attempting to be this superhero—“a good guy”—but it’s not his place as an Asian. This is reminiscent of Reitano’s mentioning of Chinatown as an isolated community as opposed to other culturally amalgamated immigrant hubs like The Five Points, for example. The Chinese community appears exclusive even in Yang’s graphic novel where the position of superhero for Hank is only a vicarious aspiration for his mother and a laughable fate to the rest of the Asian community. Although the text does engage and challenge stereotypes to illustrate Hank’s breach into American society, in a sense, it is important to note that Yang does reveal legitimate Chinese practices like familial piety and values in patriarchy as well.

Before identifying the influences of new ethnic groups into the New York City melting pot today, Reitano draws our attention to the overall picture immigration in New York City paints. Since the removal of national origin quotas with 1965 immigration reform, the city’s population soared, and by the early 2000s, 37.8% of the city’s population was foreign born. Minorities even comprised the majority of New York voters in the 2009 elections. Although Dominicans, Chinese and Jamaicans are the city’s largest immigrant groups, they only make up 30% of the total immigrant population. In fact, in New York City there are 110 different languages spoken. Such a culturally cosmopolitan and amalgamated city yields cosmopolitan identities among the youth of the large foreign born population and contributes to the “New” New York Reitano refers to in the title of Chapter 10.

With these final new waves of immigration that will define New York City, leadership is held by two distinct mayors. First, the Republican in the historically Democratic city, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani attempted and succeeded in implementing conservative reform and was praised for his crack down on urban crime and response to the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center. Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani and restored the city’s self-confidence after 9/11 and helped the economy rebound.

Starting in the late twentieth century, Reitano points first to the Russian-Jewish immigration that transformed Brighton Beach, Brooklyn into a thriving community. Like many communities in New York City, the residents leaving for the suburbs or retiring gave immigrants a space to move into. 30% of Brighton Beach was vacant when Russian Jews filled in with their first wave of immigration in 1979 and their second wave ten years later after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Asians, on the other hand, as opposed to being absorbed into an area were excluded to one—Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. The Chinese were the first group to suffer exclusion as immigrants from 1882 to 1943. Not only were they prohibited from most occupations and the prospects of citizenship but were controlled by the Chinatown Consolidated Benevolent Association. After the repeal of immigrant quotas, Chinatown’s population exploded and Chinatown became the place where immigrants reunited with their families but was equally a trap with the exploitation of sweatshop labor for those that settled. In addition to these poorer, mostly Chinese immigrants that settled in Chinatown, there were “Uptown Chinese” immigrants that hailed from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Geographically separating themselves from their poorer counterparts, the “Uptown Chinese” may have lived outside of Chinatown but they did invest and buy up real estate in Lower Manhattan. In 1943, the Chinese were granted the ability to become citizens and the Chinese American community flourished politically. Among the Asian migrants, Korean immigrants entered New York City very often with professional backgrounds. Similar to the Russian Jews in Brooklyn, Korean immigrants replaced retiring Jewish and Italian markets and groceries. Mid-Manhattan, with thriving Korean businesses and restaurants, would serve as Koreatown but in a commercial as opposed to residential sense.

The Latino presence in New York City was originally characterized by Puerto Rican immigration. Puerto Ricans proved to be the dominant Latino group in New York City since their major migration to New York to join the post World War II industrial labor force. However, Puerto Ricans live in constant conflict with their Latino culture and American identity. While their migration peaked in the 1950s, it has been on the decline as other Latino groups challenge their dominance, particularly Dominicans. Dominicans, like Puerto Ricans, are relatively close to their native land but do participate in New York politics and contribute to the economy. In the factory, with the upward mobility or departure of Jewish and Italian immigrants, Dominican women filled in; although exploited, factory work was still a means of social mobility for them. Dominican women preferred to stay in New York City while most Dominican men dreamed of one day returning permanently back to the Dominican Republic. It was the women who united the Latino identity by building cultural bridges between groups like the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans through involvement and interactions in public locations like church or community board meetings. The result is locations like Corona, Queens where an amalgamation of ethnicities unite to represent a single Latino community.

Like the united Latino identity, the West Indian American Day Carnival promotes a pan-ethnicity among West Indians and more. West Indian immigrants tend to be classified as Black although they come from nations and communities where color was never a defining feature. West Indians have been “learning race” since their first migration to New York City in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. Often, they would embrace their British ties in order to elevate themselves above the status of African Americans. They quickly learned that race trumps ethnicity with police brutality under Mayor Giuliani due to racial profiling. In 1977, West Africans attempted to politically separate themselves from the African American identity with the first cross-Caribbean club in support of a political candidate.

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Giuliani, contrary to previous New York City mayors, reflected conservative values and focused his efforts on the middle class. He emphasized “individual initiative and private enterprise” over public activism and even advocated for the privatization of public services (221). Giuliani referred to the social programs promoted by mayors before him as the “compassion industry” that only served to increase laziness at the expense of the hardworking. He was the first mayor to actually propose that New York State reduce funding for the city’s welfare and Medicaid programs. In 1995, Giuliani reduced the welfare roles, rejecting scores of applicants and eliminating over 600,000 people already on welfare. In addition, he turned the welfare centers into job centers as all able-bodied adult welfare recipients were now required to work for their stipends—an approach long overdue.

Inevitably, these reforms were criticized for being heartless with welfare recipients not being properly protected on job sites where they were working for their stipends and welfare recipients in college having to drop out of school in order to put in hours to receive their stipend. Giuliani’s many tax cuts helped businesses and wealthy private institutions but destroyed groups like the Human Resources Administration and the Health and Hospitals Corporation where the main benefactors were minorities.

Giuliani also targeted schools in his efforts to reform New York City through regularization and control. His major achievements included shifting the supervision of school security to the police department and implementing city wide testing to institute a sense of uniformity to the public school system and raise student standards. However, Giuliani also weakened the school system by drastically cutting schools’ operating and construction budgets while increasing disbursements for books and computers. In areas like Brooklyn and the Bronx where he was confronted with fierce opposition, Giuliani shifted school construction funds to areas where he was supported like Queens and Staten Island. Giuliani appointed Bronx Borough President and congressman Herman Badillo as special education monitor in the hopes of implementing a “standards movement” to routinize teaching and standardize the public school system. Opponents of this “standards movement” believed that implementing standards were restricting opportunities, especially for minorities and the poor in the wake of Badillo’s targeting of CUNY’s open admissions policy.

Giuliani overstepped his boundaries on several occasions when it came to his position as mayor. In 1999, Giuliani threatened to cut the Brooklyn Museum’s funds and end its lease after it mounted a portrait of the Virgin Mary that used dried elephant dung and pornographic cutouts. Giuliani’s defense was that the government should not be patronizing “offensive art,” but his attempt at cultural domineering was confronted with resentful backlash. While Giuliani’s First Amendment initiatives were reversed by the courts, controversy surrounding any of his proposals and movements were overshadowed by 9/11. The mayor, in a time of utter chaos, remained calm, toured Ground Zero, attended funerals and served as the face and father of New York City during this crisis which defined his mayoralty.

Emma Lou’s unreliability is similar to Irene’s from Passing in that their allegiance to their race is unreliable. Emma Lou strives endlessly to fit in with the “right sort of people” while in Los Angeles, those who are fair-skinned, well-mannered colored folk, but also ends up taunting herself with those darker than her that could never be blue vein circle material. Her relationship with John in Harlem, for example, is limited to only two nights because he was too dark for Emma Lou, despite all he did to find her a place to live and acquaint her with the area. Although Emma Lou wants to be part of the Negro community that wouldn’t accept her back in Boise, she can only accept the “superior” Negro community in Harlem. Her unreliability to her race is similar to Irene’s in that Irene’s passing for white out of convenience is demonstrative of an air of superiority. As proud as Irene claims to be to be a part and to have remained a part of the Negro community, she still passes for white instead of bearing the burden of her color, which she would do if she were so proud of her roots.

There is no obvious answer to choosing between Claire and Irene in terms of who is the more admirable character. Claire, while looked down upon because of her alienation of Black society to better herself, can be pitied. She lost her father and was removed from the Black community by her aunts— “passing” as white to marry John Bellew was an opportunity I am not sure she could have let pass her. Irene, on the other hand, while capable of passing, remained in the Black community and settled there as an adult where she raised a stable family. However, while an admirable life choice, Irene cannot be forgiven for her dreadful act out of spite at the end of the novel. Irene’s need to have complete control over all external factors influencing her life and, by extension, the life of her family drove her to eliminate Claire, a selfish free spirit that there was no controlling. While Claire is no doubt a frustrating character in regards to her relationship with the community that raised her, she sacrificed her comfort in that community to move up in the world, and albeit by dishonest means, that self-sacrifice is more admirable than Irene’s paranoia.

Journal entries in this course have served different purposes for me based on the media of our texts. When writing about literature, for example, I find my journal entries to be more exploratory. My first sentence answers the question I am responding to, rather directly, and the rest of the journal is a process of discovering how my claim is supported by evidence in the text. I notice that I have a knack for embedding quotes into my writing which I feel makes my journal entries on written works more complete and my opinions more credible.

Journal entries are nothing like note-taking for me. In fact, it is based on the notes I take that I write my entries. I don’t find journal writing redundant due to my additional note-taking but substantiating—a way to flesh out the ideas I have only jotted in the margins of the text.

However, when writing about film, my writing becomes much more technical and the entries serve as practice for enhancing my descriptive summarizing skills. When I write about film, I tend to have all of the evidence in the types of shots and angles employed and inductively come to a conclusion on meaning as opposed to having a general opinion and returning to the text to pick out my evidence when I read literature.

Overall, journal entries allow me to reflect more fully about the ideas I have while reading literature or watching films by writing about those ideas.

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is, in essence, the framework for nearly every immigration story, from the melancholy departure, to the job search, to the bringing of the rest of the family to the new world. In the protagonist’s experiences in the foreign land he migrates to, a surprisingly essential element of the journey is the companionship by the “pet” he adopts upon moving into an apartment.

I find that the pet is an extension of the protagonist’s self in many ways—his instinctual self. It is the pet that encounters the girl that helps him decipher the map of the city, the pet that finds him food, and the pet that finds him his first job hanging up posters. The protagonist’s pet displays many of the same qualities as the protagonist such as his playfulness and youth-like curiosity, but it seems as though every person the protagonist encounters has a similar pet unique to him or herself. The pet is foreign yet familiar and is the protagonist’s only permanent sense of companionship in the foreign land he’s arrived at.

In general, the immigration narrative is often one of perseverance and survival, and the pet may be representative of the sense of self one must seek in retaining when immersed in a new world. Each character, no matter a recent immigrant or not, originated from somewhere and has a culture and background unique to him or herself that is embodied in that person’s pet. Even when the protagonist’s family arrives in the foreign land, they eagerly adopt the pet as an extension of the life the father has set up in this new world, but more so, the life he has preserved from the old.

In Chapter 5 of The Restless City, Joanne Reitano discusses late nineteenth century New York City—the center of modernization in America. The growing metropolis, particularly in finance, trade and industry, was aptly titled the Empire City, but digging deeper into the political, social, and economic climates of the urban environment reveals much strife and ultimately progress.

Reviewing literature of the time, the first novel to depict New York in a positive light was Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick with New York being home to the “rags to riches” narrative, a place of both suffering and opportunity. The main character of the dime novel became the face of Social Darwinism, explaining the gap between rich and poor because those fit for the city would prosper in it. However, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) shows a poor girl’s fate as an unfortunate product of circumstance rather than a fatal flaw. The myth that the rich were deserving of their position in society was questioned especially with wealth concentrated in the few hands of robber barons. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, and Carnegie’s steel trust, just to name a few, were examples of expansive monopolies controlled by individual men, yet these men were New York City’s heroes on Wall Street.

John D. Rockefeller is a prime example of the farm boy from West New York who achieved success and wealth in the Empire City through hard work and frugality. In his modernization of the American economy, he was both the greatest villain and a most brilliant innovator. The idea that monopolies are a natural ascension of the most effective businesses yields two very different responses in late nineteenth century New York City. The first is one of horror that yielded government intervention and a regulation of business practices to stem systematic consolidation. The second, though, is a proliferation of trusts with weak regulations that made New York City the great organizer of American Commerce.

The immense wealth gap also led to the questioning of what progress looked like during this time. Mayor Abram Hewitt’s belief that New York came to be “by natural causes” opposed renown reformer Henry George’s view that the juxtaposition between the increasingly wealthy rich and exacerbating poverty is proof that progress isn’t real. In all its wealth, New York City did blossom but was also politically seen as “the worst governed city in the world”. Bossism paralleled expanding capitalism in the Gilded Age with William Tweed heading machine politics between 1965 and 1971. With his cronies serving positions such as governor, mayor, city comptroller, and city commissioner simultaneously, in 1868, Tweed ruled both city and state. However, despite the politically disreputable methods employed, the Tweed Ring ultimately allowed for the flourishing of public works and facilities in New York.

While Tammany’s empire did contribute to the development of schools, hospitals, public baths and orphanages, it wasn’t really until Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) that the country’s social conscience was awakened and social reform was provoked. Riis targeted the “ignorant wealthy” in his humanistic view of poverty to show that poverty was not exclusively a function of individual morality but of societal responsibility to provide just wages and conditions. The New York City Consumers’ League mobilized upper and middle class women to boycott stores that exploited female workers which ultimately led to New York State setting minimum standards for working conditions, and out of the Settlement House Movement by the young and educated of the upper and middle classes emerged the field of social work.

The trusts and tenements, resulting from modernization, that ever-elucidated the wealth gap and threatened the American Dream also led to the beginning of labor unionization in the 1860s and 70s. Contrary to the pursuit of social harmony by the already established Knights of Labor, striking became a crucial weapon for labor’s self advancement in the late nineteenth century, and in response, industrial management retaliated by employing strike breakers, circulating blacklists and enforcing lockouts and evictions. There were 1,200 strikes in 1886 in New York City alone, and often coordinated with strikes were boycotts. However, after boycotts were declared illegal, workers found themselves limited and resorted to political activism.

Overall, the political, social and economic climates of New York City during the Gilded Age were very much entwined with closing the gap between rich and poor that was produced by rapid modernization. Like freedom and capitalism, reform was becoming symbolic of the Empire City.

The scene between Michael and Fredo Corleone in The Godfather Part II, where Michael rejects Fredo as a brother, utilizes pointed shot-reverse shots and the occasional wide shot to emphasize the nature of the brothers’ relationship. The scene opens with a wide angled shot where both brothers are visible and seated directly opposite each other, indicative of their hostile relationship. Their conversation, however, is conveyed in shot-reverse shots and is even more telling based on the lighting behind each character closed on in the frame. When Fredo is speaking, in his laid back chaise, light is lacking and the little that comes through is almost amber. While Michael is speaking, standing I might add, the natural, bright light from the window only serves to underscore the coldness toward his brother. Although a low angle shot is not employed here, Michael’s position standing is also indicative of the power he has over his brother. This is even further accentuated at the end of the scene where the camera resumes the wide shot initially employed and Michael walks out of the frame—as opposed to the camera moving. Michael has complete control, not only over Fredo but, the entire situation. Camera techniques are effectively engaged to display the juxtaposition between the brothers, which eventually leads to Michael’s disentanglement with Fredo.

Chapter 5 of Binder and Reimers’ All The Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City provides a thorough discussion of Jewish immigration to the Lower East Side of Manhattan beginning in the late nineteenth century. Between 1881 and 1914, about two million Jews immigrated to the United States, with three quarters of that population remaining in New York City. The immigrants hailed primarily from Russia and Eastern Europe where anti-Semitic sentiments were high and persecution and pogroms forced families to leave their homelands.

Many of the arriving immigrants could be characterized as skilled or semiskilled laborers—over forty percent having been employed in the clothing industry back in Eastern Europe. Other industries included construction, metal working, and the food industry. Well educated scholars were equally forced to emigrate under czarist oppression, yielding a more secular Jewish population in America. In fact, the Jews that often refused to settle in “the land of opportunity” were the religious orthodox that viewed the United States as a land where spiritual values had no place.

To some extent, they were correct. Stronger than the Jewish religion in the densely populated Jewish quarter of Manhattan was Jewish culture. The Jews filled in where the Irish and Germans left their mark with no plans to return back home. As the population grew, the Lower East Side of Manhattan became the most congested district in the five boroughs yet was still central to Jewish immigrants even after subways and bridges opened Brooklyn up to them. With rising antisemitism, the established German Jews feared that the influx of their Eastern European counterpart would perpetuate the hate, but the majority of Western Jewish philanthropy was directed toward helping victims of pogroms migrate to America. To repair the view of the Jewish immigrants in the public eye and bridge the manners and customs separating the German from Eastern European Jews, the Educational Alliance was established by German Jews. The Alliance was intended to assist in vocational and citizenship training for new immigrants but also offered classes in subjects such as literature, philosophy, history and art. The heavy Americanization of Jewish culture in the Alliance, though, was very much resented by the Eastern European Jews.

Another organization intended to repair the image of Jewish immigrants in America was the New York City Kehillah led by Rabbi Judah Magnes. The Lower East Side was not necessarily violent, but crime was nevertheless a problem—pickpocketing, arson, prostitution and gambling could all be found in the alleyways between tenements or in the slums themselves. After police commissioner Theodore Bingham exaggeratedly spoke out against the immigrant Jews in the September 1908 issue of the North American Review, The New York City Kehillah was founded that same year. About 200 organizations united to support Jewish immigrants in an effort to reduce crime among them, but the coalition never truly unified the community.

In terms of earning a living, most Eastern European Jews entered manufacturing, specifically the garment industry. This was no surprise as ten percent of the Jewish immigrants were skilled tailors and most of the factories were owned by German Jews. The garment industry, once run within tenements until the 1892 Tenement House Act, shifted into sweatshops, but that did not change the unbearable working conditions. Many Jewish laborers, especially women, began to unionize, and the umbrella labor organization, United Hebrew Trades, was founded in 1888. Membership particularly grew after The Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire where 146 workers, mostly young Jewish women, lost their lives. In conjunction with the labor movement, the socialist movement was widely applauded by Jewish immigrant workers in its values of brotherhood and traditional Jewish concepts.

Politically, though, Eastern European Jews followed the Germans in their support for the Republican party which proved responsive to Jewish concerns regarding immigration policy and anti-Semitism abroad. With urban life increasing the secularity of Jewish immigrants, their attraction to socialism or Zionism dwindled, and secular education became increasingly important and valued in Jewish culture. Proper schooling was emphasized for both girls and boys in climbing the ladder to economic success, even though success for most Jews was a result of strategic commercial advances, not a diploma. In an attempt to revitalize Orthodox Judaism, the Young Israel movement of 1912 was formed which ultimately led to a movement of Jewish conservatism that recognized the need to maintain tradition while adapting to change. Overall, in the immigration story of Eastern European Jews there is a clear difference between upholding the Jewish religion and Jewish culture, and to fully participate in American life, compromises were made.