Judith Ortiz Cofer "American History"

The New Georgia Encyclopedia has a good entry about Judith Ortiz Cofer here. The author's own web page is also available here. You can read an interesting personal essay by Ortiz Cofer here. This link gives you a chance to watch a video of the author giving a lecture at the University of Wisconsin in 2000. Two of her poems are available online here, as well as a useful Puerto Rican History timeline with links to images.

The story is set in Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1960s. Here is a good summary of New Jersey history (the last three paragraphs are maybe the most directly relevant). Another history website specifically about Paterson is here. If you need a good brief history of immigration in the US, this page by the Center for Immigration Studies is a good place to start. A helpful overview of Puerto Rico-US relations can be found on this site, including the current debates over independence.

How does this story portray the many different scales in all our lives? Remember, the smallest scale is the individual and her own thoughts and feelings and the largest scale is the universe, with family, neighborhood, city, region, nation, world all ranged in between. Each of these scales has its own power relations and conflicts that might include gender, race, ethnicity, political beliefs, religion, age, nationality, class, region, and more.

How does the story represent the "place" of Elena's world? If you had to define the place of this story, which social and cultural networks and personal relationships would you include? What would the map of this place look like if you tried to draw it, including the connections to "outside" or other places?

Toshio Mori "The Sweet Potato"

There are very few web pages about Japanese American author Toshio Mori and his writing: all I can find at the moment is a blurb about the latest collection of his work by Akira Tofina. Here is a link to another of Mori's short stories from the collection, Yokohama, California: "The Woman who Makes Swell Doughnuts." It's on page 7 of this PDF publication.

For more historical context, after you look at the 1940s links for Ellison's story, see the brief chronology of Japanese American history by JANET. A massive resource is the UCLA Asian American Studies home page, which has hundreds of links. The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has some digital exhibits, including some great photography collections. For more on Mori's wartime experience, the Topaz Museum page--Topaz is the internment camp where Mori was held during the war years. Their "Resources" page also has a lot of links to related web sites.

Ideas to consider as you read the story, particularly concerning nation and identity: "home" and "abroad." How do those ideas function in this story? What about the connections between appearance and identity? And again the meanings of "American" and "America" come into play here. What about language? Can you tell when the characters are speaking English to each other and when they are speaking in Japanese? How can you tell?

The story is set on the last day of the 1939-40 World's Fair on Yerba Buena Island. You can read more about the fair here. What does the location off the coast in the Pacific Ocean add to the story's representation of "place?"

Massey again: places "are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations....their 'identities' are constructed through the specificity of their interaction with other places rather than by counterposition to them" (121). With this in mind, where is the "place" of this story? Can you define it?

Ralph Ellison "In a Strange Country"

First, general background information about the United States in the 1940s, when this was written. Here is a wonderful online project from the Library of Congress, called African American Odyssey, that has lots of information and illustrations. For more on Ellison, see the New York Times Ellison page (registration required but it's free).

Some thoughts on the story "In a Strange Country" for our next class. How does the story describe Wales and being Welsh, through the eyes of the American soldier Parker? What does being "American" mean to him and to the different characters in the story and why? What does the ending of the story mean? How do you interpret the story's title?

When people travel, they carry with them their own ways of understanding the world and social relationships. Even when Parker goes to Wales, he and the other American soldiers are, in a way, still in a kind of "American" place, in that they bring with them the dominant American social, particularly racial, values of their time, the 1940s. On the other hand, people are constantly in the process of changing or developing their sense of identity in relation to others; how do you see that happening with Parker?

The geographer Doreen Massey writes that "one way of thinking about place is as particular moments in ... intersecting social relations, nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into the wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too" (Space, Place and Gender 120). How does this definition of "place" connect to the story?

UPDATE: The song in the story is "The Star-Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States. You can read the lyrics here; usually only the first verse is sung.