American Refuge

Download or read book American Refuge written by Diya Abdo and published by Steerforth Press / Truth to Power. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A moving and timely book that strips away misleading politics to reveal the complexities of real human lives." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A provocative, conversation-sparking exploration of refugee experiences told in their own words, for readers of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans and Viet Thanh Nguyen Forced to leave their homes, they came to America... In this intimate and eye-opening book, Diya Abdo--daughter of refugees, U.S. immigrant, English professor, and activist—shares the stories of seven refugees. Coming from around the world, they’re welcomed by Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), an organization Diya founded to leverage existing resources at colleges to provide temporary shelter to refugee families. Bookended by Diya’s powerful essay "Radical Hospitality" and the inspiring coda “Names and Numbers,” each chapter weaves the individual stories into a powerful journey along a common theme: Life Before (“The Body Leaves its Soul Behind”) The Moment of Rupture (“Proof and Persecution”) The Journey (“Right Next Door”) Arrival/Resettlement (“Back to the Margins”) A Few Years Later (“From Camp to Campus”) The lives explored in American Refuge include the artist who, before he created the illustration on the cover of this book, narrowly escaped two assassination attempts in Iraq and now works at Tyson cutting chicken. We learn that these refugees from Burma, Burundi, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Uganda lived in homes they loved, left against their will, moved to countries without access or rights, and were among the 1% of the "lucky" few to resettle after a long wait, almost certain never to return to the homes they never wanted to leave. We learn that anybody, at any time, can become a refugee.

Download or read book Black American Refugee written by Tiffanie Drayton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named "most anticipated" book of February by Marie Claire, Essence, and A.V. Club "…extraordinary and representative."—NPR "Drayton explores the ramifications of racism that span generations, global white supremacy, and the pitfalls of American culture."—Shondaland After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people. In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the US was idyllic. But chasing good school districts with affordable housing left Tiffanie and her family constantly uprooted--moving from Texas to Florida then back to New Jersey. As Tiffanie came of age in the suburbs, she began to ask questions about the binary Black and white American world. Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all? Why was it so hard for Black families to achieve stability? Why were Black girls treated as something other than worthy? Ultimately, exhausted by the pursuit of a "better life" in America, twenty-year old Tiffanie returns to Tobago. She is suddenly able to enjoy the simple freedom of being Black without fear, and imagines a different future for her own children. But then COVID-19 and widely publicized instances of police brutality bring America front and center again. This time, as an outsider supported by a new community, Tiffanie grieves and rages for Black Americans in a way she couldn't when she was one. An expansion of her New York Times piece of the same name, Black American Refugee examines in depth the intersection of her personal experiences and the broader culture and historical ramifications of American racism and global white supremacy. Through thoughtful introspection and candidness, Tiffanie unravels the complex workings of the people in her life, including herself, centering Black womanhood, and illuminating the toll a lifetime of racism can take. Must Black people search beyond the shores of the "land of the free" to realize emancipation? Or will the voices that propel America's new reckoning welcome all dreamers and dreams to this land?

Download or read book Refuge written by Adrie Kusserow and published by American Poets Continuum. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthropologist writes poems about globalization, culture, war, and fieldwork in South Sudan, Uganda, Botswana, and across the world.

Download or read book Seeking Refuge written by María Cristina García and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-03-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of the 20th-century Central American migration, and how domestic and foreign policy interests shaped the asylum policies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Download or read book City of Refuge written by Marcus Peyton Nevius and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Download or read book No Separate Refuge written by Sarah Deutsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long after the Mexican-American War brought the Southwest under the United States flag, Anglos and Hispanics within the region continued to struggle for dominion. From the arrival of railroads through the height of the New Deal, Sarah Deutsch explores the cultural and economic strategies of Anglos and Hispanics as they competed for territory, resources, and power, and examines the impact this struggle had on Hispanic work, community, and gender patterns. This book analyzes the intersection of culture, class, and gender at disparate sites on the Anglo-Hispanic frontier--Hispanic villages, coal mining towns, and sugar beet districts in Colorado and New Mexico--showing that throughout the region there existed a vast network of migrants, linked by common experience and by kinship. Devoting particular attention to the role of women in cross-cultural interaction, No Separate Refuge brings to light sixty years of Southwestern history that saw Hispanic work transformed, community patterns shifted, and gender roles critically altered. Drawing on personal interviews, school census and missionary records, private letters, and a wealth of other records, Deutsch traces developments from one state to the next, and from one decade to the next, providing an important contribution to the history of the Southwest, race relations, labor, agriculture, women, and Chicanos. This thirty-fifth anniversary edition reflects on its place in the history of the Anglo-Hispanic borderland, class, and gender.

Download or read book Race, Nation, and Refuge written by Doug Coulson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the role of rhetoric and the racial classification of Asian American immigrants in the early twentieth century. From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent,” and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because the distinction between white and Asian was considerably unstable, however, those charged with the interpretation and implementation of the naturalization act faced difficult racial classification questions. Through archival research and a close reading of the arguments contained in the documents of the US Bureau of Naturalization, especially those documents that discussed challenges to racial eligibility for naturalization, Doug Coulson demonstrates that the strategy of foregrounding shared external threats to the nation as a means of transcending perceived racial divisions was often more important to racial classification than legal doctrine. He argues that this was due to the rapid shifts in the nation’s enmities and alliances during the early twentieth century and the close relationship between race, nation, and sovereignty.