Immigration and Popular Culture: An Introduction (review)

Immigration is a very timely topic, one with an increasing influence on American politics and notions of, in the words of media scholar Michele Hilmes, who we are and who we are not. In this smart, well-researched and eminently readable yet intellectually complex book, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick put popular culture at the center of that definition, focusing upon the consumption, production, and imagery around immigration and popular culture in order to "offer a road map of the cultural imagination of immigration." This it does, and more.

In a series of roughly chronological case studies, beginning with Italian and Jewish gangster films of the 1930s and culminating with Asian Americans in cyberspace in the 2000s, with several other different types of media texts in-between, Rubin and Melnick analyze the integration of immigration and popular culture as a process of masquerade, analyzing both what lies behind the mask that is the popular culture text, as well the motivations and construction of the mask itself. The case studies focus on different types of popular culture texts including film, Broadway, popular music, journalism, clothing (the zoot suit of the 1940s) and media platforms (turntables, the internet). Although they do not focus on black/white relations, they do "read" immigration narratives and imagery through that history, providing a richness and depth to their analysis and discussion. The authors pay close and particular attention to historical and social context, thereby foregrounding the cultural history of immigration as read though media texts.

A work of this sort cannot cover everything, and the focus on representation of particular ethnic groups in popular culture can have the effect of wiping out real distinctions within those groups, for example, Asians or Asian Americans. At the same time, the book is so clearly written and methodologically focused that it provides inspiration and an excellent model for students and readers to pursue their own studies of groups or texts that are omitted in this volume. A thornier omission is that of representation of Native Americans, technically outside of the scope of the book but a group whose representation in popular culture demands continued interrogation. Also missing is an in-depth study of a television text, although that omission in itself says much about the potential object of study.

Immigration and Popular Culture: An Introduction is an excellent and very necessary contribution to American Studies and to the understanding of the complex and important relationship between the two topics in its title. The authors make visible a relationship that, as they argue, imbues and indeed has built American popular culture and will continue to renew and create it. Immigration and Popular Culture is a very lucid and instructive model of how to do interdisciplinary media studies, suitable for use as a key text for an undergraduate course, or as a methodological model for graduate students in American studies, media studies, or cognate fields.