Suchergebnisse

While Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley is best known for being the "first suburban Chinatown," it is actually a lively, multiethnic, and multiracial community with a complex past, and an emerging arts scene that celebrates that complexity. Today, the "SGV" constitutes the largest, majority-Asian American and Latino community in the United States. Its social and cultural mix make it a vibrant example of suburban cosmopolitanism, in which diverse residents live in relative harmony, with mutual respect for difference. Local groups such as the South El Monte Arts Posse have begun to make work that reflects this ethos, and could reshape normative ideas of what it means to be American.

This article comments on the problematic uses of East–West rhetoric in Anglo-American academia, literary culture, and popular media more generally. Of special interest to the author is how the cultural cachet of an Eastern European origin offered émigré writers a readymade audience in the last decades of the Cold War, and how these same writers then used this attention to redefine Eastern Europe, and in such a way that would exclude them from it. Rather than rehearse well-established critiques of the East–West binary, the article suggests several ways in which both scholarly and popular discourses continue to rely on it, though often in ways that call even our disciplinary boundaries into question.

NATO has recently expanded to include several eastern European, formerly communist states. This article uses empirical evidence on alliances and war to argue that this expansion and plans to expand NATO even more may pose a serious threat to international peace since the expanded alliance possesses two of the three major factors that have been found to be associated with war-prone alliances. In addition, it is argued that the expanded alliance may greatly hamper Russia's transition to democracy. The article concludes that a better long-term policy for NATO states to pursue would be an expansion that included Russia but that would be restructured to resolve outstanding territorial disputes in ways similar to the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The potential impact of this expanded NATO on political transitions in the Balkan states is also discussed.