Our Voices, Fourth Edition, examines communication in a variety of cultural and personal settings, with each contributor writing from the perspective of his or her cultural experience within diverse theoretical frameworks. Each essay addresses the question, "What is a cultural explanation and interpretation for this communication phenomenon from the ethnic scholar's perspective?"
The fourth edition features seven new essays that address such topics of current interest and concern as creating a family across race and gender borders; the struggle for identity of multiethnic and biracial individuals in America; constructing American Jewish male identity; understanding class in the context of race, ethnicity, and gender; racial tensions in a 9/11 memorial; and 9/11 and "the color line." In addition, many of the previous essays have been significantly updated, and two new sections, "Economic Class and Cultural Identity" and "Reflecting on 9/11," have been added.
Continuing the successful tradition of previous editions, the fourth edition:
* Maintains a consistent focus on communication and culture. Each essay addresses important issues in areas of communication--including rhetoric, mass communication, and interpersonal communication. Together, the authors examine how culture influences the creation of meaning and how various uses of symbols and language constitute what we call cultural reality.
* Introduces experience into examinations of cultural communication. The experience-driven approach is presented as a complement to theory-driven approaches to intercultural communication research.
* Explores the rich cultural variety of communication practices within broad cultural labels. The premise is that there is not "one" style of any particular group any more than there is "one" style of Anglo-American communication.
* = New to this editionAcknowledgments
Part I: Naming Ourselves
*1. Imagining Identity within Community: Musings on Tripmaster Monkey, Victoria Chen
*2. The Obama Presidency and the (Re)Framing of African American Identity, Marcus Coleman
3. Dis/orienting Identities: Asian Americans, History, and Intercultural Communication, Thomas Nakayama
*4. Osage Naming Ritual as a Form of Cultural Identity, Steven B. Pratt, Merry C. Pratt, and Rozilyn Miller
5. Names, Narratives, and the Evolution of Ethnic Identity, Dolores V. Tanno
Part II: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender *6. Women and Islam: A Muslim Feminist Perspective, Hoda Al-Mutawah
7. Jewish and/or Woman: Identity and Communicative Style, Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen
*8. Tyler Perry: The (Self-Appointed) Savior of Black Womanhood, Robin Means Coleman
9. When Miss America Was Always White, Navita Cummings James
10. Black Queer Identity, Imaginative Rationality, and the Language of Home, Charles I. Nero
*11. Navigating the Third Space with Double Consciousness: South Asian Indian Women in the American Workplace, Suchitra Shenoy
12. Constructing U.S. American Jewish Male Identity, David E. Weber
Part III: Representing Cultural Knowledge in Interpersonal and Mass Media Contexts
*13. Sister-Friends: Reflections on Black Women's Communication in Intra- & Intercultural Friendships, Nekita Huling, Creshema Murray, and Marsha Houston
14. The Rhetoric of La Familia among Mexican Americans, Margarita Gangotena
15. When Mississippi Chinese Talk, Gwendolyn Gong
17. Latina/o Experiences with Mediated Communication, Diana I. Ríos
*18. "I Am Not Jamal": Asian Indians, Simplistic Perceptions, and the Model Minority Myth, Pravin Rodrigues
19. Native American Culture and Communication through Humor, Charmaine Shutiva
Part IV: Celebrating Cultures
*20. Hispanic Heritage Month: Not for Members Only, Alberto González and Jennifer Willis-Rivera
21. Capturing the Spirit of Kwanzaa, Detine L. Bowers
23. Hybrid Revivals: Ethnicity and South Asian Celebration, Radha S. Hegde
Part V: Valuing and Contesting Languages
24. Identity and Struggle in Jamaican Talk, Dexter B. Gordon
25. The Power of Wastah in Lebanese Speech, Mahboub Hashem
26. Broadening the View of Black Language Use: Toward a Better Understanding of Words and Worlds, Karla D. Scott
27. Confessions of a Thirty-Something Hip-Hop (Old) Head, Eric King Watts
Part VI: Living in Bicultural Relationships
28. Sapphire and Sappho: Allies in Authenticity, Brenda J. Allen
29. Creating a Family across Race and Gender Borders, Marlene Fine and Fern Johnson
30. "I Know It Was the Blood": Defining the Biracial Self in a Euro-American Society, Tina M. Harris
31. Struggling for Identity: Multiethnic and Biracial Individuals in America, Mona Freeman Leonard
Part VII: Intersecting Identities of Class and Culture
32. Invisible Identities: Notes on Class and Race, David Engen
*33. Home as Respite for the Working-Class Academic, Katherine Hendrix
*34. More than White: Locating an Invisible Class Identity, Brandi Lawless
35. Working through Identity: Understanding Class in the Context of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, Kathleen Wong (Lau)
Part VIII: Traversing Cultural Paths
*36. Temporally Legal: My Traveling across Borders of Im/migration, Hsin-I Cheng
37. Women Writing Borders, Borders Writing Women: Immigration, Assimilation, and the Politics of Speaking, Aimee Carrillo Rowe
38. The Cultural Experience of Space and Body: A Reading of Latin American and Anglo American Comportment in Public, Elizabeth Lozano
39. Regionalism and Communication: Exploring Chinese Immigrant Perspectives, Casey Man Kong Lum
40. Traversing Disparate Cultures in a Transnational World: A Bicultural/Hybrid Experience, Maria Rogers Pascual
Part IX: Reflecting on Culture in Times of National Crisis
*41. Notes from the "War Generation," Souhad Kahil
42. Statue or Statement? Racial Tensions in a 9/11 Memorial, Teresa Nance and Anita Foeman
*43. Haiti's Tragedy in a Global Context, Eddah Mutua-Kombo