Reviews for Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest

The average rating for Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-17 00:00:00 Cynthia Aaker I don't feel qualified to write a review of this book. Perhaps because I'm not an anthropologist, or perhaps because I'm not a communist. But on the internet, nobody knows whether you're qualified, so I might as well! I read this book out of personal interest in some areas of Mexican Chicago as a place I've spent some time, albeit in all honesty mostly as a white person in search of tacos. I was instead confronted with blistering critiques of how American factory owners exploit race divisions. Which, in the long run, is probably better for me, and tells me a lot more about the sort of Chicago life that you don't see when you just go around eating at taquerias. The book makes a few central points, directed at a few different audiences. Anthropology, says de Genova, is an academic project by neocolonial institutions framed around American nativist whiteness. That same whiteness, he observes, simultaneously prevents Mexican immigrants from ever really "becoming American," in their words, while also giving them something to aspire to at the expense of black Americans. And, most crucially, the idea of whether an immigrant is "legal" or not doesn't actually have to do with keeping people out or in, it has to do with keeping their work exploited; it's a lot harder to try to get better hours or a living wage when your employer can threaten to have you thrown out. These points are made with an---at least to me---odd blend of material, interspersing detailed discussions of the author's time teaching ESL in metal fabrication plants with heavy communist and other theoretical jargon. But it makes for an engaging read with some passages that are skimmable. It might not have been the book I wanted to read, but it was a book that was good for me to read.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-01 00:00:00 Man Os Chi-town in the mid-90s. Mexican migrants. Mexican Americans. African Americas. White ethnics. Windy City corruption. Factory Work. Factory Work. Factory Work. Immigration Law. Law-in-the-Abstract. Neoliberal Capitalism. White Supremacy, then and now. U.S. Empire--from gunboat diplomacy to the present. Transnationalism. An ethnographically and theoretically informed work of "anti-anthropological" critique, this book offers up nuanced, fiercely politcal arguments about some of the most central socio-political issues in the contemporary world, and in particular the unequal conjunctures between Latin America and the urban United States. Being an ethnography, this book isn't all just theory. --What makes it most special, perhaps, is its attempt to take the ways in which abstractions like NEOLIBERAL CAPITAL-NEGROPHOBIA-RACIALIZATION are lived by individual human beings as a point of departure to theorize about these things. --I don't know if it succeeds, then, in being anti-anthropological. But it's worth a read.