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How can politicians and ordinary citizens face the racial past in a country that frames itself as colorblind? In her timely and provocative book, Resurrecting Slavery, Crystal Fleming shows how people make sense of slavery in a nation where talking about race, colonialism, and slavery remains taboo. Noting how struggles over the meaning of racial history are informed by contemporary politics of race, she asks: What kinds of group identities are at stake today for activists and French people with...

Ranging in subject from England's poor laws to the Human Genome Project, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought is one of the first books to look at the history and development of the eugenics movement in Anglo-American culture. Unlike other works that focus on the movement's historical aberrancies or the claims of its hardline proponents, this study highlights the often unnoticed ways in which the language and ideas of eugenics have permeated democratic discourse. Marouf A. Hasian,...

Author Luís Batalha's ethnographic study of the Cape Verdean community in Portugal focuses on two distinct groups: the middle-class white elite and the darker-skinned, migrant laborers. This challenging and unique work strips bare the social relations—race, gender, and class—that structure lived experience in this post-colonial society. Based on the life stories of fifty Cape Verdeans living mainly in the metropolitan are of Lisbon, this study provides an important analysis of these two remarkab...

This book is novel not only in its theoretical framework, which places racialisation in post-communist societies and their modernist political projects at the centre of processes of global racism, but also in being the first account to examine both these new national contexts and the interconnections between racisms in these four regions of the Baltic states, the Southern Caucasus, Central Asia and Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, and elsewhere. Assessments of the significance of the contemporary g...

Recent decades have seen an enormous resurgence in the arts of memoir and life writing. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Ireland and other postcolonial countries, where memoir has functioned to regenerate and re-present meaningful incidents and events in the pasts of particular individuals or cultural groups. This memoir, written by an “insider,” recalls the lives of various members of the Irish Traveller community during an era of enormous social and cultural change. The Irish Trav...

Choosing Ethnic Identity explores the ways in which people are able to choose their ethnic identities in contemporary multiethnic societies such as the USA and Britain. Notions such as adopting an identity, or self-designated terms, such as Black British and Asian American, suggest the importance of agency and choice for individuals. However, the actual range of ethnic identities available to individuals and the groups to which they belong are not wholly under their control. These identities mus...

Over twenty years of research and publication of articles dealing with the Finnish ethnic group of North America is compiled here for the first time in a collection of ten chapters dealing with various topics of interest. The chapters include reprints of articles that have appeared in refereed scholarly journals as well as popular magazines in Finland, Canada and the United States. The topics range from the Finnish immigrants of Atlantic Canada and runaway sailors, to prairie farmers, commercial...

Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in eastern Europe to absorb Gypsies into the ?ruling? working class. Since 1989, the Gypsies have become the scapegoat of postcommunism. More Gypsies have had their houses burned and have been killed in racist attacks in the first six postcommunist years than in all the time since World War II. Today the

This book aims to chart the extent to which residents of the Netherlands perceive that they are subject to discrimination, from the perspectives of group identities, discrimination grounds, and societal domains. In addition, it highlights the consequences that people attach to their experiences. The study shows that different types of perceived discrimination are associated with different groups and are related to the way in which groups are perceived in Dutch society.

Xenophobia in United Germany examines not only xenophobic expression in Germany but also its relation to the broader phenomenon of racism and xenophobia in western industrial societies. In this theoretical and factual study, the author employs a long association with East and West German youth researchers, as well as data gained from his own extensive travels and interviews with East German anti-violence youth workers. What emerges is a comprehensive analysis of formerly suppressed East German s...

By examining cultural consumption, tastes and imaginaries as a means of relating to the world, this book describes the effects of globalization on young people from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. It employs the concept of aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism to analyse the emergence of an aesthetic openness to alterity as a new generational "good taste". Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth critically examines the consumption of cultural products and imaginaries that p...

In 2002, young Fadime Sahindal was brutally murdered by her own father. She belonged to a family of Kurdish immigrants who had lived in Sweden for almost two decades. But Fadime's relationship with a man outside of their community had deeply dishonored her family, and only her death could remove the stain. This abhorrent crime shocked the world, and her name soon became a rallying cry in the struggle to combat so-called honor killings.Unni Wikan narrates Fadime's heartbreaking story through her...

The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves...

A collection of critical and theoretical essays that seek to take an in-depth look at the socio-political and historical roots of the African-German presence in today's Germany. The essays examine the African Germans and otherness, with vivid descriptions of personal accounts and observations as well as rich information about Germany's colonial history and about being black in Germany through the pre- and post-World War II era. The volume also provides personal accounts of transitional changes i...