Re-Situating Identities

The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

Vered Amit-Talai, Caroline Knowles

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781442602946
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Re-Situating Identities signals a crucial move away from the extremes of statistical reductionism and textual preoccupation which have marked race and ethnic studies. Instead, inspired by an insistence on concrete social and political change, these essays seek to re-energize the field by systematic and empirically grounded investigation of the production of identities in power relationships. Working with ethnographic data, life histories, and historical documents, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural theorists from Britain, Canada, and the United States present a diverse array of scenarios from courtrooms and classrooms to diasporas, communities, state memorials, and media representations. Each scenario raises an array of critical questions of existing theory and policy: What is the impact of multiculturalist policies? Should the term "race" still be used? What are the controversies surrounding the concept of "black cultures"? What part do race and ethnicity play in the construction of collective memories? What part do notions of home play in the organization of racial exclusion? What can we learn about racism from life stories? How is nationalism mediated by the local experiences it attempts to supersede? And what does the local mean and what is its relationship to globalization?

Table of contents

• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: Against Parochialism and Fragmentation
• Part I: Race and Racism
• Introduction
• 1. Does "Race" Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after "Race Relations"
• 2. Racism, Biography, and Psychiatry
• 3. Homing Devices
• Part II: The Politics of Identity
• Introduction
• 4. The Minority Circuit: Identity Politics and the Professionalization of Ethnic Activism1
• 5. Mediating Identity: Kashtin, the Media, and the Oka Crisis1
• 6. Canada's Visible Minorities: Identity and Representation
• 7. The Beauty of Valuing Black Cultures
• Part III: Memory and Histories
• Introduction
• 8. Remembering Forgetfully
• 9. Shared Memory in Community: Oral History, Community, and Race Relations
• 10. Dilemmas of Discovery: Europeans and "America"
• Part IV: Nationalism and Transnationalism
• Introduction
• 11. Owning the Nation, and the Personal Nature of Nationalism: Locality and the Rhetoric of Nationhood in Scotland
• 12. The Multiple Landscapes of Transnational Asian Women in the Diaspora
• Index