The Public Work of Christmas
eBook - ePub

The Public Work of Christmas

Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Public Work of Christmas

Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies

About this book

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility.

The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike.

Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas - as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness - at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies.

Contributors include Herman Bausinger (TĂźbingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan), Christian Marchetti (TĂźbingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow (Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac Weiner (Ohio State).

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Yes, you can access The Public Work of Christmas by Pamela E. Klassen, Monique Scheer, Pamela E. Klassen,Monique Scheer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Customs & Traditions. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Figures and Table
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. 1 The Difference That Christmas Makes: Thoughts on Christian Affordances in Multicultural Societies
  9. 2 Tense Holidays: Approaching Christmas through Conflict
  10. 3 “And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!” or How the Grinch Heard Christmas
  11. 4 “Stille Nacht” Time and Again: Christmas Songs and Feelings
  12. 5 Situating German Volkskunde’s Christmas: Reflections on Spatial and Historical Constructions
  13. 6 “The First ‘White’ Xmas”: Settler Multiculturalism, Nisga’a Hospitality, and Ceremonial Sovereignty on the Pacific Northwest Coast
  14. 7 Oy Tannenbaum, Oy Tannenbaum! The Role of a Christmas Tree in a Jewish Museum
  15. 8 “What Exactly Do You Celebrate at Christmas?”: Different Perceptions of Christmas among German-Turkish Families in Berlin
  16. 9 A Christmas Crisis: Lessons from a Canadian Public School’s Seasonal Skirmish
  17. 10 Christmas on Orchard Road in Singapore: Celebrating the Gift of Jesus Christ between Gucci and Tiffany
  18. 11 A Cathedral Is Not Just for Christmas: Civic Christianity in the Multicultural City
  19. 12 Epilogue: Containing the World in the Christmas Mood
  20. Contributors
  21. Index