“What unites these essays is a common focus on the ‘social construction’ of racial categories and a desire to expose the exercise of racism and its intersection with other forms of social domination such as class, gender, and ethnicity . . . Fascinating.”––Multicultural Review
“The coming together of theoretical, multiethnic, and ‘on-the-ground’ perspectives makes this book a particularly valuable contribution to the discourse on race.”––Paula Giddings
“Timely and thoughtful. . . contributes to our understanding of how race operates as a social process and in the contextualization of power and status.”––Contemporary Sociology
“A treasure chest full of gems. Virtually every article is fascinating and important, and as a collection, its impact is tremendous. Neo-conservative myths and fantasies fall like nine-pins before its well-researched and tightly argued papers.”––Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena
“A timely antidote to that reaction tome, The Bell Curve.”––Daily News (New York)
“Let’s be clear from the start what this book is about,” writes Roger Sanjek. “Race is the framework of ranked categories, segmenting the human population, that was developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion.”To contemporary social scientists, this ranking is baseless, though it has had all-too-real effects.
Drawing on anthropology, history, sociology, ethnic studies, and women's studies, this volume explores the role of race in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. The contributors show how racial ideologies intersect with gender, class, nation and sexuality in the formation of complex social identities and hierarchies. The essays address such topics as race and Egyptian nationalism, the construction of “whiteness” in the United States, and the transformation of racial categories in post-colonial Haiti. They demonstrate how social elites and members of subordinated groups construct and rework racial meanings and identities within the context of global political, economic, and cultural change. Race provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded survey of contemporary theoretical approaches to studying the complex interplay of race, power, and identity.
Race is not a subject most people associate with archaeological research. Yet because of archaeologists’ interest in long time-spans they are perfectly positioned to investigate the “naturalness” of racial designations through time.
Race and the Archaeology of Identity brings together twelve of America’s most perceptive and talented historical archaeologists. Their focus is on the recent archaeological record—stretching geographically from Jamaica to northern Michigan; their time frame is from colonial days to the late nineteenth century; and their subjects range from frontier fur traders to Victorian city dwellers. Using textual and archaeological sources, contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the creation and maintenance of institutionalized poverty, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.
Contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.
For over ten years, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America has been an essential text for students studying the region. This second edition adds new material and brings the analysis up to date.
Race and ethnic identities are increasingly salient in Latin America. Peter Wade examines changing perspectives on Black and Indian populations in the region, tracing similarities and differences in the way these peoples have been seen by academics and national elites. Race and ethnicity as analytical concepts are re-examined in order to assess their usefulness.
This book should be the first port of call for anthropologists and sociologists studying identity in Latin America.
The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965.
Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson
Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family.
Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called "colorblind" adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses.
Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.
In Religion or Ethnicity? fifteen leading scholars trace the evolution of Jewish identity. The book examines Judaism from the Greco-Roman age, through medieval times, modern western and eastern Europe, to today. Jewish identity has been defined as an ethnicity, a nation, a culture, and even a race. Religion or Ethnicity? questions what it means to be Jewish. The contributors show how the Jewish people have evolved over time in different ethnic, religious, and political movements. In his closing essay, Gitelman questions the viability of secular Jewishness outside Israel but suggests that the continued interest in exploring the relationship between Judaism's secular and religious forms will keep the heritage alive for generations to come.
Starting with the anti-Spanish wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, Earle charts the changing importance elite nationalists ascribed to the pre-Columbian past through an analysis of a wide range of sources, including historical writings, poems and novels, postage stamps, constitutions, and public sculpture. This eclectic archive illuminates the nationalist vision of creole elites throughout Spanish America, who in different ways sought to construct meaningful national myths and histories. Traces of these efforts are scattered across nineteenth-century culture; Earle maps the significance of those traces. She also underlines the similarities in the development of nineteenth-century elite nationalism across Spanish America. By offering a comparative study focused on Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, The Return of the Native illustrates both the common features of elite nation-building and some of the significant variations. The book ends with a consideration of the pro-indigenous indigenista movements that developed in various parts of Spanish America in the early twentieth century.
As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a “culture war” within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation’s ethnic composition.
Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.
A leading historian argues that in the empire we know as Byzantium, the Greek-speaking population was actually Roman, and scholars have deliberately mislabeled their ethnicity for the past two centuries for political reasons.
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself “Byzantine.” And while the identities of minorities in the eastern empire are clear—contemporaries speak of Slavs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Jews, and Muslims—that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations.
Historical evidence tells us unequivocally that Byzantium’s ethnic majority, no less than the ruler of Constantinople, would have identified as Roman. It was an identity so strong in the eastern empire that even the conquering Ottomans would eventually adopt it. But Western scholarship has a long tradition of denying the Romanness of Byzantium. In Romanland, Anthony Kaldellis investigates why and argues that it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
In the Middle Ages, he explains, people of the eastern empire were labeled “Greeks,” and by the nineteenth century they were shorn of their distorted Greekness and became “Byzantine.” Only when we understand that the Greek-speaking population of Byzantium was actually Roman will we fully appreciate the nature of Roman ethnic identity. We will also better understand the processes of assimilation that led to the absorption of foreign and minority groups into the dominant ethnic group, the Romans who presided over the vast multiethnic empire of the east.
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