110 books match the query 'Cultural pluralism' and 7 start with b

cover of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11

Behind the Backlash

Muslim Americans After 9/11

Lori Peek

Temple University Press, 2010

As the nation tried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught up in an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community.

Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book, Behind the Backlash presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis.

Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scapegoating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek’s book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.

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cover of Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More Than Human World

Being Together in Place

Indigenous Coexistence in a More Than Human World

Soren C. Larsen

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Being Together in Place explores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests and concerns. Grounded in three sites—the Cheslatta-Carrier traditional territory in British Columbia; the Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas; and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in Aotearoa/New Zealand—this book highlights the challenging, tentative, and provisional work of coexistence around such contested spaces as wetlands, treaty grounds, fishing spots, recreation areas, cemeteries, heritage trails, and traditional village sites. At these sites, activists learn how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being, particularly to those who are intent on damaging or destroying these places. 

Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson show how the communities in these regions challenge the power relations that structure the ongoing (post)colonial encounter in liberal democratic settler-states. Emerging from their conversations with activists was a distinctive sense that the places for which they cared had agency, a “call” that pulled them into dialogue, relationships, and action with human and nonhuman others. This being-together-in-place, they find, speaks in a powerful way to the vitalities of coexistence: where humans and nonhumans are working to decolonize their relationships; where reciprocal guardianship is being stitched back together in new and unanticipated ways; and where a new kind of “place thinking” is emerging on the borders of colonial power.

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cover of Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America

Beyond Pluralism

The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America

Edited by Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree

University of Illinois Press, 1998

      Pluralist or multiculturalist, proudly ethnic or disappearing into the
        melting pot, people come in all persuasions. This volume attempts to bridge
        the gap that has developed between pluralists and multiculturalists, advocates
        of the academic canon and defenders of diversity, celebrants of ethnic
        heritage and critics of racial ascription. Contributors explore the nation's
        pluralistic framework as a historical creation, looking at group relations
        in the United States and how they have been conceptualized in the past.
 
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cover of Beyond Segregation: Multiracial And Multiethnic Neighborhoods

Beyond Segregation

Multiracial And Multiethnic Neighborhoods

Michael T. Maly

Temple University Press, 2005

At a time when cities appear to be fragmenting mosaics of ethnic enclaves, it is reassuring to know there are still stable multicultural neighborhoods. Beyond Segregation offers a tour of some of America's best known multiethnic neighborhoods: Uptown in Chicago, Jackson Heights (Queens), and San Antonio-Fruitvale in Oakland. Readers will learn the history of the neighborhoods and develop an understanding of the people that reside in them, the reasons they stay, and the work it takes to maintain each neighborhood as an affordable, integrated place to live.
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cover of Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity In a Multicultural Context

Beyond the Binary

Reconstructing Cultural Identity In a Multicultural Context

Edited by Timothy B. Powell

Rutgers University Press, 1999

"Beyond the Binary offers a coherently presented collection of uniformly strong essays that speak to what is perhaps the most widely discussed, contested and conflicted topic in the study of US culture. It joins the growing body of work that seeks to move beyond identity politics and racial essentialism to formulate racial identity as a more complex series of social, cultural and political gestures." -Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Constituting Americans

Cultural studies have reached a theoretical impasse. As scholars continue to topple the previously entrenched concept of Eurocentrism, this field has fragmented into works covering many separate cultural enclaves. In the first wave of this "post-Eurocentric" scholarship, a binary model ensued, using the designations of "Self" and "Other:" i.e., black/white, gay/straight. This model, however, also has found disfavor. As a result, recent scholarship has focused on a single group studied in isolation.

What is needed is a new critical phase of reconstruction that will bring discussion of these disparate cultural enclaves back into a more organized, critical sphere. Researchers must have the necessary conceptual tools so they can study the ways in which cultures overlap, intersect, or else violently conflict with one another.

Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context addresses this theoretical impasse by proposing new critical models that fully engage the dilemmas posed by multiculturalism. Rather than becoming entangled in the polarizing rhetoric of the culture wars, these essays are firmly grounded in the lived perplexities of specific historical moments. One piece, for example, considers the cultural identity of "freaks" exhibited in P. T. Barnum's circus, the contested place of hemophiliacs within Queer Nation, and "white" working-class musicians who proudly proclaim themselves to be "black lesbians."

Beyond the Binary is meant to be read in its entirety as a many-voiced narrative dedicated to bringing the divisions within cultural studies back into contact with one another. By doing so, Powell ushers in a new era of multicultural analysis that recognizes the historical existence of racism, yet also acknowledges the dynamic fluidity of cultural identity.

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cover of Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Black or Right

Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics

Louis M. Maraj

Utah State University Press, 2020

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday.
 
Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces.
 
In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.
 
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cover of Bosnia the Good: Tolerance and Tradition

Bosnia the Good

Tolerance and Tradition

Rusmir Mahmutcehajic

Central European University Press, 2000

Bosnia the Good is an indictment of the partition of Bosnia, formalized in 1995 by the Dayton Accord. This unequalled volume is a plea from one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's most prominent dissidents appealing for Bosnia's communities to reject ethnic segregation and restore mutual trust. The author argues for the history and reality of a Bosnia-Herzegovina based upon a model of 'unity in diversity'. He shows that ethnic and religious cultures co-existed in Bosnia for centuries and that Croatian and Serbian leaders determined to enact their own nationalist programs are to be blamed for the conflicts that devastated a nation. He points out the decisive moment when the international community accepted the Serb/Croat argument that ancient ethnic hatreds were endemic to Bosnia and that ethnic segregation became not only acceptable but desirable. He examines the reasons why Western liberal democracies have regarded with sympathy the struggles of Serbia and Croatia for national recognition, while viewing Bosnia's multicultural society with suspicion. Bosnia the Good confronts the religious dimension of the Bosnian dilemmas from the perspective of a Bosniak committed to inter-religious dialogue. The author argues that the only way Bosnia will reclaim its unique civilization is more than simple tolerance among Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. They have to recognize that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share the same deity and it is this common transcendent perspective that should open the door to the acceptance and celebration of religious diversity. Bosnia is at present divided and shaken to its foundations, but the author argues it could become a model for European progress. The greatest danger is for Bosnia to be declared just another ethnoreligious entity, in this case a 'Muslim State' ghettoized inside Europe. If protected and allowed to develop however, the author explains how Bosnia could find a place in a new European order.
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