Between Class And Nation

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism? This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities. They analyze it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to present social structures-the nation-state, the division of labor, and the division between core and periphery-which are themselves constantly being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.

This timely book provides an extensive account of national identities in three of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom: Wales, Scotland and England. In all three contexts, identity and nationalism have become questions of acute interest in both academic and political commentary. The authors take stock of a wealth of empirical material and explore how attitudes to nation and state can be understood by relating them to changes in contemporary capitalist economies, and the consequences for particular class fractions. The book argues that these changes give rise to a set of resentments among people who perceive themselves to be losing out, concluding that class resentments, depending on historical and political factors relevant to each nation, can take the form of either sub-state nationalism or right wing populism. Nation, Class and Resentment shows that the politics of resentment is especially salient in England, where the promotion of a distinct national identity is problematic. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology and politics, will find this study of interest.

Edward J. Hughes here seeks to assess how Proust and his novel 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' might be understood in relation to issues of class and nation.

Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, this volume investigates how the experiences, histories, and relationships of social class are a necessary ingredient for explaining the re-emergence and dynamics of populist nationalism in both Eastern and Western Europe. Featuring in-depth urban and regional case studies from Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Scotland this volume reclaims class for anthropological research and lays out a new interdisciplinary agenda for studying identity politics in the intensifying neoliberal conjuncture.

Little attention has been paid to Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983) as a modernist writer. This study addresses the relationship of her production with Catalan, Spanish, and European modernism. Foregrounded is Rodoreda's negotiation of the overlapping subjects of gender, class, modes of representation, and national identities. In the first three chapters her pre-Civil War novels Soc una dona honrada?, Un dia de la vida d'un home, and Del que hom no pot fugir are read against key Catalan texts, particularly Eugeni d'Ors', to emphasize debates surrounding modernist aesthetics and models of Catalan national identity. The modernist preoccupation with high versus low literature is developed in Aloma, while El carrer de les Camelies reconfigures the flaneur vis-a-vis the female writer's positioning in the modernist enterprise. The modernist debt to realism and the revindication of early Catalan modernism in the 1970s are examined in Mirall trencat. Christine Arkinstall is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at The University of Auckland.

This volume contains the first broad selection of essays made available in English by Ber Borochov, one of the leading intellectuals of the early Zionist movement. Borochov founded the Labor Zionist party in 1906, and was the pillar of the Israeli Labor party from whose ranks arose such figures as David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Tsvi. He is best remembered for his ability to synthesize socialism and nationalism.Borochov argues that early Marxist theory failed to understand the causes of nationalism and views it only as a temporary phenomenon. Borochov tried to synthesize socialism with Jewish nationalism. Zionism was a movement necessary to free oppressed Eastern European Jews and permit them to further socialist ideals in their own nation-state. The dilemma is that socialist internationalism requires national culture to be of no further value once a socialist victory occurs in a country. Borochov's essays provide an important, if largely unknown perspective on these questions.

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was created in 1939 to produce, distribute, and promote Canadian cinema both domestically and abroad. In Filming Politics, author Malek Khouri explores the work of the NFB during this period and argues that the political discourse of the films produced by this institution offered a counter-hegemonic portrayal of working class people and presented them as agents of social change. Filming Politics brings to light a number of films from the early years of the NFB, most of which have long been forgotten.

'Race, Nation, Class' is a key dialogue on identity and nationalism by major critics of capitalism.