Ethnicity Nation Culture

Arising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, the formative period of American national identity, the authors reveal the complex interrelationships between collective identities on the local, regional, and national level which, over time, shaped the peculiar character of American nationalism. This volume combines vivid descriptions of various public celebrations with a sophisticated methodological and theoretical approach.

Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

The consolidation of Taiwanese identity in recent years has been accompanied by two interrelated paradoxes: a continued language shift from local Taiwanese languages to Mandarin Chinese, and the increasing subordination of the Hoklo majority culture in ethnic policy and public identity discourses. A number of initiatives have been undertaken toward the revitalization and recognition of minority cultures. At the same time, however, the Hoklo majority culture has become akin to a political taboo. This book examines how the interplay of ethnicity, national identity and party politics has shaped current debates on national culture and linguistic recognition in Taiwan. It suggests that the ethnolinguistic distribution of the electorate has led parties to adopt distinctive strategies in an attempt to broaden their ethnic support bases. On the one hand, the DPP and the KMT have strived to play down their respective de-Sinicization and Sinicization ideologies, as well as their Hoklo and Chinese ethnocultural cores. At the same time, the parties have competed to portray themselves as the legitimate protectors of minority interests by promoting Hakka and Aboriginal cultures. These concomitant logics have discouraged parties from appealing to ethnonationalist rhetoric, prompting them to express their antagonistic ideologies of Taiwanese and Chinese nationalism through more liberal conceptions of language rights. Therefore, the book argues that constraints to cultural and linguistic recognition in Taiwan are shaped by political rather than cultural and sociolinguistic factors. Investigating Taiwan’s counterintuitive ethnolinguistic situation, this book makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature to many fields of study and will appeal to scholars of Taiwanese politics, sociolinguistics, culture and history.

Nationality in Latin America has long been entwined with questions of racial identity. Just as American-born colonial elites grounded their struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the history of Amerindian resistance, constructions of nationality were based on the notion of the fusion of populations heterogeneous in culture, race, and language. But this rhetorical celebration of difference was framed by a real-life pressure to assimilate into cultures always defined by Iberian American elites. In Mestizo Nations, Juan De Castro explores the construction of nationality in Latin American and Chicano literature and thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the discourse of mestizajeÑwhich proposes the creation of a homogenous culture out of American Indian, black, and Iberian elementsÑhe examines a selection of texts that represent the entire history and regional landscape of Latin American culture in its Western, indigenous, and neo-African traditions from Independence to the present. Through them, he delineates some of the ambiguities and contradictions that have beset this discourse. Among texts considered are the Indianist novel Iracema by the nineteenth-century Brazilian author JosŽ de Alencar; the Tradiciones peruanas, Peruvian Ricardo Palma's fictionalizations of national difference; and historical and sociological essays by the Peruvian Marxist JosŽ Carlos Mari‡tegui and the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre. And because questions raised by this discourse are equally relevant to postmodern concerns with national and transnational heterogeneity, De Castro also analyzes such recent examples as the Cuban dance band Los Van Van's use of Afrocentric lyrics; Richard Rodriguez's interpretations of North American reality; and points of contact and divergence between JosŽ Mar’a Arguedas's novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below and writings of Gloria Anzaldœa and Julia Kristeva. By updating the concept of mestizaje as a critical tool for analyzing literary text and cultural trendsÑincorporating not only race, culture, and nationality but also gender, language, and politicsÑDe Castro shows the implications of this Latin American discursive tradition for current critical debates in cultural and area studies. Mestizo Nations contains important insights for all Latin Americanists as a tool for understanding racial relations and cultural hybridization, creating not only an important commentary on Latin America but also a critique of American life in the age of multiculturalism.

Global Multiculturalism offers a rich collection of case studies on ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity drawn from thirteen countries_each unique in the way it understands, negotiates, and represents its diversity. A multi-disciplinary group of authors shows how, in different nations, identity groups are included, or made invisible by forced assimilation, or reviled even to the point of genocide. Framed within a theoretical discussion of national identity, transnationalism, hybridity, and diaspora, each chapter surveys the demographics and history of its country and then analyzes the dynamics of diversity. With cases ranging from Bosnia to Chiapas, Cuba to China, and Zimbabwe to France, this volume offers a truly global perspective and scope. Its genuinely comparative methodology and range of disciplinary perspectives make it a unique resource for all those seeking to understand ethnic conflict and diversity.

Multicultural Riddle is a comprehensive exploration of all the issues that shape our search for a multicultural society. The book examines how we can establish a state of justice and equality between and among three groups: those who believe in a unified national culture, those who trace their culture to their ethnic identity, and those who view their religion as their culture. To solve the multicultural riddle, one must rethink national identity, ethnicity and the role of religion in the modern world.

"The major issues in cultural practice today include identity crisis, creation of a new national culture, conflicts derived from regional imbalance in economic development and power sharing, fear of erosion of indigenous values and problems of morals and cultures in the waves of cyber streams and globalization. However, these issues, are invariably related to the key issues of cultural identity and ethnicity. The identity that defines the sense of nation, community and ethnic roots is generally linked to the politics of nationalism, national integration and political contests.The purpose of the texts included in this book is to highlight these points and treat the intercultural phenomenon carefully, to reflect on what it implies on social, political as well as aesthetic levels."

This text discusses key debates in the sociology of ethnicity and race, arguing that ethnicity is culturally expressed and politically and economically contextualized. The historical trajectories of slavery, colonialism and nation state formation have seen ethnicities and racisms develop along some parallel, and some quite different, lines. Drawing on examples from all around the globe, including Britain, continental Europe, the USA, Hawaii and Malaysia, this book offers a theoretically-informed account of a major sociological issue in a truly international and comparative perspective.