Negotiating Identities

Immigration is even more hotly debated in Europe than in the United States. In this pivotal work of action and discourse analysis, Riva Kastoryano draws on extensive fieldwork--including interviews with politicians, immigrant leaders, and militants--to analyze interactions between states and immigrants in France and Germany. Making frequent comparisons to the United States, she delineates the role of states in constructing group identities and measures the impact of immigrant organization and mobilization on national identity. Kastoryano argues that states contribute directly and indirectly to the elaboration of immigrants' identity, in part by articulating the grounds on which their groups are granted legitimacy. Conversely, immigrant organizations demanding recognition often redefine national identity by reinforcing or modifying traditional sentiments. They use culture--national references in Germany and religion in France--to negotiate new political identities in ways that alter state composition and lead the state to negotiate its identity as well. Despite their different histories, Kastoryano finds that Germany, France, and the United States are converging in their policies toward immigration control and integration. All three have adopted similar tactics and made similar institutional adjustments in their efforts to reconcile differences while tending national integrity. The author builds her observations into a model of ''negotiations of identities'' useful to a broad cross-section of social scientists and policy specialists. She extends her analysis to consider how the European Union and transnational networks affect identities still negotiated at the national level. The result is a forward-thinking book that illuminates immigration from a new angle.

Aimed at "empowering" teachers and students in a culturally diverse society, this book suggests that schools must respect student's language and culture, encourage community participation, promote critical literacy, and institute forms of assessment in order to reverse patterns of under-achievement in pupils from varying cultures. The book shows that students who have been failed by schools predominantly come from communities whose languages, cultures and identities have been distorted and devalued in the wider society, and schools have reinforced this pattern of disempowerment.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays, addressing such diverse topics as the history of Brazilian football and the concept of masculinity in the Mexican army. It provides insights into questions of identity in 19th- and 20th-century Latin America. It analyses a variety of identity-bearing groups, from small-scale communities to nations.

This edited volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how identities are negotiated and a sense of belonging established in a world of increasing migration and diversity. Transcending field-specific approaches and differences in foci, the authors investigate how identity is constructed and mediated in face-to-face interactions (in real time and fictional writing), how writers use narratives to express their reorientation and their identity negotiation in a new homeland, and how material objects convey layered meaning to identity and belonging. This engagement with spoken, written and material mediation of identity resonates with recent sociolinguistic investigations on how language is connected to and intersects with embodiment, materiality and time. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of globalisation and migration studies, sociolinguistics and narrative analysis, anthropology and cultural studies.

Negotiating Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal illuminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city and its people. The chapters focus on sites where identities were forged and contested over crucial decades in Montreal's history. Readers will discover the links between identity, place, and historical moment as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men of the Great Depression, elite families, shopkeepers, reformers, notaries, and social workers, among others. This is a fascinating study that explores the intersections of state, people, and the voluntary sector to elucidate the processes that took people between homes and cemeteries, between families and shops, and onto the streets. This book will be of interest to a wide range of social and cultural historians, critical geographers, students of gender studies, and those wanting to know more about the fascinating past of one of Canada's most lively cities.

Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

This book addresses the conceptual difficulties and political contestations surrounding the applicability of the term "African-Canadian". In the midst of this contested terrain, the volume focuses on first generation, Black Continental Africans who have immigrated to Canada in the last four decades, and have traceable genealogical links to the continent.

Negotiating Identities is a study of the development of writing by Asian American women in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the successful late 20th century writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Joy Kogawa, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gish Jen. It relates the development of Asian writing by women in America – with a comparative element incorporating Britain – to a series of theoretical preoccupations: the mother/daughter dyad, biracialism, ethnic histories, citizenship, genre, and the idea of 'home'.