Books in the Politics, History, and Culture series

Immigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe's cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of national belonging. This book provides an ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations.

An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them, are acts framed by a long tradition. This collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins.

Demonstrates the central role of ordinary people - rather than state or market elites - in creating institutions for determining status in China. This book explores the emerging hierarchy, which is based on the concept of suzhi, or quality.

Argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.

Illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative, cross-case perspective. This book emphasizes that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory - its place in social relations and the forms it takes-varies over time.

A look at how the Chinese Exclusion Act and later legislation affected Chinese American communities, who created fictitious "paper families" to subvert immigration policies.

This analysis of the failure of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922 has implications for modern-day nation-building efforts in the Mideast.

Offers an analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. This book reconstructs black women's crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform.

Explores the multiple meanings of the November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the different reactions it elicited: among the Amsterdam-based artistic and intellectual subculture, the wider Dutch public, the local and international Muslim communities, the radical Islamic movement, and the broader international community.

Explores the 19th-century assumption that the advancement of a society could be measured by its treatment of women. This book shows how race was an additional - and more concealed - factor embedded in the history, politics, and culture of both German feminism and German colonialism from the late 19th century to the Third Reich.

Collection of new essays on the past, present, and future of positivism in the various social sciences

An exploration of how US' efforts to sacralize and repatriate the remains of some 2,000 soldiers killed in action in the Vietnam War might indicate some lingering corporeal and ontological uncertainties in the post-Vietnam era.