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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Ethnicity without Groups -- 2 Beyond "Identity" -- 3 Ethnicity as Cognition -- 4 Ethnic and Nationalist Violence -- 5 The Return of Assimilation? -- 6 "Civic" and "Ethnic" Nationalism -- 7 Ethnicity, Migration, and Statehood in Post–Cold War Europe -- 8 1848 in 1998: The Politics of Commemoration in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia -- Notes -- References -- Index

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Traditions of Nationhood in France and Germany -- I. THE INSTITUTION OF CITIZENSHIP -- 1. Citizenship as Social Closure -- 2. The French Revolution and the Invention of National Citizenship -- 3. State, State-System, and Citizenship in Germany -- II. DEFINING THE CITIZENRY: THE BOUNDS OF BELONGING -- 4. Citizenship and Naturalization in France and Germany -- 5. Migrants into Citizens: The Crystallization of Jus Soli in Late-Nineteenth-Century France -- 6. The Citizenry as Community of Descent: The Nationalization of Citizenship in Wilhelmine Germany -- 7. "Etre Français, Cela se Mérite": Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in France in the 1980s -- 8. Continuities in the German Politics of Citizenship -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

"In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of "transgender" and "transracial" as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up in different ways and to different degrees to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one's race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal's claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry increasingly understood as mixed loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories."--Publisher's description

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Difference and Inequality -- 2. The Return of Biology -- 3. Language, Religion, and the Politics of Difference -- 4. Religion and Nationalism -- 5. The "Diaspora" Diaspora -- 6. Migration, Membership, and the Nation-State -- 7. Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity -- Notes -- References -- Index

Offering fresh perspectives on perennial questions of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and religion, Rogers Brubaker makes manifest the forces that shape the politics of diversity and multiculturalism today. In a lucid and wide-ranging analysis, he contends that three recent developments have altered the stakes and the contours of the politics of difference: the return of inequality as a central public concern, the return of biology as an asserted basis of racial and ethnic difference, and the return of religion as a key terrain of public contestation. The cultural and discursive turn that drew students of identity away from the study of structural inequalities in recent decades has now run its course. At a moment of heightened public and scholarly concern with deepening inequality, Grounds for Difference shows how categories of difference such as race, ethnicity, and gender get built into enduring structures of inequality. In the aftermath of the Human Genome Project, newly influential genetic understandings of human difference threaten to naturalize both difference and inequality. Brubaker critically engages the new ethnoracial naturalism and assesses how genetic perspectives have transformed understandings and practices of race and ethnicity in biomedical research, criminal forensics, popular genealogy, and identity politics. The resurgence of public religion in recent decades likewise has major implications for how we understand the politics of difference. Brubaker explains why the most intensely contested struggles over cultural difference today tend to involve religion, confounding longstanding expectations about continued secularization. -- Provided by publisher.

Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has turned anti-protectionist during the pandemic and challenged the allegedly overprotective restrictions of the nanny-state. I address each apparent paradox in turn before speculating in conclusion about how populist distrust of expertise, antipathy to government regulation, and skepticism toward elite overprotectiveness may come together – in the context of intersecting medical, economic, political, and epistemic crises – in a potent and potentially dangerous mix.