Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 4 May 2008 pp. 818833 Book reviews Jessica Adams, WOUNDS OF RETURNING: RACE, MEMORY, AND PROPERTY ON THE POSTSLAVERY PLANTATION, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, xi
226, $22.50 (pb). The 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave by Britain (1807) and the United States (1808) has produced a growing number of books about slavery and memory. Now we have Wounds of Returning, an arresting and innovative book that examines the ways in which the plantation and plantation mentalities have shaped ‘postslavery geographies’ (p. 4). The commodification of the black body, Adams argues, ‘haunts’ contemporary discourses about consumerism, punishment and public history. In this sense, the ‘plantation’ has proved a dynamic, evolving notion that speaks directly and indirectly to white fears about ‘race’ and, within the context of modern consumer culture at least, acts as a symbol for Americans’ fixation with commodities and the market, itself a form of ‘enslavement’. Adams, who is lecturer in English literature at Berkeley, pursues these themes in a series of five case studies. Some of these studies deal with physical manifestations of the plantation. In her opening chapter, for instance, Adams examines in some detail the history of ‘Storyville’, New Orleans’ segregated (black) vice district, which became a popular tourist destination in the early twentieth century. ‘Storyville’ was hardly unique in the South but, as Adams argues, it ‘nationalized and legitimized’ (p. 36) one of white men’s perceived ante-bellum privileges, namely, sex across the colour line. Equally fascinating is her discussion of the predominantly black Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, built ironically on the site of a former plantation. Again, the continuities between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Souths are striking: the state penitentiary at Angola literally operates as a kind of plantation, particularly for those inmates who, because of a quirk in state law, have no prospect of being released. Elsewhere, Adams is more preoccupied with literary or cultural continuities (the romanticization of the Old South, for instance), evident in the work of figures like William Faulkner and Grace King. She also neatly unpicks the ways in which the novelist, Willa Cather, (re)presents the messa, mission and hacienda of the American West (‘the frontier’) as ‘screens for the slave plantation’ (p. 125). Adams explores these modern manifestations of the slave past with considerable skills and ingenuity. She also deals perceptively with the thorny issue of plantation tourism. Throughout the American South, there is still a marked tendency for these sites to neglect or ignore the subject of slavery. Plantation houses are more often than not presented as white ‘homes’, valuable for their architecture, contents (furniture and paintings, for example) and insights into planter lifestyles. There are exceptions, of course, among them Carter’s Grove, a ‘restored’ slave village at Colonial Williamsburg. Yet responses to these initiatives have been mixed. Many black visitors, it seems, would also prefer to forget about slavery, which is why so many of them are uncomfortable with ‘slave tours’ or with blacks playing the role of enslaved Africans. Adams is rightly critical of attempts to re-package plantation history as white history. But, again, she sees the process of ‘remembering through forgetting’ as further evidence of the continuing significance of white ‘fears and superstitions about the consequences of slavery within a society in which black and white people continue to live in close proximity, and in which the upheaval and confusion following the Civil War sometimes seem not long past’ (pp. 712). ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online DOI: 10.1080/01419870801957126 Book reviews 819 Wounds of Returning is a thoughtful and illuminating study that juxtaposes Elvis Presley’s ‘Graceland’, the novels of Faulkner, King and Cather, and films like William Wyler’s Jezebel. In the main, Adams reads these different texts brilliantly, but at times the discursive nature of her analysis gets in the way of her overall argument (Adams’ chapter on ‘Graceland’ is a case in point). Connections are occasionally assumed rather than explained, and it is not always clear why a film, say, has been chosen to illustrate a point rather than a literary text or a slice of social history. To this extent, Adams’ eclecticism is both a strength and a weakness. Nevertheless, she makes a convincing case for the social and cultural persistence of plantation mentalities and their role in shaping attitudes to plantation tourism, consumer culture and modern methods of punishment. # 2008 J. R. Oldfield University of Southampton Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson, JAMAICA: HANDS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2006, x
233 pp., $24.95 (pb). Despite its small size, Jamaica with only about 2.5 million people, accounts for a disproportionate number of migrants, almost as many as half its population, from the English-speaking Caribbean. The Caribbean, with close to 40 million people, itself almost entirely settled today by migrants from other parts of the world, has paradoxically become a major exporter of migrants and settlers. Jamaica, as part of this complex historical flow of people in the Caribbean, occupies a special place as a vibrant and creative, cultural, densely populated centre that survives mainly by exporting its people. With few resources apart from its attraction as a tourist destination, the island has been plagued by high unemployment and endemic poverty and violence which have driven those who can afford it to migrate. A substantial number of illegals also seem to pass through. Jamaican migrants are conspicuously present in London, Toronto and New York, where after many generations of residence, they proudly proclaim that they are first and foremost Jamaicans. Despite the salience of Jamaicans in the steady outward Caribbean migratory flow, there is not much accurate and reliable data on how many have actually left the island and in what quantities to specific destinations in Europe and North America. What is lacking in exact data need not deter the basic task of understanding and explaining the migration phenomenon, for this can be offset by other methodologies. In this book, Jamaica: Hands Across the Atlantic, the authors have approached the issues of migration through oral history. For, as they cogently argue, while statistics and documents provide ‘at best a context and at that a dubious one, for inevitably they do not include illegal immigrants’ (p. 22), it is through life-story evidence that we can unearth the inner processes of migration. The critical interest that the authors have pursued in this work pertains not to the assembling of cold quantitative data (‘the dry bones of statistics’) as an end in itself, but in ‘the power of oral history in giving voice to ordinary men and women, conveying their experience of work and migration, and family, and of religion and education and their own interpretations of this lived experience’ (p. 27). The focus of the oral history methodology is what the authors describe as ‘the transnational family’, a new kinship structure where close relationships are maintained across state boundaries at multiple sites with members frequently holding multiple citizenship: ‘We wanted to understand how far grandparents and parents, brothers and sisters, could still operate as families despite being split up by migration and whether the family patterns and sense of identity remained simply Jamaican after migration or new forms are emerging’ (pp. 12). Since the time of the emancipation from slavery on the island, ‘travelling’ had emerged historically as a Jamaican practice in the construction of an evolving Jamaican migration and national culture. But the peculiar feature of this practice relates to its impact in establishing new patterns in the structure of the family radically different from the conventional AngloAmerican variant. The authors poignantly describe how ‘it is so common in Jamaican 820 Book reviews families for either fathers or mothers or both to have children with more than one partner’ and how this multiple partnering has tended to ‘produce a complex of fathers with as many as thirty children from at least ten mothers’ (p. 2). Offspring are caught in an abundant network of stepmothers and stepfathers, half-brothers and half-sisters and myriad cousins. In the migration out of Jamaica, a transnational family tends to include a variety of close and remotely related siblings and relatives in New York, Toronto, Miami and London. In the study of the normative Jamaican family then and especially the transnational family, it is necessary to avoid the Eurocentric family terminologies with their pejorative stigmatization of single mothers, multiple partners, offspring out of wedlock and so on. The authors went to great lengths to underscore the need to recognize the family in Jamaica and the Caribbean as a legitimate new form of kinship and not a dysfunctional structure: ‘scattered across the seas between the Caribbean, Britain and North America, very often divided by parental separations as well as vast distances, Jamaican transnational families may seem to fit all too well into the white social worker’s image of the classically dysfunctional and literally ‘‘broken’’ family’ (p. 9). The book takes the reader into this different world of the transnational family created by generations of migration to multiple sites employing social history derived from interviews and participation observation of forty-five Jamaican families. The product has been a work that sets a measure of excellence for similar future endeavours. It is a well-documented work that offers a survey of the antecedent literature of Jamaican and Caribbean and migration family studies that have pioneered the departure from the more formalized conventional Eurocentric treatment of the subject. While some may argue for greater rigour from a quantitative approach, it is clear from this work that such efforts need to be supplemented by so-called subjective methodology in oral and social history for a deeper appreciation of the migratory process everywhere. A major controversy that the book is likely to provoke relates to the effort to turn the transnational family with its many agonies, alienation and dislocations, which are so well portrayed in this book, into a prescriptive and futuristic model in this age of migration. # 2008 Ralph R. Premdas University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago David L. Brunsma (ed.), MIXED MESSAGES: MULTIRACIAL IDENTITIES IN THE ‘COLOR-BLIND’ ERA, London: Lynne Rienner, 2005, 403 pp., £18.50 (hb). David Brunsma’s edited collection of theoretical and empirical research on racial justice is an informative addition to the field of race relations. In four major parts, various scholars provide their research and theoretical considerations to the nascent study of multiracial identity negotiation, experience and hegemony. The majority of the book’s authors’ unerringly stubborn perception of multiracialism as a tangential approach to black and white  and primarily black and white  relations is especially appropriate to researchers interested in macro-level conceptions of racial justice in the US mainland. However, for researchers who are interested in the study of conceptions of race, racial identity and race relations which are informed by the research of multiracial individuals and theories drawn from the experience of multiracial individuals, then this book’s value is more limited. I will review each section of the book and highlight how scholars from either camp can appreciate this book. Part one, ‘Shifting Color Lines’, focuses primarily on how the multiracial hegemony in the US creates the illusion of racial justice, but in reality blacks are still horribly and unfairly treated. With the exception of Jeffry Moniz and Paul Spickard, the contributing authors to this section decry the use of multiracial hegemony as propaganda and misdirection, providing vehement arguments  yet sparse empirical data  to bolster their theories on the direction of race relations in the US mainland. In contrast, Moniz and Spickard provide a very interesting and new theory concerning multiracial identity that is informed by local Book reviews 821 experience in Hawai’i. Their ‘midaltern’ theory can be a welcome supplement for any researcher who is interested in studying how a protean identity can be informed by the surrounding politico-historical environment. Part two, ‘Manipulating Multiracial Identities’, provides further theory and some qualitative data (by Johanna Foster) on how various racial movements  multiracial, white separatist and black  can implicate racial justice. Again, the authors focus primarily on the dichotomous black and white race relationship in the US mainland and the future of racial justice within this context. G. Reginald Daniel, Josef Manuel Cataneda-Liles and Kimberly McClain DaCosta argue that members of the current multiracial movement are naı̈ve about their abilities and/or insidiously attempting to prevent future racial justice for blacks in the US. It is an incredibly cogent argument that is insightful from a macro-level inspection of race relations; however, it provides little for those concerned with the well-being and intentions of actual individuals who proclaim a multiracial identity. Part three, ‘Socialization in Multiracial Families’, offers more micro-level information on the multiracial experience. This section provides enlightening information about future considerations when conducting race research. For example, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Tracey Laszloffy and Julia Noveske suggest the importance of understanding participants’ racial ideology as opposed to just their racial identity when studying racial socialization. Again, all the contributing authors focus primarily on the implication their work has for racial justice, framing all conclusions from their work within this justification. Part four, ‘Dilemmas of Multiracial Identity’, provides additional micro-level information about the unique problems that are encountered  again, primarily  between black and nonblack individuals in various contexts: friendship, client-therapist and housing. This section helps integrate the various themes of the previous sections, specifically how essentialism reinforces black injustice in the US and how the focus on multiracial movements can be seen as a distraction that reinforces the hegemony of a colour-blind society that ignores issues of unfairness. Unlike previous compilations, the majority of scholars in Brunsma’s compilation largely ignore multiracialism as a product of a recent generation’s discovery that not only is their identity contestable, but that it is a matter of choice and great responsibility. The macro- and (somewhat) micro-level analyses that Brunsma compiles do not shed light on the multiracial experience or treat the study of multiracials as a unique field in and of itself. Instead, Brunsma buttresses traditional issues of black racial injustice against  what is considered by most of the authors  a recent multiracial movement of distraction from blacks obtaining justice. If one’s objective was to study multiracialism from various perspectives beyond the black and non-black racial issues in the US, then Brunsma’s book might not be appropriate. However, this book does provide broadly accessible information into black and non-black race relations and is a great sounding board for scholars who are primarily interested in a macro-level inspection of black racial justice. # 2008 Katherine Aumer-Ryan University of Texas at Austin Thomas Faist (ed.), DUAL CITIZENSHIP IN EUROPE: FROM NATIONHOOD TO SOCIETAL INTEGRATION, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 226 pp., £55.00 (hb). There has been a gradual shift from insoluble allegiance in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century to exclusive allegiance across most of the twentieth century to multiple allegiances of citizens at the beginning of the new millennium. Today, with the processes of globalization, democratization and migration, more than half of all states tolerate some form of dual citizenship. However, at a time of heightened terror alert and a likely increase of migrants from non-European countries to compensate for Europe’s low fertility, questions of community cohesion and loyalty to the nation have come to the fore again. 822 Book reviews The authors adopt a socio-historical perspective in tracing the liberalization of citizenship practices in recent decades and essentially argue that concepts of nationhood (i.e. ethnocultural versus civic-republican) and immigrant integration (i.e. multiculturalism versus assimilation) alone are insufficient in explaining the current national variations over tolerance of dual citizenship across Europe. Instead, they connect these two research paradigms to broader notions of societal integration, referring to both the integration of society as a whole and the integration of immigrants. This novel multidimensional approach analyses the worldviews and ideologies of major political actors regarding the aforementioned concepts and also examines institutional structures including political systems and voting rights for denizens. This book advances two main hypotheses. The first is that there has been a growing emphasis on individual rights in liberal-democratic immigration countries in Europe which has led to an increased tolerance of dual citizenship and the blurring of the boundaries between aliens and citizens. The second proposition is that the governments of many emigration countries have encouraged dual or multiple citizenship as a means of maintaining contacts and transnational economic and political links with their diasporas abroad. The authors test their hypotheses in three immigration countries  ranging from the relatively restrictive German case to the more tolerant Dutch case to the Swedish case where dual citizenship is explicitly accepted  and two mainly emigration countries which have tolerated dual citizenship only for emigrants abroad in a de facto (Poland) and de jure (Turkey) manner but not for immigrants. While the focus on emigration and immigration countries and the avoidance of ‘usual suspects’ like France and Britain is clearly one of the strengths of this book, there could have been more references to other European countries. For example, Greece, a traditional emigration country with a strong ethno-national conceptualisation of nationhood, has joined this debate and started tolerating dual citizenship for some of her immigrants. Another major strength lies in the ways in which the editor defines the highly complex and multifaceted concept of (dual) citizenship. National, transnational and post-national citizenship are used here as lenses through which to view the development of political conflicts surrounding dual citizenship. The national perspective, Thomas Faist argues, defines dual citizenship primarily as a problem pertaining to individual states. In contrast, he maintains that the post-national viewpoint links citizenship with rights and democratic norms beyond the nation-state whereas the transnational perspective refers to the crossborder lifestyles of citizens and the attempts by national governments to regulate these social formations. The German case powerfully illustrates the advantages of the societal integration approach. Jürgen Gerdes, Thomas Faist and Beate Rieple argue that the delayed 1999 reform of the country’s citizenship law was not the result of an ethno-national concept of nationhood but mainly the outcome of an ideological struggle between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) over the meaning of the term integration  the SPD views naturalization as a precondition of successful integration whereas the CDU mostly views integration as a precondition for naturalization. ‘Tying arguments to the ‘‘integration’’ belief system . . . is comparatively more useful for making sense of the different positions of the competing political camps than linking them with the concepts of nationhood or assimilation vs. multiculturalism’ (p. 49). The ‘integration’ belief system was also employed in explaining the recent shift from multiculturalism to a more integrationist approach in the Netherlands. Here, the republican model of nationhood has come under increasing pressure from ethno-national voices including the populist politician Pim Fortuyn and the publicist Paul Scheffer. This overturn of liberal dual citizenship policies contrasts with Sweden where the equal treatment of Swedes abroad and denizens at home as well as the absence of an established right-wing party at the national level in the 1990s has led to a full acceptance of dual citizenship. The two chapters on emigration countries are less complex in the sense that there has been no real debate, for instance, on voting rights for non-citizens or dual citizenship for Book reviews 823 immigrants. Instead, dual citizenship is pragmatically tolerated only for emigrant citizens and for either more economic (Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Poland) reasons. As Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu argues, ‘the Turkish experience indicates that the political activism of immigrants in their host countries [notably Germany] combined with the economic and political interests of the sending countries are the major explanatory factors behind increased tolerance of dual citizenship’ (p. 143). In Poland, restoration of citizenship to those who were unlawfully deprived of it in the communist era further explains the tacit toleration of dual citizenship. The book somewhat underplays the work of other authors (e.g. Koopmans, Statham, Giugni and Passy 2005) who have also tried to combine the two citizenship research paradigms (nationhood and immigrant integration), albeit through a political claims analysis rather than an examination of individuals, society and the state. It is also limited in its view of identity development through the lens of citizenship and thereby underplays factors like community dynamics, ethnic relations and social class positioning. Both national majorities and minority ethnic immigrant communities in Europe have multiple  not dualistic  identities including complex ethnic and political (or citizenship) dimensions. The authors could have entertained this imbalance between dual citizenship policies and multiple, often unacknowledged, identities among individuals and societies. In sum, this accessible and conceptually innovative volume makes an important contribution to political sociology and the sociology of migration in Europe. # 2008 Daniel Faas Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy Reference KOOPMANS, RUUD, STATHAM, PAUL, GIUGNI, MARCO and PASSY, FLORENCE 2005 Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Nancy L. Green and François Weil, CITIZENSHIP AND THOSE WHO LEAVE: THE POLITICS OF EMIGRATION AND EXPATRIATION, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007, 336 pp. $25.00 (pb). Citizenship and Those Who Leave takes an interesting and useful approach to the study of migration. Most scholars in this area tend to examine migration as immigration, looking at immigrant adaptation and cultural retention, host-country context of reception, immigration laws and policies, and consequences of immigration for migrants and their host countries. The collection of articles in this volume makes the valuable point that nations of origin are also important, although frequently overlooked, parts of the phenomenon of global mobility. Most of the contributors are acknowledged authorities in migration, and they come from a variety of disciplines, although historians tend to predominate. This interdisciplinary character is a consequence of the book’s origin in a conference at the Êcoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the home institution of both of the editors. The book ranges widely in geographic focus, as well as in disciplinary perspective, with chapters concentrating on Italy, France, Britain, Holland, Germany, the United States, Canada, Mexico, China, India and Israel, as well as Europe in general. The chapters range in time from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The breadth of coverage offered here might be both a general strength and a general weakness of books that have their origin in conferences. With specialists in varied areas 824 Book reviews describing their own fields in terms that are readily comprehensible to all of them, we get excellent, non-technical pieces that can familiarize readers with emigration issues in specific countries. At the same time, though, coverage tends to depend on who attended the conference or made papers available for publication. This means that some of the major population-exporting countries tend to be left out. For example, emigration is a major social, political and economic issue for the Philippines, the countries of the Maghreb and other locations not specifically examined in this volume. In addition, most of the topics tend to reflect the interests and specializations of the contributors, rather than a comprehensive and coherent view of the relationship between emigration and citizenship. The chapters also frequently miss some fairly fundamental emigration subjects. For example, remittances from countries of immigration to countries of emigration receive only very brief mentions in Caroline Douki’s chapter on Italian emigration between 1860 and 1914, Dorothee Schneider’s chapter on the US government and European emigration during the Open Door Era, and the chapter by Carine Pina-Guerassimoff and Eric Guerassimoff on the Chinese state and the overseas Chinese from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. This oversight struck me as odd because remittances have played such a large part in the societies and economies of many countries of emigration, and have often been important in shaping policy decisions. I was particularly surprised to see little attention given to this question in Jorge Durand’s otherwise excellent chapter on migration policy and the asymmetry of power between the United States and Mexico. Refugees, an entire category of emigrants who are enormously important for citizenship and the self-definitions of countries receive almost no attention here, except in Stephen J. Gold’s chapter on Israeli emigration policy, where Gold touches on Palestinian refugees and describes Jewish Israeli refugees as an initial stage in building a nation on immigration. The general lack of attention to refugees as emigrants may be partly due to the spotty geographical selectivity mentioned above. If Cold War Eastern Europe, post-Vietnam War Southeast Asia or late twentieth-century Central America had been included, doubtless refugees would have a more central place in the discussion. Despite the limitations of an edited conference volume, the two editors have managed to cast the chapters into a well-organized and logical framework. They begin with a ‘Freedom of Movement’ section that contains two overviews of the historical emergence of the right to exit. John Torpey makes an interesting and convincing argument that this right developed as part of a free labour market. Aristide Zolberg then moves this same argument further by maintaining that what he calls ‘the exit revolution’ was part of the rise of globalization in the nineteenth century. The three historical chapters in the section on ‘Nation Building and the Administrative Framework’ look at how emigration was connected to the development of European nation states during the nineteenth century. The chapters on ‘The Costs of Emigration’ look at the economic side of emigration for Britain, Holland and Germany. The chapters in the ‘Borders and Links’ section turn from Europe to North America, considering how American policy-makers at the opening of the twentieth century viewed European emigration, how migration from Canada to the United States has affected the Canadian national consciousness and how differences in power between the United States and Mexico moved the Mexican government from efforts to limit emigration, to passivity and then to active efforts to improve conditions for Mexican workers in the northern neighbour. In the last section, the contributors turn to the question of ‘Naming Emigrants’, considering how emigrants have been differently defined in China, India and Israel. Given current events and preoccupations, I suspect that Jorge Durand’s chapter on Mexican governmental policy, in the ‘Borders and Links’ section, and Steven J. Gold’s chapter on Israeli emigration policy, in the ‘Naming Emigrants’ section, will attract the attention of the greatest number of readers. All the chapters make valuable contributions to Book reviews 825 the study of migration, though, and the book as a whole successfully points out the importance of studying those who leave nations as shapers and definers of nationhood. # 2008 Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University Neville Hoad, AFRICAN INTIMACIES: RACE, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND GLOBALIZATION, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, vii
187 pp., £14.00 (pb). What is the historic and current relationship between sub-Saharan African national identities, sovereignty, colonialism, homosexuality and globalization? This is a question that Neville Hoad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, seeks to answer in his thoughtful and ambitious book, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Hoad uses historical documents and literary texts to make a convincing argument that identity and sexuality shift vis-à-vis historical context, genres and audiences. Hoad cautions against interpreting all same-gender desire as homosexuality, in order not to reinscribe European terminology concerning African sexuality, while acknowledging the presence of same-gender desire within African cultures. The book has six chapters providing a chronological outline from analysing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incident*the execution of thirty men in the royal court  to the contemporary HIV and AIDS crisis in Africa. In Chapter 1, Hoad gives four analyses of the Buganda events of 1886 using primary and secondary sources (i.e. documentation from the Anglican and Roman catholic missions in Uganda) to locate various shifts in how sexuality and identity were operating in Africa during this time, and cautions against the overdetermined nature of the representation of events. According to documents Hoad examines, Mutesea, the king of Buganda, welcomes explorer Henry Morgan Stanley, who is searching for sources of the Nile. Stanley then encourages missionaries to bring Christianity to Buganda. In 1877 the king receives two members of the Church Missionary Society and in 1878 Alexander Mackay sets up the Church Missionary Society in Buganda’s capital, Rubaga. In 1886 Mwanga wants Christian leaders to recant;many refuse and are as a result killed and in 1888 the Imperial British East Africa Company receives instructions from Lord Salisbury’s government to maintain order in Buganda. Hoad gives four readings of these events: the first is that homosexuality was a form of resistance to colonization; the second is that notions of a deviant sexuality were created and imposed upon Africans as a result of scientific racism and anxieties regarding race and gender; a third reading is that homosexuality was often viewed by British missionaries as being ‘un-British’ and not natural to northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, since, according to missionaries, Mwanga learned same-sex practices from Arab traders, thus shifting the European gaze over to the Orient for displaced sexual fantasies. Hoad credits the stance of many postcolonial African leaders regarding same-sex desire to this belief. The last reading is that African sodomy among men (lesbians are not as much of a focus of the book) was a form of anti-colonial resistance against British invasion. In Chapter 2, Hoad examines themes of sexuality, nationalism, economic exploitation and decolonization in Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel, The Interpreters, in which Joe Golder is a US black gay character who represents the diasphoric presence of homosexuality in Africa, who, albeit homophobically represented, remains a central part of the African bohemia of the protagonists (mainly artists) in the novel. The novel places the Nigerian civil war, US black civil rights movement, modernity, globalization of erotic capital and other global struggles in dialogue with one another, thus resembling the questions of diaspora and identity set forth in Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. In Chapter 3, Hoad discusses the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, which was split along geographic lines over ordaining homosexual priests and sanctioning same sex unions. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of lesbian and gay rights in South Africa in response to the new South African constitution and the tensions that arise. 826 Book reviews Chapter 5 is the chapter I enjoyed the most. I feel Hoad provided an in-depth analysis regarding resistance to homosexuality among African leaders, and the response to HIV and AIDS in many African countries, by examining the history of European racism and hypersexualization of African bodies, which is illustrated in the speech by Z. K. Matthews at the funeral of Sarah Bartmann on 9 August 2002. The last chapter examines the role of cosmopolitanism in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, which challenges notions of African identity, and the relationship to Africa and the rest of the world. I thought it was odd that in the conclusion Hoad did not mention the recent murders of black lesbians within the townships of Soweto since the new constitution of South African has been enforced; however, I think this book is a useful tool in establishing contemporary and historical connections regarding homosexuality within African cultures, and expanding notions of African identity at a time when African solidarity is much needed. This book will also help expand the fields of both African studies and queer studies. # 2008 Siobhan Brooks University of California at Santa Barbara Richard N. Juliani, PRIEST, PARISH, AND PEOPLE: SAVING THE FAITH IN PHILADELPHIA’S ‘LITTLE ITALY’, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, x
395 pp., $35.00/£23.50 (pb). Richard N. Juliani’s Priest, Parish, and People: Saving the Faith in Philadelphia’s ‘Little Italy’ is an exhaustive analysis of the complex interactions of the various socio-cultural components involved in the establishment of ethnic identity. Drawing together the biographical history of pastor Antonio Isoleri, the cultural history of Italian immigrants in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the religious history of Catholicism in America, Juliani demonstrates the ways in which these wide-ranging elements are inextricably bound to each other. In so doing, the book offers a comprehensive view of the formation of this distinctive community’s identity. The book is primarily structured around the central figure of Antonio Isoleri, whom Juliani sees as an essential force in the construction of the Italian-American Catholic community in Philadelphia. In order to analyse Isoleri’s experiences and beliefs, and the ways in which these factors influence the parish and people of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi, Juliani embarks on a meticulous examination of archival materials, many of which are from his personal collection of Isoleri’s papers. Juliani writes: ‘Every biography is also a history. . . . Isoleri’s life reflects his personal odyssey as an immigrant as well as the history of his community’ (p. 4). The author’s focus on Isoleri serves not as a limitation of the scope of the analysis, but rather as a way to organize the enormous amount of diverse historical and sociological data examined. While recognizing Isoleri’s central importance to the parish, Juliani presents Isoleri first and foremost as a member of his community. Even with the leadership of the powerful and charismatic Isoleri, the establishment of a communal identity was fraught with difficulty. Juliani’s book pays close attention to the challenges faced by Italian Catholic immigrants, identifying conflicts within the Roman Catholic Church as well as between culturally distinct immigrants in Philadelphia at the time. In Juliani’s analysis, these struggles are essential to the formation of Italian-American identities. While, on the surface, the structure of a nationality parish may seem to prevent assimilation to American culture, in the examination of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi, we are shown a much more complex and fluid process of identity building, incorporating both the old and the new in order better to account for the new situations encountered by immigrants in America. Juliani notes that ‘[Isoleri] sought to help [the members of his parish] to remain what they had previously been while he facilitated what they inevitably were becoming’ (p. 6). Like perhaps all human experiences, the experiences of Italian immigrants can be seen as essentially dynamic. Immigrants are clearly involved in the creation of new identities, both individual and communal, and these new identities involve implicit acts of comparison, of Book reviews 827 change and of adaptation. The old is never wholly erased, but neither is it ever purely maintained. By analysing a specific community, Juliani demonstrates how these adaptations occur in precise ways; while these may be distinct for each immigrant group, they may also share elements or qualities. By attending to these similarities, scholars may be better equipped to make comparisons that aid in understanding immigrant experiences across a variety of contexts. At times, the distinctions that Juliani makes between aspects of culture such as religious or spiritual and secular detract from the central foundation of viewing the ways that the various components of this community worked together to form a holistic unity. While the overall structure of the book supports an analysis of community formation that blurs the distinctions between disciplines and eschews these often artificial categories, the maintenance of some of this language to describe particular elements of the community’s practices and perspectives occasionally undermines this otherwise strong interdisciplinary approach. Though this book examines a very specific subject, its conclusions are of interest to scholars in the fields of history, sociology and religious studies as well as scholars interested in examining the formation of cultural or communal identities. The book also serves as an excellent case study of the history of Catholicism in America and indicates some of the unique challenges faced by the Roman Catholic Church in the transmission of its message to new American communities and contexts. As such, while the historical records analysed are precise, this book offers insights that can be applied to a number of different scholarly endeavours in the examination of immigrant communities, the spread of religious institutions and traditions, and questions of cultural identities in relation to increasingly global communications. Juliani’s subject of study is interesting in its own right, but his book is most fascinating in the larger questions it raises about how cultural identities develop, how these identities shift and change over time and how identities are forged out of the intricate interactions between different cultures, societies and individuals. Priest, Parish, and People is thus a book focused on the particular, but its observations and careful research methods are applicable to a number of academic enquiries. # 2008 Christa Shusko Clemson University Leigh Oakes and Jane Warren, LANGUAGE, CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY IN QUEBEC, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, xiv
260 pp., £50.00. This book is intended as a contribution to a debate about ‘the new civic approach to national identity within a global context’ (p. 2). It uses the recent report of the Larose Commission on the future of the French language in Quebec as the point of departure for analysis of the Quebec case. The authors approach the issues ‘informed by sociolinguistic preoccupations’ as a complement to the prevailing sociological and political science perspectives. At the same time, they intend to offer a pluri-disciplinary approach to achieve a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between language and national identity not only for Quebec but for a range of cases. The Quebec case was chosen as especially appropriate because these issues have been actively debated in Quebec public life, and the Quebec experience is frequently cited in the academic literature. The principal research material consisted of official publications and empirical studies, academic articles and monographs, and debates in prominent Quebec newspapers, supplemented by interviews with officials and academic specialists in the area. The main research questions are decidedly descriptive in nature: ‘how is Quebec dealing with the new realities of ethnic diversity and globalization?’ ‘What is Quebec doing to forge a sense of common identity through language?’ ‘To what extent is official policy concerning these issues compatible with the diverse experiences of minorities in Quebec?’ (p. 4). The authors conclude that ‘Quebec’s model of intercultural citizenship provides a third way between a civic republican notion of citizenship and the liberal model espoused by Canada’ 828 Book reviews (p. 194). The success of this endeavour requires a commitment to the priority of the French language as integral to Quebec identity while detaching it from a narrowly French-Canadian ethnicity, so as to include the ever-increasing ethnic minority populations in Quebec. While endorsing this broad direction for Quebec policy, Oakes and Warren note a number of challenges to its ultimate success. These include the lack of enthusiasm among many immigrants for this inclusive civic model, the competing civic identities (based on their own languages) embraced by both Aboriginal and Anglophone minority groups and the continued presence of ‘Anglophobia’ as an aspect (albeit a minority one) of Francophone public opinion. They suggest that Quebec’s civic model must be expanded to include recognition of a special status for Aboriginal and Anglophone groups in shaping the evolution of that model. Nevertheless, they conclude that the Quebec model serves as an important reference point for all nations which seek to construct a common civic attachment from an ever more culturally diverse citizenry. The topic is certainly timely both as an area of academic inquiry and as a matter of contemporary public debate. The authors have aptly depicted the stated goals of Quebec public policy in this domain, represented the diversity of views among Quebec academics and decision-makers about the options to achieve an inclusive Quebec civic identity and identified a number of challenges to goal achievement. They have also reviewed a number of important sociolinguistic matters in Quebec and situated them in a broader academic literature. These are considerable strengths in this study. At the same time, there is a certain detachment from the reality of public opinion that animates public debate and controversy on these matters. What requires greater emphasis is the disjuncture between the orientations of government policy toward inclusive citizenship and a francophone public opinion that is decidedly ambivalent about such an agenda. Two dimensions are insufficiently emphasized: the prevailing terminology of civic identity and the integration of political goals with that identity. While the authors review the different meanings attached to ‘Francophone’ among Quebec analysts, they neglect the fact that surveys reveal that the more exclusionary term ‘Québécois’ is the one more widely embraced among Francophones in Quebec. Furthermore, surveys have also demonstrated that this term is significantly associated with support for a specific political agenda  Quebec independence. These facts explain why Quebec’s minorities  aboriginal, Anglophone and allophone  cannot embrace the prevailing terminology of civic identity in Quebec and are unlikely to do so. In exploring the prospects for success here, it would have enriched this study if more attention had been devoted to language and education controversies over the past two decades. The policy rhetoric of an inclusive civic identity and accommodation of minorities has not always been especially visible in such controversies as access to health and education services or the use of bilingual signs and product labels. These would convey more of the nuances of the situation and illustrate more fully the challenges to a viable model of intercultural citizenship in Quebec. # 2008 C. Michael MacMillan Mount Saint Vincent University Scott Straus, THE ORDER OF GENOCIDE: RACE, POWER, AND WAR IN RWANDA, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006, 288 pp., £15.85 (hb). In his amazing book with the photographer Robert Lyons, Intimate Enemies, Scott Straus gave some initial hints at what was to come in the present volume. However, the thoroughness with which this study has been conducted exceeds all expectations raised. The author adopts a form of ‘triangulation’, as it is known, a bit like ‘cross-checking your sources’ writ large  I make this analogy because Straus’s interest in Rwanda stems from his time in the Great Lakes as a journalist from 1996, which led him to research genocide and violence, and to note that ‘theory had outpaced the evidence; (p. x), which ironically is so Book reviews 829 often the case when events overtake people. His approach is a ‘multi-level, multi-method, triangulated analysis of one of the most important political events of the second half of the twentieth century’, and fully delivers on this promise (p. 16). Through a mix of quantitative survey data, sequential graphs for the timing of the genocide per area, painstakingly reconstructing the story of the local-level dynamics of genocide, recounting first hand how perpetrators explain their past actions and why genocide was considered thinkable and doable in the first place, Straus builds up a very complex, holistic picture, especially of masculine involvement in the genocide (he leaves women out as far as perpetrators are concerned). What happened on the ground in a number of local areas, and how individuals, including convicted killers, survivors and others recount events and interpret their cause, is fascinating. The longer extracts from interviews that formed the basis for the Intimate Enemies book are well worth reading in tandem with this study. It is significant that, since reviewing it, I have given that study away to a Rwandan lawyer friend, after he told me that, for him, it was the best thing he had ever read on the genocide. Scholars on the genocide are now numerous and widely spread throughout the halls of academia and think tanks; from historians to social psychologists, human rights and criminal lawyers, to economists, international relations and politics experts, anthropologists and human geographers, the range of scholarship and research on Rwanda has massively increased since the genocide of 1994, especially in view of its implications for the wider Great Lakes region. Much of the research is not grounded in solid empirical research, partly because such research is difficult to conduct against a backdrop of current Rwandan politics. But by sticking to some key questions he identified in his doctoral thesis, the basis for this book, Straus managed to collect material that in its rich diversity really has contributed something very challenging to other scholars both in the study of Rwanda and in research on violence, genocide and social control. What this study seems to demonstrate is that a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, of individual, group and national data, historical and contemporary interpretations, can overcome most of the gross generalizations, sweeping statements and supposedly irrefutable hypotheses based on thin air which beset so much scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, sometimes making it seem a field of ideological contention rather than intellectual rigour. In terms of its implications for Rwanda, the outcomes are less clear. Straus has no particular policy recommendations, but he does have an idea for a new book: his last page talks of the importance of recognizing the factors that lead to resistance: ‘luck, uncommon savvy, strong moral principle, and great courage’, and concludes ‘but a better strategy is to work to prevent the conditions in which ordinary people have to face such terrible choices’ (p. 246). This is a brilliant study, and I do not say that lightly, and all the more so since it has no policy recommendations anywhere in sight. It may be useful to give examples of why this book was so convincing, so different from the usual approaches which generally propose and follow through a single hypothesis or line of argument (my own work included). ‘‘[T]he point of the analysis is thus not to excuse but to understand the dynamics that led ordinary civilians to become perpetrators’ (p. 228). In a nutshell, his research shows that ‘situations matter’ (p. 228) and that ‘the state made the difference in Rwanda’ (p. 201), especially because of the context of war. These  and political support for the ruling party at the time, the MRND  are among the key elements Straus finds which can start to explain how ‘in particular circumstances, ordinary men [and he means men, as has been noted] can switch from viewing others as unthreatening neighbours to seeing them as enemies’ (p. 229). In all this, the genocide plan was not a foregone conclusion, argues Straus, quite controversially, but was propelled forward by a defensive logic in which ‘war is central’ (p. 234) to understanding the logic of genocide (also the title of Chapter 6). The factors that made for genocide were social control in the form of state surveillance, made possible by the topography of the country, which leaves ‘few options to hide or exit’ for Rwandans (p. 202), enhanced by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial legacies of publicly required participation. The state in Rwanda emerges as having almost unrivalled powers to enforce compliance at the mass level. It was (and remains) a true ‘Leviathan’, the term Straus uses for his impressive analysis of the Rwandan state in 830 Book reviews Chapter 8. From setting out to explain how genocide worked in terms of its local, communelevel dynamics, by considering the onset of genocide, its delays, its occasional reversals, Straus has gone a long way since the days he arrived as a journalist in Rwanda in 1995. He remains, however, suitably sceptical of ‘proving’ anything, and this is the beauty of the research; every possible causal link is subjected to multiple forms of evidence and exercises of interpretation and cross-checking, making his final conclusions much more reliable than anything else that this reviewer at least has come across in the literature on the Rwandan genocide. The conclusion takes us on and round to the Holocaust literature, and it is here that the greatest parallels seem to arise with this study; Straus has given the Rwandan genocide the first serious treatment it has had in terms of social science methods being applied to it systematically  at least the first I am aware of. Instead of choosing one method, he relates several kinds of evidence, empirical and inductive, personal and collective, macro-, meso- and micro-level. He also questions his own findings, in terms of the regression analyses conducted, where he notes that the ‘data are blunt’ (p. 62) and inconclusive. He also questions his own findings, where, for instance, 91 per cent of his respondents claim never to have disobeyed the authorities (p. 205). The ‘Comparative and theoretical implications’ section of the conclusion is, as a consequence, a tour de force, in which, informed by his ten years or so of work on Rwanda, Straus reviews and sifts through the literature on mass killings and genocide to find patterns that resemble or contrast with the story he tells. The story of the Rwanda genocide has been told, perhaps most definitively in Des Forges’ study for Human Rights Watch, immediately after the end of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (1995). But even she does not tell the story of Giti, the only commune in the country where genocide did not take place. Straus goes to speak to the former burgomaster, the current mayor, a subprefect, police inspector, two survivors, two councillors, one former councillor, one perpetrator from the neighbouring area and one headmaster (pp. 85ff.). Through this original work, and through a thorough use of local, Belgian and US-based archives, he painstakingly reconstructs such accounts as one cannot find elsewhere. Perhaps only in the recent work of Andre Guichaoua, which is of a different kind, and involves a great deal more collaboration with scholars based in the region and diaspora scholars from the region, is this attention to detail in evidence. The story of Giti illustrates the thesis that Straus puts forward, and could have been highlighted more, had he not so much else to say. In Giti, there were no elite challengers to the burgomaster, who kept order until 9 April, including by arresting youth who killed Tutsi cattle on the previous day. As the former burgomaster says, ‘If you do not put people in prison and they take cows, the next day they would kill’ (p. 86). Behind this apparently simple statement lies a great deal of evidence, through the testimonies of survivors, the stories of those convicted for crimes of genocide and others, that the genocide was the result of war, of a desperate bid for survival by a regime in charge of a powerful state structure over which they feared they were about to lose control. The arrival of the RPF in Giti, as elsewhere, meant the end of the genocide. But only in Giti was the RPF able to prevent genocide by its arrival. Elsewhere the pressure created by the proximity of the frontline meant genocide started within hours of the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane. This incident has become my litmus test for fair scholarship. The shooting, following a few initial days of resistance by the local equivalent of the mayor (as they are now called, then burgomaster), is a remarkably simple story that seems to provide a mirror image to all the other locations in which genocide took place very rapidly, with or without an initial delay (pp. 857). Because of the resistance to orders to kill in some areas, and because of factors like party membership and proximity of the civil war front-line determining onset of the genocide (date at which killings started and peaked) the author concludes, interestingly, that there is some solid empirical evidence to suggest that intervention in this genocide by UN forces could have made a real difference and could indeed have saved hundreds of thousands Book reviews 831 of lives. He relies heavily on the memoirs of Dallaire, but also goes to the archives to find out what was happening during the genocide in terms of casualties on the ground, their timing and the resistance to the orders to kill Tutsi and ‘moderate’ Hutu. # 2008 Helen Hintjens Institute of Social Studies, The Hague Peter Vermeersch, THE ROMANI MOVEMENT: MINORITY POLITICS AND ETHNIC MOBILIZATION IN CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL EUROPE, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006, xiv
261 pp., US$80/£47 (hb). This important volume is published at a critical point for the future of European Roma. The Decade of Roma Inclusion, launched in 1995, represents the most ambitious and sustained initiative yet undertaken to equalize the position of these long-neglected people in their Central and Eastern European [CEE] homelands. Roma participation is seen as an essential, core value of the Decade, yet this implies meaningful and effective Romani organization. Peter Vermeersch’s pioneering and groundbreaking study is especially welcome in seeking to map the difficult terrain for activists attempting such mobilization. Compared with ten years ago, the place of Roma populations on the international political agenda has changed significantly. The climb to relative prominence of what might be regarded collectively as the largest ethnic minority in Europe accelerated noticeably with the intensification of negotiations with formerly Communist-ruled applicant countries as part of the eastward expansion of the European Union. These EU candidates were not only poorer than existing member states but among their inhabitants were the most impoverished and marginalized communities in the entire continent. According to a 1995 estimate these CEE Roma amounted to roughly three-quarters of a total 8 million European Roma. The vulnerable situation of most Roma has posed an uncomfortable challenge to the EU which requires new entrants to satisfy certain basic criteria, one of which is guaranteeing respect for minorities. Repeated warnings about lack of progress in integrating their Roma communities made governments of candidate countries apprehensive that EU entry might even be denied. Nevertheless, as Vermeersch points out, the EU was guilty of applying double standards since it required applicants to behave better than existing member states towards their indigenous Roma (Gypsy) populations. Despite EU-funded assistance for Roma-related projects in candidate countries during the accession period, growing involvement of supra- and international bodies and attempts by Romani leaders to organize in order to gain political representation and social justice for their people, little appears to have changed on the ground. Opinion polls in CEE countries consistently register the highest levels of popular resentment expressed against Roma fellowcitizens, and Roma have only minimal parliamentary representation, while the UNDP reported that ‘most of the [CEE] region’s Roma people endure living conditions closer to those of Sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe’ (Roma Integration is Key in an Enlarged EU, UNDP press release, 16 January 2003, http://www.undp.bg/uploads/documents/1163_546 _en.pdf). This is the bleak setting for Peter Vermeersch’s study, based on extensive in-depth interviews and documentary research, which focuses on attempted Romani mobilization in three CEE countries with substantial Roma minorities  Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In the process he avoids the common marginalization of Romani studies by treating his subject comparatively and examining Romani activism with theoretical tools developed to examine wider social movements, including mobilization by other ethnic minorities. His conceptual approach, drawing on political opportunity structure and framing, allows actions of Roma leaders as political actors to be understood in terms of their perceived options and anticipated consequences of their strategies. At the same time ethnic identity is shown to be not a static given but instead the product of a dynamic process of manoeuvring for advantage in concrete situations. In this way Vermeersch is able to 832 Book reviews demonstrate that Romani mobilization is not a unique phenomenon but has important parallels with ethnic and national movements elsewhere. To support this approach the influential work of Barth, Brubacker and Kymlicka is invoked. To put mobilization attempts in context, Vermeersch’s account presents a detailed and informative analysis of the development of state policy towards Roma in the three countries, breaking down the post-1989 period since the ending of Communist rule into distinct phases by highlighting key watersheds. The example of Hungary is particularly striking with its 1993 Minorities Law and the later emergence of what were termed Gypsy Minority Selfgovernments. However, proper emphasis is also placed on the continuing legacy of Communist policies and institutions throughout the region. Reflecting on the largely ineffectual attempts at Romani mobilization hitherto, Vermeersch concludes that even a favourable international climate of opinion and a situation where CEE governments felt under pressure to demonstrate positive results were not enough to foster and sustain successful, large-scale mobilization. In his view ‘a crucial factor was the inability of activists to use Romani identity, with all of its stigmas, and turn it into a mobilising identity’. In other words the prevalence and dominance of negative stereotypes were too overwhelming to allow them to ‘realise a ‘‘cognitive liberation’’ among their potential constituencies’ (p. 226). Whether the Decade can make a significant difference remains to be seen. # 2008 Will Guy University of Bristol Matt Wray, NOT QUITE WHITE: WHITE TRASH AND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHITENESS, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 232 pp., £13.99 (pb). Matt Wray’s latest book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, is a compelling read. The prose is lucid and the analysis, which draws upon boundary theory and poststructuralist methods, most insightful. Wray’s focus throughout is upon the so-called Southern American, rural, ‘white trash’. Although he draws upon a wide range of disciplines his approach is primarily that of a social historian employing textual analyses to examine the constructions of American ‘white trash’ in different periods from the 1720s to the 1920s. In doing so Wray draws upon journal articles, religious, medical and social policy documents. Many of these reports construct the ‘white trash’ underclass as immoral and feckless, and serve to imply that they are degenerate ‘dirt eaters’. Wray documents how many social commentators initially believed these attributes to be the consequence of hereditary dispositions produced through successive inbreeding of ‘feebleminded’ peoples and inter-generational criminality. By the late 1930s fears concerning the creation of a nation of imbeciles are powerfully present. Eugenicist arguments proliferate to the extent that segments of poor rural white populations are the subject of debates on state-sponsored sterilization. Hookworm crusaders later challenged this discourse through their insistence that these individuals were victims of a disease and that the racial integrity of the southern poor white as of Anglo-Saxon ‘stock’ was still intact. An abiding concern in these tumultuous discussions is the struggle to understand how free whites could sink to the pitiful, dirt-eating level of black slaves. Wray opens out this conundrum as part of a two-piece puzzle of race and class that has come to define those deemed ‘white trash’. the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, transgressive Book reviews 833 identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other. (p. 2) It is this ‘in-between’ status that the rural poor inhabit that lends them to be considered counterfeit whites. A genuine strength of Not Quite White is Wray’s ability to communicate a clear narrative that leads the reader through the various discussions and different positionings of ‘white trash’ communities. Yet if there is a limitation to Wray’s analysis it rests with its parochial focus on American white studies. He contends that much of the literature in whiteness studies has tended to see whiteness simply as a form of privilege, or marker of superiority. While the racialization of the poor may have been given scant regard in the US, it does feature in other international accounts of whiteness, class and race privilege. For example, in research in nineteenth-century Barbados, Lambert (2001) focuses upon the plight of poor whites and former slaves from the colonial order who became freedmen. Like Wray, Lambert argues that each of these social groups functions as a ‘liminal figure[s]’ (p. 335) as they both occupy a position of ‘in-betweenness’ and ambiguity that means their status is constantly in flux. As with the ‘lubbers’, ‘crackers’ and ‘white trash’ outcasts Wray identifies, poor whites in slavefree Barbados became a project for ‘racial reinscription’ (p. 337) into whiteness. Elsewhere, sections of the British urban poor  the ‘chavs’, ‘charvers’ and ‘radgies’ Nayak (2006) identifies  have also been depicted as ‘not quite white’ on account of inter-generational unemployment, popular stigmas and material geographies of exclusion. Many overlapping discourses surrounding the southern poor are also strikingly similar to early depictions of the Irish in English and American societies where they were regularly castigated as rural bumpkins, drunken, lazy, simple and racially degenerate. Although Wray does not elaborate on the connections between these groups the discursive interplay may suggest a more interconnected repertoire of race tropes speaking through and against one another. Indeed the 1835 cartoon depiction of the pugnacious Ransey Sniffle (p. 40) bears an uncanny resemblance to familiar portraits of the Irish in this period. What such investigations reveal, and no doubt there is more besides, is that studies of whiteness need to move beyond the narrow horizons of the US and become more international and globally connected in their approach to race, class and ethnicity. None of this detracts from what remains a beautifully crafted, detailed and fascinating account. # 2008 Anoop Nayak Newcastle University References LAMBERT, D. 2001 ‘Liminal figures: poor whites, freed-men, and racial reinscription in colonial Barbados’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 19, pp. 33550 NAYAK, A. 2006 ‘Displaced masculinities: chavs, youth and class in the post-industrial city’, Sociology, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 81331