Nasar Meer - Key Concepts in Race and Ethnicity

Recent volumes include:

Third Edition

This book reflects an accumulated process of learning; something that arguably places me in a debt to both my teachers and students alike. Inevitably this debt takes a diffuse course and could not be traced to one or other class room, whether I was in the audience or at the podium. Nonetheless, and as I set out in more detail in the discussion of reflexivity, the book relies on continuous thinking made possible through collaboration and dialogue with friends and colleagues. Amongst those who I would especially like to name here include Tariq Modood, John Solomos, Anna Triandafyllidou, Per Mouritsen, Anoop Nayak, Varun Uberoi, Claire Alexander, Ray Taras, Jan Dobbernack, Brian Klug, Therese OToole, Tehseen Noorani, Derek McGhee, Pnina Werbner, Claire Blencowe, Bernard Harris, Carol Stephenson, Les Back and Ruth Lewis. Significant thanks are owed to Chris Rojek who commissioned the book some years ago when I was at Southampton University, and waited patiently with Gemma Shields and Katherine Haw at SAGE. The majority of the book was penned during my time at Northumbria University, and I will always be grateful to colleagues for creating and sustaining an intellectually rewarding space in the Department of Social Sciences and Languages. I am obliged to SAGE Publications for kind permission to reproduce a figure from Pieterse, J. N. (2001) Hybridity, so what? The anti-hybridity backlash and the riddles of recognition, Theory, Culture and Society, 18 (23): 21945. Finally, the book would never have been completed without the support and encouragement of Katherine Smith, and for which I am profoundly fortunate.

The study of race and ethnicity is a dynamic field. For some readers this will be self-evidently the case. Why? Because human populations and the social relations they constitute are constantly developing, and so our conceptual language needs to meet the challenge of valid description. But the task for social scientists is much greater than may at first appear. In order for our analyses to be meaningful they also have to be reflexive. In our case this means that we need to think critically about the intellectual frames through which we have come to understand what we name as racial and ethnic differences amongst and across populations. Meeting this challenge is important. Not doing so invites the risk that we can ignore how through our concepts we sometimes help constitute those social relations we wish to study.

As a teacher and researcher in race and ethnicity studies, it has become clear to me that while the status of some concepts has been so significant that they have helped structure the field (e.g. blackness, ethnicity, integration, race, race relations), and while others are much more novel (e.g. hybridity, intersectionality, mixedness, transnationalism, whiteness), the status of established and novel concepts does not necessarily reflect an incremental development in our learning. To put it another way, more recent concepts do not necessarily describe more recent phenomena. So while there are several introductory books on race and ethnicity, one of the strengths of this collection is that it is able to illustrate how it may equally be the case that our conceptualisation of new phenomena is only now able to register something that may have long been in evidence. This is not to say other things remain the same (on the contrary) but instead that few other introductory collections seek to offer the analytical range of this book not merely in describing but also critiquing with real world examples.