ISBN: 0814725252 9780814725252

Category: Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social

Page count: 383

<p>While the term “culture wars” often designates the heated arguments in<br>the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative<br>action, in fact these discussions have raged in diverse sites and languages. Race<br>in Translation charts the<br>transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones—the U.S.,<br>France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these<br>multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of<br>postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors<br>also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like<br>Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn<br>Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning “multiculturalism” and “identity<br>politics.” At once a report from various “fronts” in the culture wars, a<br>mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading<br>the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to<br>our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.</p>