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Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic

Online ISBN:
9780814723920
Print ISBN:
9780814798379
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic

Published online:
24 March 2016
Published in print:
28 May 2012
Online ISBN:
9780814723920
Print ISBN:
9780814798379
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

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

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