American Multiculturalism after 9/11
Transatlantic Perspectives
Distributed for Amsterdam University Press
This groundbreaking volume explores the multicultural debate that has evolved in the United States and Europe since the cataclysmic events of 9/11. Instead of suggesting closure by presenting a unified narrative about cultural diversity, national identity, and social stratification, the essays in this well-balanced collection present a variety of perspectives, each highlighting the undiminished relevance of key issues such as immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, while also pointing to unresolved conflicts over universalism, religion, and tolerance. Most importantly, this volume shows that the struggle over multiculturalism is not limited to the political domain, but also has profound cultural implications. American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives is an invaluable, thought-provoking addition to the debate about multiculturalism as central to the study of the United States in a global context.
“These lively essays illuminate the ways in which multiculturalist initiatives in the United States and Europe have influenced one another with a variety of productive as well as unproductive effects, especially since the events of 9/11. The authors vindicate the promise of American Studies as a scholarly domain in which the trend from a preoccupation with ‘identity’ to a concern for ‘solidarity’ can be charted and critically interrogated.”—David A. Hollinger, author of Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
“The thirteen new essays assembled in this book make many fresh and often surprising contributions to understanding the theoretical issues surrounding multiculturalism, the effects of the terrorist attacks of 2001 on debates about American ethnic diversity and national unity, and European and transatlantic perspectives on migration and religious difference.”—Werner Sollors, author of Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descebt in American Culture and coedtior of A New Literary History of America
“American Multiculturalism after 9/11 is a timely and extremely important intervention in and reconfiguration of the debates over multiculturalism that took place after 9/11 on both sides of the Atlantic.”—Donald E. Pease, coeditor of Cultures of American Imperialism and The Futures of American Studies
Introduction
Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul
Multicultural Boundary Crossings
Multiculturalism and Immigration
Paul Lauter
Native-Immigrant Boundaries and Ethnic and Racial Inequalities
Richard Alba
Coherence, Difference, and Citizenship: A Genealogy of Multiculturalism
Ed Jonker
Cultural Reflections of the Unthinkable
Indecent Exposure: Picturing the Horror of 9/11
Rob Kroes
“The Dead Are Our Redeemers”: Culture, Belief, and United 93
Phillip E. Wegner
Real American Heroes: Attacking Multiculturalism through the Discourse of Heroic Sacrifice
Michan Andrew Connor
“America under Attack”: Unity and Division after 9/11
Mathilde Roza
“This Godless Democracy”: Terrorism, Multiculturalism, and American Self-Criticism in John Updike
John-Paul Colgan
Multiculturalism in American History Textbooks before and after 9/11
Rachel Hutchins-Viroux
Transatlantic Dialogues
A Kinder, Gentler Europe? Islam, Christianity, and the Divergent Multiculturalisms of the New West
Patrick Hyder Patterson
Slavery, Memory, and Citizenship in Transatlantic Perspective
Johanna C. Kardux
Are We All Americans? 9/11 and Discourses of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands
Jaap Kooijman
“How could this have happened in Holland?”
American Perceptions of Dutch Multiculturalism after 9/11
Jaap Verheul
About the Contributors
Index
Sociology: General Sociology
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