Rogers Brubaker

By shifting the analytical focus from identity to identifications, from groups as entities to group-making projects, from shared culture to categorisation, from substance to process, Brubaker shows that ethnicity, race and nation are not things in the world but perspectives of the world.

Ethnicity Without Groups

The difference between French and German definitions of citizenship is instructive—and, for millions of immigrants from North Africa, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, decisive. Rogers Brubaker shows how this difference—between the territorial basis of the French citizenry and the German emphasis on blood descent—was shaped and sustained by sharply differing understandings of nationhood, rooted in distinctive French and German paths to nation-statehood.

Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality. In this wide-ranging and sharply argued book, Rogers Brubaker develops an original interpretive account of the pervasive and unsettling changes brought about by hyperconnectivity. He traces transformations of the self, social relations, culture, economics, and politics, giving special attention to underexplored themes of abundance, miniaturization, convenience, quantification, and discipline. He shows how hyperconnectivity prepared us for the pandemic and how the pandemic, in turn, has prepared us for an even more fully digitally mediated future. Throughout, Brubaker underscores the ambivalence of digital hyperconnectivity, which opens up many new and exciting possibilities, yet at the same time threatens human freedom and flourishing. Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents will be essential reading for everyone interested in the constellation of socio-technical forces that are profoundly remaking our world.

Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents

2015, kurz nachdem sich Caitlyn Jenner zu ihrer Identität als Transgender bekannt hatte, wurde Rachel Dolezal, Präsidentin einer Ortsgruppe der National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), durch ihre Eltern als weiss «geoutet». Darauf entbrannte in den Medien eine Debatte über die Fluidität von genderund race. Wenn Jenner sich rechtmässig als Frau identifizieren konnte, konnte sich Dolezal nicht ebenso als schwarz identifizieren? Obwohl sex im Unterschied zu race eine biologische Fundierung hat, findet die Wahl bzw. Änderung von sex oder gender paradoxerweise eine grössere Akzeptanz als die Wahl oder Änderung der race. Während Dolezals Behauptung, sie sei schwarz, von wenigen akzeptiert wurde, verstärkt sich die Fluidität von Race-Identitäten in dem Masse, wie die Abstammung – zunehmend als gemischt verstanden – ihre Vorherrschaft über Identität verliert und race und ethnicity wie auch gender als etwas gesehen werden, was wir tun, und nicht als etwas, was wir haben. Indem er raceund ethnicity durch die Linse der Transgender-Erfahrung neu betrachtet – nicht nur als eine Bewegung von einer Kategorie zur anderen, sondern auch als Position zwischen und jenseits von bestehenden Kategorien –, unterstreicht Brubaker die Formbarkeit, Kontingenz und Beliebigkeit der Kategorien von race. Ausgehend von der kontroversen Koppelung von «transgender» und «transracial», zeigt Rogers Brubaker, wie gender und race, die während langer Zeit als stabil, angeboren und unzweideutig verstanden werden, in den letzten Jahrzehnten – auf unterschiedliche Art und in unterschiedlichem Ausmass – als wandelbar und einer Wahl zugänglich betrachtet werden. Transgender-Identitäten haben sich in schwindelerregendem Tempo von der Peripherie in den Mainstream bewegt, und Grenzen der Ethnizität und der race wurden unscharf.

Gender und Race in einer Zeit unsicherer Identitäten

Trans

Offering fresh perspectives on perennial questions of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and religion, Rogers Brubaker analyzes three forces that shape the politics of diversity and multiculturalism today: inequality as a public concern, biology as an asserted basis of racial and ethnic difference, and religion as a key terrain of public contestation.

Grounds for Difference

Margit Feischmidt

Jon Fox

Liana Grancea

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names. Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up—in different ways and to different degrees—to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry—increasingly understood as mixed—loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities

Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair Rogers Brubaker

This study of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union develops an original account of the interlocking and opposed nationalisms of national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national homelands to which they are linked by external ties.

Rogers Brubaker

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