Challenging Euro-America’s Politics of Identity: The Return of the Native

In this fascinating book, Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes critically examines the impact of colonialism and postcolonial migration on the politics and identity of Euro-American imperial powers.

It considers how ’outsiders’ are part of the construction of the ’native’ identity of the nation-state, and also how they challenge its essential coherence when they ’return’ to the centre in our increasingly globalized world. Engaging in a theoretically-motivated discussion of a range of sources (film, fiction, political theory and state policy); the volume traces the nomadic movement of bodies across national frontiers, helping us to question any natural link between nation-states and identities, and between places and peoples. This is not merely a theoretical problem, as Fernandes relates it to the very current crisis of nativistic / multicultural identity in the West. He examines how politics takes shape in transnational social and cultural encounters, and how this new politics is not just about containing aliens, but also contains fruitful possibilities for different modes of being.

Challenging Euro-America’s Politics of Identity will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in politics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, African and African-American studies, comparative literature, American studies, and Ethnic studies.

Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes was an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, USA, before he died in 2004.

Preface by Michael J. Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, USA.