Publisher's Synopsis
The West has a unique civilization, a powerful front of modernity, liberty, democracy and affluence. This volume offers critical perspectives from both inside and outside the cultural and intellectual frontiers of the Western project. The primary focus is on analyzing racism and changing ethnicities in Europe and the US in the context of new forms of global dislocation, economic recession, the resurgence of neo-Fascism, and a widespread sense of the crisis of Western modernity. The chapters assess the value of Marxist perspectives and newer approaches that take "modernity" and "postmodernity" as frameworks for analysis. They also explore how European identities have been continually reconstructed by a cultural repression of the non-Western, whether through colonial discourses, the denial of Asian, Islamic, Judaic and African influences or the effects of Eurocentric conceptions of subjectivity in the psychiatric disciplining of ethnic minorities.
