Search

How do race and class intersect in state practices of nation-building? This is one of the key themes in Jennifer Elrick's book Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada. In this essay, I discuss Elrick's conceptualization of the relation between race and class, which combines notions of class as a component of race on the one hand, and class as intersecting with race on the other hand. I argue that the intersectional perspective is most convincing. Elrick shows that the cultural and moral traits which bureaucrats ascribe to applicants – integrity, ambition, trustworthiness, initiative and self-reliance – are part of both racial classification systems and class classification systems. I therefore conclude by proposing to think of the intersection of class and race in state classificatory practices as consisting in an overlap in the criteria for allocating individuals to the categories of class and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This article considers the fruits of an elaborate multi‐year European Science Foundation (ESF)‐sponsored research project on the reciprocal dynamics joining nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century historiography to the varying trajectories of European state‐formation. It reads the culminating volume in the eight‐book series sponsored by this ESF project against the wider associated discussions and the larger context of the contemporary historiography of nationalism. It seeks to draw out the defining features of the approach involved (conceptually, methodologically, intellectually, politically), while pointing to a number of the entailments and lacunae. In particular, it considers some of the attenuations and omissions resulting from the adoption of an overly institutional and “top‐down” approach to the chosen thematic of “nation and narration.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Dry Place: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion," by Patricia L. Price.