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This study explores how Japanese immigrants in Canada understood themselves and conceptualized their community during the first half of the twentieth century. Using vernacular texts in Japanese language, I scrutinize their self-expressions and expand the discourse of Japanese-Canadian history beyond a frame centred upon white racism and exclusionary policies. I start by suggesting the need to relativize normative ideas about the individual to contextualize immigrants' cognitive and discursive practices. Next, I outline notions about the self and collective, morality, and language as intricate components of nationhood in Japanese modernity. Then I turn to immigrant texts. Focusing on debates concerning language education of the second generation (Nisei), I examine how constitutive elements of the Japanese nation affected diasporic subjectivity and self-understanding. As I argue, immigrants claimed their space in Canada by asserting Japaneseness and navigated a hostile world by deploying cultural tools of Japanese modernity. Hegemonic epistemology of Western modernity, however, prevents their history from being assessed on its own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enumeration used in more than one thousand census questionnaires in more than 150 countries spanning more than two centuries. Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war. The plausibility of the theory is further demonstrated through case study analysis of religious conflict in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the fact of representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China. The present ethnic configuration, centred on a re-categorization of the population, came to be accepted by ordinary people in Chinese society as the result of the multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building. This paper delineates how the projects in question came about, especially the one focused on the investigation of ethnic minority social history. It examines the way in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation of ethnic minorities functions in the construction of the Chinese nation. It argues that representation for ethnicities focused on how to locate each of them at a certain stage of social development, conceptualizing the Chinese nation in a framework of brotherhood in order to include those excluded by the mainstream throughout history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the social significance of the Alexandria, Virginia, Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) fundraising event the Scottish Christmas Walk during the 1960s and 1970s as a representation of the cultural, social, and economic issues that faced Alexandria, particularly concerning Scottish ethnic identity in the era of the U.S. civil rights movement, class identity and racism against African Americans in Alexandria, and the concepts of urban renewal and consumerism.

Banton's article provoked a number of reflections on working with John Rex in the 1960s. The idea of race has a long history both in human relations and sociological theory. But the possibility of there being a specific field of ‘race relations’ remains contested. Ideas of race and ethnicity are elided in public discourse, making the resolution of linguistic issues in the field especially difficult and as yet unresolved. These reflections touch upon the political environment in which John Rex's earlier writing on race was conducted and upon the breadth of influences upon a sociologist rooted in the classical tradition, especially the sociology of Max Weber. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argues that a nationally oriented, highly selective public narrative of the forced migrations soon emerged in the Federal Republic, a narrative that stressed German suffering, relativized German crimes, and, crucially, elided differences among the forced migrants as well as between them and the rest of the West German population. The narrative had various useful societal functions, at least in the short term, but in the longer term it imposed significant costs on West Germany, both domestically and internationally. These costs related not only to foreign relations, especially vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, and to memory politics, but also to even wider challenges that contemporary Germany continues to face. These include the ongoing attempts to reconcile the reality of the Federal Republic as a multi-ethnic society of large-scale immigration with the myth of Germanness as an ethnically homogeneous and exclusive category, a myth that the post-1945 public narrative of German forced migrants helped to uphold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To secure his reelection, President Richard Nixon tried to dismantle the New Deal coalition and form a new Republican majority; to do so, he attacked the monopoly Democrats had on racial and ethnic votes. Nixon's racial and ethnic politicking represented a rupture with past Republican ignorance of minorities; it was going to be one of his key legacies to his party. This article shows that, driven by consecutively defined electoral goals, his administration systematically favored group-specific measures over universalistic policies addressing common ethnic claims, and that these measures were accompanied by a divisive rhetoric and implemented in an antagonistic fashion. It argues that Nixon broke his promise to reunite the country, and used racial and ethnic politics as an instrument of electoral engineering rather than as a way to correct legacies of past discriminations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]