How did the empire strike back? Lessons for today from The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s ' Britain.

The Empire Strikes Back made a landmark and sometimes controversial intervention in the scholarship of ethnicity and race when it was first published. This article considers both the continuities and breaks that linked and separated the volume from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' work and tradition that preceded it. It also suggests that the balance between ethnographic engagement and critical scholarship sets up a necessarily iterative process that values both but also recognizes the differences between the two. Such iteration speaks also to the manner in which the study of contemporary migration and its consequences demands both more self-conscious links between the study of migration and the scholarship of racial formation and ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]