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After the Nazi Racial State
Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe
Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making 'race' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history."
---Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego

What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.

Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.

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Alienhood
Citizenship, Exile, And The Logic Of Difference
Katarzyna Marciniak
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
“Alien” has a double meaning in the United States, suggesting both “foreigner” and “extraterrestrial creature.” In Alienhood, Katarzyna Marciniak explores this semantic duality. Interrogating the dominant images of aliens in American popular culture—and in legal, historical, linguistic, and literary discourses—Marciniak examines “alienhood” and the impact it has on the daily experiences of migrants, legal or illegal.

Using examples from exilic literature and cinema, including the works of Julia Alvarez, Eva Hoffman, Gregory Nava, and Roman Polanski, Alienhood theorizes multicultural experiences of liminal characters that belong in the interstices between nations. Investigating gendered, racialized, and ideological formations of “aliens,” Marciniak’s readings put into dialogue narratives from both the second world and the third world in relation to “first worldness.” This dialogue problematizes the meanings of “transnational” and brings the so-called second world into these debates. In doing so, Marciniak reorients the study of immigrant or exile subjects beyond the celebrated notion of transnationalism.

With its unique focus on “aliens” in relation to discourses of immigration, exile, and displacement, Alienhood shows how transnationality is, for many dislocated people, an unattainable privilege.

Katarzyna Marciniak is associate professor of English at Ohio University.
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Beyond Solidarity
Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World
Giles Gunn
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Beyond Solidarity is an impassioned argument for a sharable morality in a world increasingly fractured along lines of difference. Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify.
He finds the terms for answering these questions in a more inclusive, cosmopolitan pragmatism—one willing to explore fundamental values without recourse to absolutist arguments. Drawing on the work of William and Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty, and many others, as well as postcolonial writing, Jewish literature of the Holocaust, and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity. Beyond Solidarity, then, is a study of the difference that difference makes in a globalized world.
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Century of Difference
How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years
Claude S. Fischer
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
In every generation, Americans have worried about the solidarity of the nation. Since the days of the Mayflower, those already settled here have wondered how newcomers with different cultures, values, and (frequently) skin color would influence America. Would the new groups create polarization and disharmony? Thus far, the United States has a remarkable track record of incorporating new people into American society, but acceptance and assimilation have never meant equality. In Century of Difference, Claude Fischer and Michael Hout provide a compelling—and often surprising—new take on the divisions and commonalities among the American public over the tumultuous course of the twentieth century. Using a hundred years worth of census and opinion poll data, Century of Difference shows how the social, cultural, and economic fault lines in American life shifted in the last century. It demonstrates how distinctions that once loomed large later dissipated, only to be replaced by new ones. Fischer and Hout find that differences among groups by education, age, and income expanded, while those by gender, region, national origin, and, even in some ways, race narrowed. As the twentieth century opened, a person's national origin was of paramount importance, with hostilities running high against Africans, Chinese, and southern and eastern Europeans. Today, diverse ancestries are celebrated with parades. More important than ancestry for today's Americans is their level of schooling. Americans with advanced degrees are increasingly putting distance between themselves and the rest of society—in both a literal and a figurative sense. Differences in educational attainment are tied to expanding inequalities in earnings, job quality, and neighborhoods. Still, there is much that ties all Americans together. Century of Difference knocks down myths about a growing culture war. Using seventy years of survey data, Fischer and Hout show that Americans did not become more fragmented over values in the late-twentieth century, but rather were united over shared ideals of self-reliance, family, and even religion. As public debate has flared up over such matters as immigration restrictions, the role of government in redistributing resources to the poor, and the role of religion in public life, it is important to take stock of the divisions and linkages that have typified the U.S. population over time. Century of Difference lucidly profiles the evolution of American social and cultural differences over the last century, examining the shifting importance of education, marital status, race, ancestry, gender, and other factors on the lives of Americans past and present. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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The Cinema Makers
Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in South-Eastern and Central Europe since the 1960s
Anna Schober
Intellect Books, 2013

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in southeastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema "events," writing about film, and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture—and cinema’s role in that development—in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist, and post-socialist traditions.

 
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Clothing and Difference
Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa
Hildi Hendrickson, ed.
Duke University Press, 1996
This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times.
Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning.
By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development—heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation—have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation.

Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

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Culture Concept
Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism
Michael A. Elliott
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Examines the prehistory of the American struggle to address cultural difference. "Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings-folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies-that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference-American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works-which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference-is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come. Michael A. Elliott is assistant professor of English at Emory University.
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Death beyond Disavowal
The Impossible Politics of Difference
Grace Kyungwon Hong
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Death beyond Disavowal utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyze works of cultural production by people of color as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary neoliberalism.

According to Grace Kyungwon Hong, neoliberalism is first and foremost a structure of disavowal enacted as a reaction to the successes of the movements for decolonization, desegregation, and liberation of the post–World War II era. It emphasizes the selective and uneven affirmation and incorporation of subjects and ideas that were formerly categorically marginalized, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability. It does so in order to suggest that racial, gendered, and sexualized violence and inequity are conditions of the past, rather than the foundations of contemporary neoliberalism’s exacerbation of premature death. Neoliberal ideologies hold out the promise of protection from premature death in exchange for complicity with this pretense.

In Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation and Waiting in the Wings, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B. D. Women, Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, and the work of the late Barbara Christian, Death beyond Disavowal finds the memories of death and precarity that neoliberal ideologies attempt to erase.

Hong posits cultural production as a compelling rejoinder to neoliberalism’s violences. She situates women of color feminism, often dismissed as narrow or limited in its effect, as a potent diagnosis of and alternative to such violences. And she argues for the importance of women of color feminism to any critical engagement with contemporary neoliberalism.


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Decency and Difference
Humanity and the Global Challenge of Identity Politics
Steven C. Roach
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Decency remains one of the most prevalent yet least understood terms in today’s political discourse. In evoking respect, kindness, courage, integrity, reason, and tolerance, it has long expressed an unquestioned duty and belief in promoting and protecting the dignity of all persons. Today this unquestioned belief is in crisis. Tribalism and identity politics have both hindered and threatened its moral stability and efficacy. Still, many continue to undertheorize its political character by isolating it from the effects of identity politics. Decency and Difference argues that decency is a primary source of the political tension that has long shaped the struggles for power, identity, and justice in the global arena. It distinguishes among basic, conservative, and liberal strands of decency to critically examine the many conflicting and competing applications of decency in global politics. Together these different strands reflect a long and uneven evolution from the British and American empires to a global network of justice. This powerful book exposes the gaps of decency and the disparate ways it is practiced, thus addressing the global challenge of configuring a diverse political ethic of decency.

 

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Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference
Subverting the Race/Gender Divide
Ellen T. Armour
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The term "feminism" conjures up the promise of resistance to the various forms of oppression women face. But feminism's ability to fulfill this promise has been undermined by its failure to deal adequately with the difference that race makes for gender. In this book, Ellen T. Armour forges an alliance between deconstruction and feminist theology and theory by demonstrating deconstruction's usefulness in addressing feminism's trouble with race.

Armour shows how the writings of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray can be used to uncover feminism's white presumptions so that race and gender can be thought of differently. In clear, concise terms she explores the possibilities and limitations for feminist theology of Derrida's conception of "woman" and Irigaray's "multiple woman," as well as Derrida's thinking on race and Irigaray's work on religion. Armour then points a way beyond the race/gender divide with the help of African-American theorists such as bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Hill Collins.

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Degrees of Difference
Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School
Edited by Kimberly D. McKee and Denise A. Delgado
University of Illinois Press, 2020
University commitments to diversity and inclusivity have yet to translate into support for women of color graduate students. Sexism, classism, homophobia, racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of institutional and departmental support, limited help from family and partners, imposter syndrome, narrow reading lists—all remain commonplace. Indifference to the struggles of women of color in graduate school and widespread dismissal of their work further poisons an atmosphere that suffocates not only ambition but a person's quality of life.

In Degrees of Difference, women of color from diverse backgrounds give frank, unapologetic accounts of their battles—both internal and external—to navigate grad school and fulfill their ambitions. At the same time, the authors offer strategies for surviving the grind via stories of their own hard-won successes with self-care, building supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and colleagues.

Contributors: Aeriel A. Ashlee, Denise A. Delgado, Nwadiogo I. Ejiogu, Delia Fernández, Regina Emily Idoate, Karen J. Leong, Kimberly D. McKee, Délice Mugabo, Carrie Sampson, Arianna Taboada, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Soha Youssef

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Difference and Givenness
Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence
Levi R Bryant
Northwestern University Press, 2008

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism.  What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology. 

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Dilemmas of Difference
Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy
Sarah A. Radcliffe
Duke University Press, 2015
In Dilemmas of Difference Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the relationship of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to the development policies and actors that are ostensibly there to help ameliorate social and economic inequality. Radcliffe finds that development policies’s inability to recognize and reckon with the legacies of colonialism reinforces long-standing social hierarchies, thereby reproducing the very poverty and disempowerment they are there to solve. This ineffectiveness results from failures to acknowledge the local population's diversity and a lack of accounting for the complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and geography. As a result, projects often fail to match beneficiaries' needs, certain groups are made invisible, and indigenous women become excluded from positions of authority. Drawing from a mix of ethnographic fieldwork and postcolonial and social theory, Radcliffe centers the perspectives of indigenous women to show how they craft practices and epistemologies that critique ineffective development methods, inform their political agendas, and shape their strategic interventions in public policy debates.
 
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The Dread of Difference
Gender and the Horror Film
Edited by Barry Keith Grant
University of Texas Press, 2015

The Dread of Difference is a classic. Few film studies texts have been so widely read and so influential. It’s rarely on the shelf at my university library, so continuously does it circulate. Now this new edition expands the already comprehensive coverage of gender in the horror film with new essays on recent developments such as the Hostel series and torture porn. Informative and enlightening, this updated classic is an essential reference for fans and students of horror movies.”—Stephen Prince, editor of The Horror Film and author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

“An impressive array of distinguished scholars . . . gazes deeply into the darkness and then forms a Dionysian chorus reaffirming that sexuality and the monstrous are indeed mated in many horror films.”—Choice

“An extremely useful introduction to recent thinking about gender issues within this genre.”—Film Theory

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Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same
The Musical Moment in Film
Amy Herzog
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Musical spectacles are excessive and abstract, reconfiguring time and space and creating intense bodily responses. Amy Herzog's engaging work examines those instances where music and movement erupt from within more linear narrative frameworks. The representational strategies found in these films are often formulaic, repeating familiar story lines and stereotypical depictions of race, gender, and class. Yet she finds the musical moment contains a powerful disruptive potential.

Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same investigates the tension and the fusion of difference and repetition in films to ask, How does the musical moment work? Herzog looks at an eclectic mix of works, including the Soundie and Scopitone jukebox films, the musicals of French director Jacques Demy, the synchronized swimming spectacles of Esther Williams, and an apocalyptic musical by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. Several refrains circulate among these texts: their reliance on clichés, their rewriting of cultural narratives, and their hallucinatory treatment of memory and history.

Drawing on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, she explores all of these dissonances as productive forces, and in doing so demonstrates the transformative power of the unexpected.

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The ECO Guide to Careers that Make a Difference
Environmental Work For A Sustainable World
Environmental Careers Organization
Island Press, 2005
How can you make a real difference in the world and make a good living at the same time? The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference: Environmental Work for a Sustainable World provides the answer.

Developed by The Environmental Careers Organization (ECO, the creators of the popular Complete Guide to Environmental Careers), this new volume is unlike any careers book you've seen before. Reaching far beyond job titles and resume tips, The ECO Guide immerses you in the strategies and tactics that leading edge professionals are using to tackle pressing problems and create innovative solutions.

To bring you definitive information from the real world of environmental problem-solving, The ECO Guide has engaged some of the nation's most respected experts to explain the issues and describe what's being done about them today. You'll explore: Global climate change with Eileen Claussen, Pew Center for Global Climate Change; Biodiversity loss with Stuart Pimm, Nicholas School for the Environment at Duke University; Green Business with Stuart Hart, Kenan-Flager Business School at University of North Carolina; Ecotourism with Martha Honey, The International Ecotourism Society; Environmental Justice with Robert Bullard, Environmental Justice Center at Clark Atlanta University; Alternative Energy with Seth Dunn, Worldwatch Institute; Water Quality with Sandra Postel, Global Water Policy Project; Green Architecture with William McDonough, McDonough + Partners; and twelve other critical issues.

To demonstrate even more clearly what eco-work feels like on the ground, The ECO Guide offers vivid "Career Snapshots" of selected employers and the professionals that work there. You'll visit government agencies like the USDA Forest Service, nonprofit organizations like Conservation International and Project Wild, and local advocates like Alternatives for Community and Environment. You'll go inside environmental businesses like Wildland Adventures and Stonyfield Farms. And you'll learn from academic institutions like the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.

ECO also identifies and describes forty specific jobs that are representative of environmental career opportunities in the twenty-first century. It provides dozens of the best Internet resources. And most importantly, The ECO Guide offers all of the insight about current trends you expect from ECO, the acknowledged leaders in environmental career information.
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The Exhaustion of Difference
The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies
Alberto Moreiras
Duke University Press, 2001
The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world.
What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed.
The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.
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Feminisms
Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures
Edited by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism.
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Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages
Sharon Farmer
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

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Gender and the Science of Difference
Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine
Fisher, Jill A
Rutgers University Press, 2011

How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images.

Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.

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Gender Politics And MTV
Voicing the Difference
Lisa Lewis
Temple University Press, 1991

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Health and Illness
Images of Difference
Sander L. Gilman
Reaktion Books, 2004
This timely study demonstrates how images of beauty and ugliness have constructed a visual history that records the artificial boundaries dividing "healthy" bodies from those that are "ill".

"Gilman tells an excellent tale."—Jewish Chronicle
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Homecoming Queers
Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production
Danielson, Marivel T
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities.

Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

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'I am an American'
Filming the Fear of Difference
Cynthia Weber
Intellect Books, 2011
From Samuel Huntington’s highly controversial Who Are We? to the urgent appeal of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, Americans are increasingly reflecting on questions of democracy, multiculturalism, and national identity. Yet such debates take place largely at the level of elites, leaving out ordinary American citizens, who have much to offer about the lived reality behind the phrase, “I am an American.”
 
Cynthia Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American today. The result is this brave and captivating memoir that gives a voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001—and their lingering aftermath—live on in collective memory. Heartrending first-person testimonials reveal how the ongoing fear of terrorists and immigrants has betrayed America’s core values of fairness and equality, which have been further weakened by polarizing international and domestic responses. Considered together, these portraits also provide a sharp contrast to the idealized vision of Americanness frequently spun by media and politicians.
 

Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, ‘I am an American’ offers precisely the kind of ground-level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.

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Identity and Difference
Martin Heidegger
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Identity and Difference consists of English translations and the original German versions of two little-known lectures given in 1957 by Martin Heidegger, "The Principle of Identity" and "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics." Both lectures discuss the difficult problem of the nature of identity in the history of metaphysics. A helpful introduction and a list of references are also provided by the translator, Joan Stambaugh.

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Identity Politics of Difference
The Mixed-Race American Indian Experience
Michelle Montgomery
University Press of Colorado, 2021

In Identity Politics of Difference, author Michelle R. Montgomery uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine questions of identity construction and multiracialism through the experiences of mixed-race Native American students at a tribal school in New Mexico. She explores the multiple ways in which these students navigate, experience, and understand their racial status and how this status affects their educational success and social interactions.

Montgomery contextualizes students’ representations of their racial identity choices through the compounded race politics of blood quantum and stereotypes of physical features, showing how varying degrees of "Indianness" are determined by peer groups. Based on in-depth interviews with nine students who identify as mixed-race (Native American–White, Native American–Black, and Native American–Hispanic), Montgomery challenges us to scrutinize how the category of “mixed-race” bears different meanings for those who fall under it based on their outward perceptions, including their ability to "pass" as one race or another.

Identity Politics of Difference includes an arsenal of policy implications for advancing equity and social justice in tribal colleges and beyond and actively engages readers to reflect on how they have experienced the identity politics of race throughout their own lives. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars, policy makers, teachers, and school administrators, as well as to students and their families.

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Inclusion
The Politics of Difference in Medical Research
Steven Epstein
University of Chicago Press, 2007

With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions.

Formal concern with this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men—and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society.

“Epstein’s use of theory to demonstrate how public policies in the health profession are shaped makes this book relevant for many academic disciplines. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

“A masterful comprehensive overview of a wide terrain.”—Troy Duster, Biosocieties

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Inventions of Difference
On Jacques Derrida
Rodolphe Gasché
Harvard University Press, 1994

Rodolphe Gasché, one of the world's foremost—and most provocative—authorities on Jacques Derrida, has news for deconstruction's devotees, whose traffic in the terms of “difference” signals privileged access to the most radically chic of intellectual circles: they do not know their Derrida. A deconstruction of the criticism that goes by deconstruction's name, this book reveals the true philosophical nature of Derrida's thought, its debt to the tradition it engages, and its misuse by some of its most fervent admirers.

Gasché's Inventions of Difference explodes the current myth of Derrida's singularity and sets in its place a finely informed sense of the philosopher's genuine accomplishment. Derrida's recent turn from philosophical concerns to matters literary, historical, and political has misled many of his self-styled followers, Gasché contends. Though less overtly philosophical, Derrida's later writings can be properly understood only in relation to a certain philosophical tradition, which Inventions of Difference cogently traces.

Gasché shows that terms like “difference” and “other” are devoid of meaning outside the context of identity, a context that draws not only on Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's writings but also on the work of Hegel. By setting forth this affinity with Hegel, Gasché clarifies the philosophical weight and direction of Derrida's recent work and the philosophical engagement of his larger project. His book puts a stop to the loose talk of deconstruction and points to the real rigors and pleasures of knowing Derrida.

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Israeli Feminist Scholarship
Gender, Zionism, and Difference
Edited by Esther Fuchs
University of Texas Press, 2014

The last two decades have given rise to a proliferation of scholarship by Israeli feminists working in diverse fields, ranging from sociology to literature, anthropology, and history. As the Israeli feminist movement continually decentralizes and diversifies, it has become less Eurocentric and heterocentric, making way for pluralistic concerns. Collecting fifteen previously published essays that give voice to this diversity, Israeli Feminist Scholarship showcases articles on Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Palestinian, and lesbian identities as well as on Israeli women’s roles as mothers, citizens and activists, and soldiers.

Citing evidence that these scholars have redefined their object of inquiry as an open site of contested and constructed identity, luminary Esther Fuchs traces the history of Israeli feminism. Among the essays are Jewish historian Margalit Shilo’s study of the New Hebrew Woman, sociologist Ronit Lentin’s analysis of gendered representations of the Holocaust in Israeli culture, peace activist Erella Shadmi on lesbianism as a nonissue in Israel, and cultural critic Nitza Berkovitch’s examination of womanhood as constructed in Israeli legal discourse.

Creating a space for a critical examination of the relationship between disparate yet analogous discourses within feminism and Zionism, this anthology reclaims the mobilizing, inclusive role of these multifaceted discourses beyond the postmodern paradigm.

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Istanbul
Living with Difference in a Global City
Fisher-Onar, Nora
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows. 

Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.  
 
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Just Schools
Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference
Martha Minow
Russell Sage Foundation, 2008
Educators and policymakers who share the goal of equal opportunity in schools often hold differing notions of what entails a just school in multicultural America. Some emphasize the importance of integration and uniform treatment for all, while others point to the benefits of honoring cultural diversity in ways that make minority students feel at home. In Just Schools, noted legal scholars, educators, and social scientists examine schools with widely divergent methods of fostering equality in order to explore the possibilities and limits of equal education today. The contributors to Just Schools combine empirical research with rich ethnographic accounts to paint a vivid picture of the quest for justice in classrooms around the nation. Legal scholar Martha Minow considers the impact of school choice reforms on equal educational opportunities. Psychologist Hazel Rose Markus examines culturally sensitive programs where students exhibit superior performance on standardized tests and feel safer and more interested in school than those in color-blind programs. Anthropologist Heather Lindkvist reports on how Somali Muslims in Lewiston, Maine, invoked the American ideal of inclusiveness in winning dress-code exemptions and accommodations for Islamic rituals in the local public school.  Political scientist Austin Sarat looks at a school system in which everyone endorses multiculturalism but holds conflicting views on the extent to which culturally sensitive practices should enter into the academic curriculum. Anthropologist Barnaby Riedel investigates how a private Muslim school in Chicago aspires to universalist ideals, and education scholar James Banks argues that schools have a responsibility to prepare students for citizenship in a multicultural society. Anthropologist John Bowen offers a nuanced interpretation of educational commitments in France and the headscarf controversy in French schools. Anthropologist Richard Shweder concludes the volume by connecting debates about diversity in schools with a broader conflict between national assimilation and cultural autonomy. As America's schools strive to accommodate new students from around the world, Just Schools provides a provocative and insightful look at the different ways we define and promote justice in schools and in society at large.
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Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference
Amaryll Chanady
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Macedonia
The Politics of Identity and Difference
Jane K. Cowan
Pluto Press, 2000

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Making Up the Difference
Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador
By Erynn Masi de Casanova
University of Texas Press, 2011

Globalization and economic restructuring have decimated formal jobs in developing countries, pushing many women into informal employment such as direct selling of cosmetics, perfume, and other personal care products as a way to "make up the difference" between household income and expenses. In Ecuador, with its persistent economic crisis and few opportunities for financially and personally rewarding work, women increasingly choose direct selling as a way to earn income by activating their social networks. While few women earn the cars and trips that are iconic prizes in the direct selling organization, many use direct selling as part of a set of household survival strategies.

In this first in-depth study of a cosmetics direct selling organization in Latin America, Erynn Masi de Casanova explores women's identities as workers, including their juggling of paid work and domestic responsibilities, their ideas about professional appearance, and their strategies for collecting money from customers. Focusing on women who work for the country's leading direct selling organization, she offers fascinating portraits of the everyday lives of women selling personal care products in Ecuador's largest city, Guayaquil. Addressing gender relations (including a look at men's direct and indirect involvement), the importance of image, and the social and economic context of direct selling, Casanova challenges assumptions that this kind of flexible employment resolves women's work/home conflicts and offers an important new perspective on women's work in developing countries.

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Marginal People in Deviant Places
Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism
Janice M. Irvine
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.
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Mediating the South Korean Other
Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State
David C. Oh, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.

This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats.
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Medicating Race
Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA's approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of "normal" populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.
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National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada
Race, Territory, and the Roots of Difference
Gerard W. Boychuk
Georgetown University Press, 2008

After World War II, the United States and Canada, two countries that were very similar in many ways, struck out on radically divergent paths to public health insurance. Canada developed a universal single-payer system of national health care, while the United States opted for a dual system that combines public health insurance for low-income and senior residents with private, primarily employer-provided health insurance—or no insurance—for everyone else. In National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada, Gerard W. Boychuk probes the historical development of health care in each country, honing in on the most distinctive social and political aspects of each country—the politics of race in the U.S. and territorial politics in Canada, especially the tensions between the national government and the province of Quebec.

In addition to the politics of race and territory, Boychuk sifts through the numerous factors shaping health policy, including national values, political culture and institutions, the power of special interests, and the impact of strategic choices made at critical junctures. Drawing on historical archives, oral histories, and public opinion data, he presents a nuanced and thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two systems, compares them as they exist today, and reflects on how each is poised to meet the challenges of the future.

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ON INTIMATE TERMS
The Psychology of Difference in Lesbian Relationships
Beverly Burch
University of Illinois Press, 1993
  On Intimate Terms looks at the internal logic of lesbian relationships, arguing that they are not patterned after heterosexual ones but rely on the interplay of psychosexual differences between women. The book suggests that everyone seeks psychic complementarity with an Other in intimate relationships as a way of supporting personal growth and development. A complementary partner is one who is different in some individually meaningful way, not necessarily in terms of gender.
 
"A very thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work. . . . It will be a strong contribution to the fields of lesbian studies, gender relations, and feminist psychoanalysis." - Diane Ehrensaft, author of Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharing the Care of Their Children 
 
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Painting the Difference
Sex and Spectator in Modern Art
Charles Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The picture plane of a painting creates boundaries and perspectives. It governs the relationship of daubs of pigment on a canvas to reality, allowing the viewer to connect with the imagined world of a work of art. Charles Harrison's latest endeavor, Painting the Difference, explores the role of the picture plane in modern painting and the relationships it creates among the artist, the subject, and the spectator. One of the most respected teachers and theorists of modern art, Harrison here offers a bold interpretation of the Modernist canon that uncovers the significance of gender to the functioning of the picture plane.

Arguing that the representation of women in art was crucial to the character of modernity, Harrison traces the history of female subjects as they began to gaze out of the picture to confront and engage their viewers. Combining sweeping conceptual history with telling investigations into the details of particular paintings, Painting the Difference deciphers the implications of sexual difference for the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Harrison shows how artists, reflecting the underlying anxieties of the time about gender, used female subjects' gazes both to create a sexualized relationship between these subjects and their viewers, and to simultaneously question that relationship. In considering works by artists such as Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as Rothko, Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Harrison incorporates elements of cultural criticism and social history into his arguments, and generous color illustrations permit the reader to test Harrison's claims against the works on which they are based. Rich with detail and compelling analysis, Painting the Difference offers cutting-edge interpretation grounded in the reality of magnificent works of art.
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The Poetics of Difference
Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.

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The Politics of Difference
Ethnic Premises in a World of Power
Edited by Edwin N. Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister
University of Chicago Press, 1996
According to most social scientists, the advent of a global media village and the rise of liberal democratic government would diminish ethnic and national identity as a source of political action. Yet the contemporary world is in the midst of an explosion of identity politics and often violent ethnonationalism.

This volume examines cases ranging from the well-publicized ethnonationalism of Bosnia and post-Apartheid South Africa to ethnic conflicts in Belgium and Sri Lanka. Distinguished international scholars including John Comaroff, Stanley J. Tambiah, and Ernesto Laclau argue that continued acceptance of imposed ethnic terms as the most appropriate vehicle for collective self-identification and social action legitimizes the conditions of inequality that give rise to them in the first place.

This ambitious attempt to explain the inadequacies of current approaches to power and ethnicity forges more realistic alternatives to the volatile realities of social difference.

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Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference
Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms.

Synthesizing a number of fields—anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory—this collection analyzes diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault, and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Some essayists focus on the racialized violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Others examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse—in the emergence of “racial diseases” such as sickle cell anemia, in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child, and even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil.

Contributors.
Bruce Braun, Giovanna Di Chiro, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gregory, Donna Haraway, Jake Kosek, Tania Murray Li, Uli Linke, Zine Magubane, Donald S. Moore, Diane Nelson, Anand Pandian, Alcida Rita Ramos, Keith Wailoo, Robyn Wiegman

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"Race," Writing, and Difference
Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah
University of Chicago Press, 1987
A classic of cultural criticism, "Race," Writing, and Difference provides a broad introduction to the idea of "race" as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory. This collection demonstrates the variety of critical approaches through which one may discuss the complexities of racial "otherness" in various modes of discourse. Now, fifteen years after their first publication, these essays have managed to escape the cliches associated with the race-class-gender trinity of '80s criticism, and remain a provocative overview of the complex interplay between race, writing, and difference.
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Reading Adoption
Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama
Marianne Novy
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Reading Adoption explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals how fiction has contributed to general perceptions of adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. She observes how these works address the question of what makes a parent, as she scrutinizes basic themes that repeat throughout, such as the difference between adoptive parents and children, the mirroring between adoptees and their birth parents, and the romanticization of the theme of lost family and recovered identity. Engagingly written from Novy's dual perspectives as critic and adult adoptee, the book artfully combines the techniques of literary and feminist scholarship with memoir, and in doing so it sheds new light on familiar texts.

Marianne Novy is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture.
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Restoring America's Neighborhoods
How Local People Make a Difference
Michael R Greenberg
Rutgers University Press, 1999

What does it take to mobilize a grass-roots force dedicated to bringing new life into a decaying neighborhood? Can any one person or group successfully halt physical deterioration, drug-related crime, or the encroachment of clusters of factories, highways, and other noxious land uses? Michael Greenberg demonstrates in this book that it can and has been done against all odds.

Restoring America's Neighborhoods profiles twenty-four such cases from across the United States. It tells the story of people determined to make the blighted, crime-ridden urban enclaves in which they live and work a better place for everybody. These are people from many different walks of life: ministers working to bring jobs to their communities; city planners and federal employees trying to relocated residents of potential disaster areas; and locals taking matters into their own hands to create a healthier, more pleasing living environment for their children. Greenberg's is a heartening account of courage and unwavering resolve as well as of hope that individuals can make a difference, that violent criminals and uncaring bureaucrats need not carry the day. He calls them "streetfighters," a fitting tribute to their efforts to take back their neighborhoods, block by block and street by street.

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The Right to Difference
French Universalism and the Jews
Maurice Samuels
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country’s Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious affiliations. This timely book offers a fresh perspective on the debate by showing that French equality has not always demanded an erasure of differences. Through close and contextualized readings of the way that major novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and political figures have struggled with the question of integrating Jews into French society, Maurice Samuels draws lessons about how the French have often understood the universal in relation to the particular.

Samuels demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism, whether as its foil or as proof of its reach. He traces the development of this discourse through key moments in French history, from debates over granting Jews civil rights during the Revolution, through the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy, and up to the rise of a “new antisemitism” in recent years. By recovering the forgotten history of a more open, pluralistic form of French universalism, Samuels points toward new ways of moving beyond current ethnic and religious dilemmas and argues for a more inclusive view of what constitutes political discourse in France.
 
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The Right to Difference
Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature
Nicole Coleman
University of Michigan Press, 2021

The Right to Difference examines novels that depict human rights violations in order to explore causes of intergroup violence within diverse societies, using Germany as a test case. In these texts, the book shows that an exaggeration of difference between minority and majority groups leads to violence. Germany has become increasingly diverse over the past decades due to skilled labor migration and refugee movements. In light of this diversity, this book’s approach transcends a divide between migrant and post-migrant German literature on the one hand and a national literature on the other hand. Addressing competing definitions of national identity as well as the contest between cultural homogeneity and diversity, the author redefines the term “intercultural literature.” It becomes not a synonym for authors who do not belong to a national literature, such as migrant writers, but a way of reading literature with an intercultural lens.

This book builds a theory of intercultural literature that focuses on the multifaceted nature of identity, in which ethnicity represents only one of many characteristics defining individuals. To develop intercultural competence, one needs to adopt a complex image of individuals that allows for commonalities and differences by complicating the notion of sharp contrasts between groups. Revealing the affective allegiances formed around other characteristics (gender, profession, personal motivations, relationships, and more) allows for similarities that grouping into large, homogeneous, and seemingly exclusive entities conceals. Eight novels analyzed in this book remember and reveal human rights violations, such as genocide, internment and torture, violent expulsion, the reasons for fleeing a country, dangerous flight routes and the difficulty of settling in a new country. Some of these novels allow for affective identification with diverse characters and cast the protagonists as individuals with plural perspectives and identities rather than monolithic members of one large national or ethnic group, whereas others emphasize the commonalities of all people.

Ultimately, the author makes the case for German Studies to contribute to an antiracist approach to diversity by redefining what it means to be German and establishing difference as a fundamental human right

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Selected Writings on Race and Difference
Stuart Hall
Duke University Press, 2021
In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall's contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.
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Splitting the Difference
Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India
Wendy Doniger
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In Splitting the Difference, the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Face/Off.

Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology's prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger's comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.

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Tactical Inclusion
Difference and Vulnerability in U.S. Military Advertising
Jeremiah Favara
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of color and women played an essential role in making the US military one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, and Ebony. Favara draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence.

Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising’s role in building the all-volunteer military.

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Talking about Race
Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference
Katherine Cramer Walsh
University of Chicago Press, 2007

It is a perennial question: how should Americans deal with racial and ethnic diversity? More than 400 communities across the country have attempted to answer it by organizing discussions among diverse volunteers in an attempt to improve race relations. In Talking about Race, Katherine Cramer Walsh takes an eye-opening look at this strategy to reveal the reasons behind the method and the effects it has in the cities and towns that undertake it.

With extensive observations of community dialogues, interviews with the discussants, and sophisticated analysis of national data, Walsh shows that while meeting organizers usually aim to establish common ground, participants tend to leave their discussions with a heightened awareness of differences in perspective and experience. Drawing readers into these intense conversations between ordinary Americans working to deal with diversity and figure out the meaning of citizenship in our society, she challenges many preconceptions about intergroup relations and organized public talk. Finally disputing the conventional wisdom that unity is the only way forward, Walsh prescribes a practical politics of difference that compels us to reassess the place of face-to-face discussion in civic life and the critical role of conflict in deliberative democracy.

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Territories of Difference
Place, Movements, Life, Redes
Arturo Escobar
Duke University Press, 2008
In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.

Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

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Thinking Plant Animal Human
Encounters with Communities of Difference
David Wood
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Collected essays by a leading philosopher situating the question of the animal in the broader context of a relational ontology

There is a revolution under way in our thinking about animals and, indeed, life in general, particularly in the West. The very words man, animal, and life have turned into flimsy conceptual husks—impediments to thinking about the issues in which they are embroiled. David Wood was a founding member of the early 1970s Oxford Group of philosophers promoting animal rights; he also directed Ecology Action (UK). Thinking Plant Animal Human is the first collection of this major philosopher’s influential essays on “animals,” bringing together his many discussions of nonhuman life, including the classic “Thinking with Cats.”

Exploring our connections with cats, goats, and sand crabs, Thinking Plant Animal Human introduces the idea of “kinnibalism” (the eating of mammals is eating our own kin), reflects on the idea of homo sapiens, and explores the place of animals both in art and in children’s stories. Finally, and with a special focus on trees, the book delves into remarkable contemporary efforts to rescue plants from philosophical neglect and to rethink and reevaluate their status. Repeatedly bubbling to the surface is the remarkable strangeness of other forms of life, a strangeness that extends to the human. 

Wood shows that the best way of resisting simplistic classification is to attend to our manifold relationships with other living beings. It is not anthropocentric to focus on such relationships; they cast light in complex ways on the living communities of which we are part, and exploring them recoils profoundly on our understanding of ourselves.

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Transformative Political Leadership
Making a Difference in the Developing World
Robert I. Rotberg
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Accomplished political leaders have a clear strategy for turning political visions into reality. Through well-honed analytical, political, and emotional intelligence, leaders chart paths to promising futures that include economic growth, material prosperity, and human well-being. Alas, such leaders are rare in the developing world, where often institutions are weak and greed and corruption strong—and where responsible leadership therefore has the potential to effect the greatest change.
          
In Transformative Political Leadership, Robert I. Rotberg focuses on the role of leadership in politics and argues that accomplished leaders demonstrate a particular set of skills. Through illustrative case studies of leaders who have performed ably in the developing world—among them Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Seretse Khama in Botswana, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, and Kemal Ataturk in Turkey—Rotberg examines how these leaders transformed their respective countries. The importance of capable leadership is woefully understudied in political science, and this book will be an important tool in exploring how leaders lead and how nations and institutions are built.
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Treating AIDS
Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention
Sangaramoorthy, Thurka
Rutgers University Press, 2014
 There is an inherently powerful and complex paradox underlying HIV/AIDS prevention—between the focus on collective advocacy mobilized to combat global HIV/AIDS and the staggeringly disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS in many places. In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in South Florida. Although there is worldwide emphasis on the universality of HIV/AIDS as a social, political, economic, and biomedical problem, developments in HIV/AIDS prevention are rooted in and focused exclusively on disparities in HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality framed through the rubric of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Everyone is at equal risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, Sangaramoorthy notes, but the ways in which people experience and manage that risk—and the disease itself—is highly dependent on race, ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, immigration status, and other notions of “difference.”

Sangaramoorthy documents in detail the work of AIDS prevention programs and their effect on the health and well-being of Haitians, a transnational community long plagued by the stigma of being stereotyped in public discourse as disease carriers. By tracing the ways in which public knowledge of AIDS prevention science circulates from sites of surveillance and regulation, to various clinics and hospitals, to the social worlds embraced by this immigrant community, she ultimately demonstrates the ways in which AIDS prevention programs help to reinforce categories of individual and collective difference, and how they continue to sustain the persistent and pernicious idea of race and ethnicity as risk factors for the disease.
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Under the Kapok Tree
Identity and Difference in Beng Thought
Alma Gottlieb
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In this companion volume to Parallel Worlds, Alma Gottlieb
explores ideology and social practices among the Beng people of Côte
d'Ivoire. Employing symbolic and postmodern perspectives, she highlights
the dynamically paired notions of identity and difference, symbolized by
the kapok tree planted at the center of every Beng village.

"This book merits a number of readings. . . . An experiment in
ethnography that future projects might well emulate." —Clarke K. Speed,
American Anthropologist

"[An] evocative, rich ethnography. . . . Gottlieb does anthropology a
real service." —Misty L. Bastian, American Ethnologist

"Richly detailed. . . . This book offers a nuanced descriptive analysis
which commands authority." —Elizabeth Tonkin, Man

"Exemplary. . . . Gottlieb's observations on identity and difference are
not confined to rituals or other special occasions; rather she shows
that these principles emerge with equal force during daily social life."
—Monni Adams, Journal of African Religion

"[An] excellent study." —John McCall, Journal of Folklore
Research

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Unsung Heroes
Federal Execucrats Making a Difference
Norma M. Riccucci
Georgetown University Press, 1995

This book explores an important side of public employment that most Americans never get the opportunity to see—high-level career executives who make positive contributions to our quality of life. Norma M. Riccucci profiles six "unsung heroes," the people behind the scenes of some of the most successful programs in American government, and identifies the tools, skills, and strategies that make them effective leaders.

Through in-depth interviews and provocative story-telling, Riccucci demonstrates that while these executive-level bureaucrats—or "execucrats"—may have an overall negative public image, they create, develop, execute, and enforce a number of programs and public policies that change our country for the better. She highlights six of these modern execucrats who best exemplify the creativity, determination, and leadership found in such officials:

—William Black, Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision, who attacked the rampant corruption and mismanagement that created the savings and loan crisis;

—Eileen Claussen, Director, Atmospheric and Indoor Air Programs, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who negotiated as intensely within her own government as with other countries to create an international plan to protect the earth's ozone layer;

—Ambassador Edward Perkins, U.S. State Department, the first African-American Ambassador to South Africa and the first American ambassador to meet with black South African leaders as part of his persistent efforts to end apartheid in that country;

—Stephen Marica, Assistant Inspector General, Small Business Administration, who investigated the Wedtech scandal, which bilked millions of dollars in fraudulent defense contracts from American taxpayers;

—Dr. Vince Hutchins, Director, Division of Maternal and Child Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spearheaded the team that developed "Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition," a public-private partnership that improved, and even saved, the lives of thousands of newborn babies; and

—Dr. Helene Gayle, Division Chief, HIV-AIDS Division, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who is actively battling the AIDS virus through education and prevention programs around the world.

Riccucci not only relates the intriguing tales of these six dedicated officials who overcame the challenges before them, but she also analyzes the specific factors—from knowledge of the system to honesty, integrity, and humor—that are needed to become a dynamic government executive. Of interest to those both inside and outside government circles, Unsung Heroes gives captivating insights into effective executive leadership.

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Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference
Rebecca N. Mitchell
The Ohio State University Press, 2011

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Violence and Difference
Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction
Andrew J. McKenna
University of Illinois Press, 1992
McKenna explicates key elements of the anthropology of Rene Girard and the literary
theory of Jacques Derrida in terms of each other--to create an interpretive strategy that he
hopes will "salvage deconstruction from the flashy sterility it favors."     
 
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Words Matter
Writing to Make a Difference
Edited by Amanda Dahling and Mary Kay Blakely
University of Missouri Press, 2016

Newspapers and magazines have been steadily shrinking, and more and more former subscribers have gone to digital and internet sources for the news. Yet it has become increasingly clear that “short takes” don’t satisfy many readers, who still long for nuanced, long form journalism. By providing examples of classic magazine articles by professional writers, all of whom are graduates of the Missouri School of Journalism, this book fulfills the need for more sophisticated, thought-provoking essays that will resonate with both the general reader and students.

The book is divided into three broad categories: profiles, first person journalism, and personal memoirs, and includes the original articles as well as a “postscript” by the writers in which they discuss what they’ve learned about writing, journalism, and the business of getting published. Useful for students and instructors in writing programs, the book also appeals to writers interested in both the art and the craft of successful writing.

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Working the Difference
Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing
E. Summerson Carr
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of motivational interviewing and what its rise reveals about how cultural forms emerge and spread.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. In Working the Difference, E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.
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World of Difference
A Moral Perspective on Social Inequality
Gioia Marini
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Public debates tend to see social inequality as resulting from individual decisions people make, for instance with respect to their education or lifestyle. Solutions are often sought in supporting individuals to make better choices. This neglects the importance of social groups and communities in determining individual outcomes. A moral perspective on social inequality questions the fairness of insisting on individual responsibilities, when members of some groups systematically receive fewer opportunities than others. The essays in this book have been prepared by experts from different disciplines, ranging from philosophy to engineering, and from economics to epidemiology. On the basis of recent scientific insights, World of Difference examines how group memberships impact on individual outcomes in four key domains: health, education and work, migration, and the environment. This offers a new moral perspective on social inequality, which policy makers tend to neglect.
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Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1980
First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.
[more]

front cover of Writing and Difference
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1978
First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.
[more]


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