From police on the street, to the mayor of New Orleans and FEMA administrators, government officials monumentally failed to protect the most vulnerable residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster. This violation of the social contract undermined the foundational narratives and myths of the American nation and spawned a profound, often contentious public debate over the meaning of Katrina's devastation. A wide range of voices and images attempted to clarify what ...

Vietnam: A War, Not a Country explores the conflicting ways in which the American-Vietnamese War has been collectively remembered and represented from the perspective of the war’s three primary belligerents: the Vietnamese communists, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans. The book examines how the three different collectives memorialize this traumatizing historical event. Within each of these three groups there exists a number of competing narratives, generating not only a sens...

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history. In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what...

In November 2004, the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed on a busy street in Amsterdam. A twenty-six-year-old Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent shot van Gogh, slit his throat, and pinned a five-page indictment of Western society to his body. The murder set off a series of reactions, including arson against Muslim schools and mosques. In The Assassination of Theo van Gogh, Ron Eyerman explores the multiple meanings of the murder and the different reactions it el...

Building on their studies of sixties culture and theory of cognitive praxis, Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison examine the mobilization of cultural traditions and formulation of new collective identities through the music of activism. They combine a sophisticated theoretical argument with historical-empirical studies of nineteenth-century populists and twentieth-century labour and ethnic movements, focusing on the interrelations between music and social movements in the United States and the ...

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves ...

This volume brings together Ron Eyerman’s most important interventions in the field of cultural trauma and offers an accessible entry point into the origins and development of this theory and a framework of an analysis that has now achieved the status of a research paradigm. This collection of disparate essays, published between 2004 and 2018, coheres around an original introduction that not only provides a historical overview of cultural trauma, but is also an important theoretical contri...

With the erosion of strong class theory, sociologists have recently started to look at aspects of social stratification other than class. One of the most interesting new areas of investigation is the sociology of generations.This book brings together the work of scholars who are making a major contribution to this new sociological interest. Through a combination of innovative theoretical and empirical studies, this book shows that an analysis of generations is essential to an unders...

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and und...

**Edward Said has long been considered one of the world’s most compelling public intellectuals, taking on a remarkable array of topics with his many publications. But no single book has encompassed the vast scope of his stimulating erudition quite like Power, Politics, and Culture.“A fascinating, oblique entry into the mind of one whose own writings . . . are a brilliant questioning chronicle of contemporary culture and values.” --Nadine Gordimer**In these twenty-eight inte...

In this ground-breaking book, a renowned bioethicist argues that the political left must radically revise its outdated view of human nature. He shows how the insights of modern evolutionary theory, particularly on the evolution of cooperation, can help the left attain its social and political goals.Singer explains why the left originally rejected Darwinian thought and why these reasons are no longer viable. He discusses how twentieth-century thinking has transformed our understandi...

Over the past ten years, the work of Michael Eric Dyson has become the first stop for readers, writers, and thinkers eager for uncommon wisdom on the racial and political dynamics of contemporary America. Whether writing on religion or sexuality or notions of whiteness, on Martin Luther King, Jr. or Tupac Shakur, Dyson's keen insight and rhetorical flair continue to surprise and challenge. This collection gathers the best of Dyson's growing body of work: his most incisive commentary, his m...