Clarissa Rile Hayward

How Americans Make Race

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

How do people produce and reproduce identities? In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward challenges what is sometimes called the 'narrative identity thesis': the idea that people produce and reproduce identities as stories. Identities have greater staying power than one would expect them to have if they were purely and simply narrative constructions, she argues, because people institutionalize identity-stories, building them into laws, rules, and other institutions that give social actors incentives to perform their identities well, and because they objectify identity-stories, building them into material forms that actors experience with their bodies. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the development of racialized identities and spaces in the twentieth-century United States, and also on life-narratives collected from people who live in racialized urban and suburban spaces, Hayward shows how the institutionalization and objectification of racial identity-stories enables their practical reproduction, lending them resilience in the face of challenge and critique.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 226
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. Februar 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 302g
• ISBN-13: 9781107619586
• ISBN-10: 1107619580
• Artikelnr.: 39117101

Autorenporträt

Clarissa Rile Hayward teaches political theory at Washington University, St Louis. The author of De-Facing Power (Cambridge, 2000) and of many articles in journals and edited volumes, she writes broadly on the themes of power and identity in the contemporary United States.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction. Comme il faut; 1. Identities and stories; 2. Black places; 3. Ordinary stories; 4. Home, sweet home; 5. White fences; Conclusion: stories, institutions, and spaces; Appendix. Interview respondents and interview schedule.

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Introduction. Comme il faut
1. Identities and stories
2. Black places
3. Ordinary stories
4. Home, sweet home
5. White fences
Conclusion: stories, institutions, and spaces
Appendix. Interview respondents and interview schedule.

Rezensionen

"For some unknown reason, social scientists focus almost obsessively on the construction of and borders between identities. They pay much less attention to the question of "so what?" - why identities matter in the public realm and in the exercise of political power. Clarissa Hayward is an expert in the ways that power is manifested and used in everyday activities, and she brings that expertise to bear in How Americans Make Race. Identities matter because they are embedded in institutions that matter, and everything from the course of American history to the course of an individual's life chances is shaped by the ways in which "who we are" becomes elided with "what we can do." This is a subtle, moving, important book." - Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Harvard University