What to read after American Multiculturalism After 9/11?

This groundbreaking volume explores the multicultural debate that has evolved in the United States and Europe since the cataclysmic events of 9/11. Instead of suggesting closure by presenting a unified narrative about cultural diversity, national identity, and social stratification, the essays in this well-balanced collection present a variety of perspectives, each highlighting the undiminished relevance of key issues such as immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, while also pointing to unresolved conflicts over universalism, religion, and tolerance. Most importantly, this volume shows that the struggle over multiculturalism is not limited to the political domain, but also has profound cultural implications. American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives is an invaluable, thought-provoking addition to the debate about multiculturalism as central to the study of the United States in a global context.

"These lively essays illuminate the ways in which multiculturalist initiatives in the United States and Europe have influenced one another with a variety of productive as well as unproductive effects, especially since the events of 9/11. The authors vindicate the promise of American Studies as a scholarly domain in which the trend from a preoccupation with ‘identity’ to a concern for ‘solidarity’ can be charted and critically interrogated."

                   --David A. Hollinger, author of POSTETHNIC AMERICA: BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM

"The thirteen new essays assembled in this book make many fresh and often surprising contributions to understanding the theoretical issues surrounding multiculturalism, the effects of the terrorist attacks of 2001 on debates about American ethnic diversity and national unity, and European and transatlantic perspectives on migration and religious difference."

                              Werner Sollors, author of BEYOND ETHNICITY: CONSENT AND DESCENT IN AMERICAN CULTURE and coedtior of A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA

"American Multiculturalism after 9/11 is a timely and extremely important intervention in and reconfiguration of the debates over multiculturalism that took place after 9/11-on both sides of the Atlantic."

Donald Pease, co-editor of CULTURES OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM and THE FUTURES OF AMERICAN STUDIES

"This provocative volume tracks the evolution of the contentious debate over 'multiculturalism' on both sides of the Atlantic as intensified and complicated in the post 9/11 period.  Examining a wide range of cultural texts--a photo, a film, a statue, a poem, a novel, a monument, a symbol, history textbooks and other modes of memorialization--these incisive essays add up to a meditation on the tumult and contradictions of our globalizing age."

        --Rubén G. Rumbaut, co-author of Immigrant America: A Portrait