Introduction: Framing the Questions
The Citizenship Question: Of the State and Beyond
The National Question: From the Indigenous to the Diasporic
The Religious Question: The Sacred, the Cultural and the
Political
The Cosmopolitan Question: Situating the Human and Human Rights
The Caring Question: The Emotional and the Political
Concluding Remarks
Nira Yuval-Davis is Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at The University of East London.
This is an in-depth examination of a slippery and contradictory
subject. Knowledge alone is not enough for this type of project. It
takes breaking out of narrow conceptual cages and unsettling what
we think of as stable meanings. The author brings all of this to
life in often unforgettable ways.
*Saskia Sassen*
National identities were once taken largely for granted in social
science. Now they are part of an even more complex "politics of
belonging" that challenges both public affairs and the categories
of social science. Nira Yuval-Davis offers a nuanced account that
will be important for scholars and all those concerned with
contemporary politics.
*Craig Calhoun*
Nira Yuval-Davis always pushes the feminist envelope. Here she
guides us through the thickets of five questions that preoccupy all
of us today , shining a bright light on the fraught dynamics of
"belonging." One of the innovations of The Politics of Belonging is
to introduce us to specific feminist groups and movements tackling
each one of these five thorny questions. I′ve learnt a lot, as I
always do when guided by Nira Yuval-Davis.
*Cynthia Enloe*
Nira Yuval-Davis has written an important book on the politics of
belonging. As a result of her anti-racist, socialist version of
feminist political commitment she has always approached the issues
of gender and gender relations intersectionally; this stands as a
key feature of her work overall and of this particular book...
Yuval- Davis thus provides a mapping of the ‘politics of belonging’
applied to different environments and she does it with exquisite
sophistication and attention to detail by including a wide range of
theories and authors.
*Montserrat Guibernau, Queen Mary, University of London*
This book is a major contribution to debates about how we can
understand the intersections between multiple forms of
identification and belonging which structure social relations. It
argues that analyses and political projects which privilege
particular axes of identity are always incomplete and limiting and
thus always make for inadequate social science and dangerous
politics... Yuval-Davis’ scholarship is always concerned with
understanding the social world in order to change it – in a more
meaningful way than that captured by the now ubiquitous term
‘impact’.
*Ben Gidley, University of Oxford*
The book provides the reader with a dense theoretical description
and exhaustive examples, which cover a range of disciplines such as
Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, Gender Studies and
Cultural Studies. Furthermore, it not only gathers multiple aspects
for a critical analysis of the slippery and complex manifestations
and dynamics of belonging in contemporary political projects, but
it is also a valid tool for fostering awareness and mobilization
strategies, especially for feminist movements.
*Giulia D’Odorico*
This is a timely and important book which addresses key
contemporary issues around thethemes of belonging and the politics
of belonging... The Politics of Belonging is an ambitious and
pertinent book which sets out to equipsociologists, political
scientists and others with the tools to analyse complex
contemporarydebates in this field. Applied in specific contexts,
this book is another potential classic, andmay well emerge as the
definitive text on the politics of belonging.
*Naaz Rashid*
Yuval-Davis draws the contents skillfully together with the help of
theoretical frame... The literary contribution is valuable to
understanding contemporary political projects of belonging, and how
the boundaries of belonging are constructed with different
naturalized signifiers. Besides ample examples from grassroots
movements to supranational projects, also numerous footnotes
provide the reader [with] easily accessible online references...
Yuval-Davis′s literal contribution is more than topical as it
explores the slippery and complex phenomenon of belonging as well
as its manifestations and dynamics in contemporary political
projects.
*Mari Toivanen*
In this book, the author outlines a specific approach to the
infinite number of inherent difficulties in tackling the major
categories of social division in modern societies, along with their
normative significance... The sense of balance and differentiation
is a constant throughout the analysis in this book and it is this,
along with the general strength of argumentation, which gives the
concluding arguments their weight. The capacities of individual and
collective actors to negotiate the increasingly dynamic, complex
and involved processes of changing attachment, value and meaning
are at the core of Yuval-Davis’s perspective upon the contemporary
politics of belonging.
*Kieran O’Connor*
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