Sites of ethnicity: Europe and the Americas

Sites of Ethnicity brings together contributions from scholars in Canada, the U. K., Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States who share an interest in exploring the theoretical possibilities of site analysis and the crucial role of place and spatial tactics in multi-ethnic societies. The strategic means for deciphering total social facts-comprising broad issues such as travel, subject positioning, identity, ethnicity, culture, memory-are as diverse and wide-ranging as the contributors to this volume. Manifestations of ethnicity in literature and non-literary texts, music, food, TV series, photographs, and even gravesites, are revealed to be constructed, performed, eaten, remembered, desired, and imagined as important sites for a definition of both individual and collective identities that, when studied in-depth, prove consistently elusive, fluid, and always already deferred. The papers present a vision of a world that is increasingly a global village, one in which memory and local place help measure various forms of ethnic representation through a reflection of possible sites of cultural engagement and agency.