Angličtina
Are the conflicts that accompany the growth of postcolonial ethnic, cultural and religious diasporas undermining the political culture of first-world nations? This work explains why the hope of a harmonious, fully consensual society is misguided. Ranu Samantrai argues that the proliferation of sources of dissent can hold liberal democratic nations accountable for their political promises. Eschewing the settlements between liberal and communitarian theorists, she proposes a radicalization of democracy grounded in poststructuralist analysis of contingent individual and collective subjects. The black British women's movement of the 1980s (comprising women of African Caribbean and South Asian origin) is the occasion for this historical investigation of a national field of similitudes and differences. Through parliamentary papers and political history Samantrai charts the changing definition of Britain in the post-World War II period and tracks a new nationalism of disparate peoples into a narrowly territorial, homogeneous community of kin. In a reading of nationality and immigration law she uncovers the gender anxieties that justified the legal racialization of British national identity.
