Migration is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. As such, it both reshapes the global village and subverts the all-encompassing vision of the city, a space split between the blending of all new cultures and the need felt by many migrants to maintain their traditions and thereby contribute to a multicultural mosaic. This series of essays explores how the concepts of the melting-pot and the mosaic have shaped the representation of Paris and Montreal in francophone literatures. Migrant movements to these cities from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, Indochina, and the Indian Ocean have produced new groups of intersecting cultures. Under the dual influences of their native and host countries, migrants have produced an innovative and multifaceted literature that reflects their composite world-view. Their writing poses pressing questions of ethnicity, immigration, integration, and citizenship, and challenges longstanding notions both of the concept of the city and of how its spaces embody and articulate Frenchness in the face of ongoing change. Such shifts produce changes not only in the diasporic culture, but in the national culture as well, through creolization processes. These shifting identities increasingly destabilize current notions of national membership and social and cultural belonging, since we can no longer presume a direct correspondence between place, culture, language and identity. They also pose new questions of national identity and difference as the immigrant presence expands and inflects the cosmopolitan pluralism of today’s societies.

Author note: Andrés Torres is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Labor Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

When people imagine 1920s Chicago, they usually (and justifiably) think of Al Capone, speakeasies, gang wars, flappers and flivvers. Yet this narrative overlooks the crucial role the Windy City played in the modernization of America. The city's incredible ethnic variety and massive building boom gave it unparalleled creative space, as design trends from Art Deco skyscrapers to streamlined household appliances reflected Chicago's unmistakable style. The emergence of mass media in the 1920s helped make professional sports a national obsession, even as Chicago radio stations were inventing the sitcom and the soap opera. Join Joseph Gustaitis as he chases the beat of America's Jazz Age back to its jazz capital.

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

The Holy Mosaic delves into the rich and intricate history of Syria, tracing the origins and evolution of its three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as they are the three major monotheistic religions of the world today. This book is an unprecedented guide to understanding how Judaism began and evolved as well as how the Christians and Muslims later appeared in that part of the world. The Holy Mosaic looks at Syrian history but through the lens of religion, the specificity of which has not been shared by the public over the years. It gives accordingly, figures, main events, and relations between these faiths and others in centuries. Boasting a strict adherence to the principles of neutrality and respect, this elaborate analysis proves rather beneficial for understanding how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the one hand, and Syrian society on the other reciprocally influenced one another.