In the South today, the sight of a Latina in a NASCAR T-shirt behind the register at an Asian grocery would hardly draw a second glance. That scenario, and our likely reaction to it, surely signals something important--but what? Here some of the region’s most respected and readable observers look across the past century to help us take stock of where the South is now and where it may be headed. Reflecting the writers’ deep interests in southern history, politics, literature, religion, and other matters, the essays engage in new ways some timeless concerns about the region: How has the South changed--or not changed? Has the South as a distinct region disappeared, or has it absorbed the many forces of change and still retained its cultural and social distinctiveness? Although the essays touch on an engaging diversity of topics including the USDA’s crop spraying policies, Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full, and collegiate women’s soccer, they ultimately cluster around a common set of themes. These include race, segregation and the fall of Jim Crow, gender, cultural distinctiveness and identity, modernization, education, and urbanization. Mindful of the South’s reputation for insularity, the essays also gauge the impact of federal assistance, relocated industries, immigration, and other outside influences. As one contributor writes, and as all would acknowledge, those who undertake a project like this “should bear in mind that they are tracking a target moving constantly but often erratically.” The rewards of pondering a place as elusive, complex, and contradictory as the American South are on full display here.

Professor Dana and his colleagues have carefully and successfully put together a collection of chapters on ethnic minority entrepreneurship from all parts of the world. The book comprises eight parts and 49 chapters. Undoubtedly, given the massive size and content of a 835-page book, it is fair to ask, is it value for money? The answer is unequivocally yes! A further comment on the content of the book should probably reassure potential readers and buyers of the book. . . This collection is undoubtedly rich, creative and varied in many respects. Therefore, it will be of great benefit to researchers and scholars alike. . . I will strongly recommend this book to researchers, students, teachers and policy-makers. Aminu Mamman, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research The volume presents an impressive panorama of studies on ethnic entrepreneurships ranging from Dalits in India to Roma entrepreneurs in Hungary. B.P. Corrie, Choice From a focus on middle-man minorities in the 1950s, the study of minority ethnic entrepreneurship has evolved into a vast undertaking. A major ingredient in this expansion is the massive population movements of the past thirty years that have created ethnic minority communities in almost all advanced economies. From New York to San Francisco, from Birmingham to Hamburg, from the Chinese in Canada, to the Turks in Finland, to the Ghanians in South Africa to the Lebanese in New Zealand, more than twenty chapters in this volume treat small-scale ethnic entrepreneurship and the cultural and institutional resources which support it. At the other end of the spectrum, the ethnic Chinese have created ever larger multi-divisional enterprises in the host societies of Southeast Asia. At the mid-point of the spectrum, analyzed in an elegant paper by Ivan Light, is the recently identified transmigrant entrepreneur accultured in two societies but assimilated in neither whose special endowments have provided the lynchpin for for much of the international trade expansion in the global economy over the past decade. And Dana and Morris provide us with much more Afro-American entrepreneurship, caste and class, the theory of clubs, women ethnic entrepreneurs, minority ethnicity and IPOs. In the quality of its contributions and in the reach of its coverage, this Handbook attains a very high standard. Peter Kilby, Wesleyan University, US The new Handbook of Research on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship, edited by Léo-Paul Dana, constitutes a major contribution to the literature on ethnic enterprise. Unlike previous work, which tended to focus on one country or one region of the world, this book is global in scope. You will find chapters on America, Europe, and Asia, as well as integrative essays that review important principles and concepts from the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship. I particularly appreciate the historical and evolutionary framework within which the contributions are situated. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone who has an interest in immigration and entrepreneurship or ethnic entrepreneurship more generally. Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina, US This exhaustive, interdisciplinary Handbook explores the phenomena of immigration and ethnic minority entrepreneurship in light of marked changes since the mid-twentieth century and the advent of easier, more affordable travel and more open and integrated national economies. The international contributors, key experts in their respective fields, illustrate that myriad ethnic minorities exist across the globe, and that their entrepreneurship can and does significantly influence national economies. The contributors go on to promote our understanding of which factors make for successful entrepreneurship, and, perhaps more importantly, how negative political consequences that members of successful entrepreneurial ethnic minorities might face can be minimized. This extensive collection of current research on entrepr

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood. She brings Khanty views of their history and current life into focus, revealing multiple levels of cultural activism. She argues that anthropological theory and practice can derive from indigenous insights, and should help indigenous peoples. Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization, and regionalization. These processes incorporate suprastate and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and generations. It has been shaped by recent grass-roots mobilization, ecological activism, and religious revival, as well as older historical memory, language-based solidarity, and loyalty to a homeland. The Tenacity of Ethnicity demonstrates how at each historical turn, Siberian experiences shed new light on old debates concerning colonialism, conversion, revitalization, ethnicity, and nationalism. This volume will be important for political scientists, historians, and regional specialists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1974 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

The New Ethnicity is characterized more by a cutting of roots than a cultivation of them, particularly among descendants of recent European immigrants to America. The authors hold that the American Dream, including its melting pot imagery, was sought by immigrants from Ireland or eastern, central, and southern Europe, not imposed by xenophobic WASPs. Thus The Ethnic Imperative is partly a rejoinder to apologists for the New White Ethnic movement, partly a sympathetic critique of the movement and, by extension, of all movements premised on the biosocial nature of ethnicity. Three centuries of Euro-American history are reviewed in order to establish a psycho-social base from which to view the New Ethnicity as what La Barre calls a "crisis cult." A distinction is made between current ideological ethnicity and the prior unselfconscious behavioral ethnicity. The latter subsumes the preservation of intracultural values while the former involves a rejection of the American Dream. The liberating American Dream is contrasted with the equally powerful--and often constraining--doctrine and practice of American Conformity. The post-World War II period of liberation for recent Americans is viewed psychoanalytically as the triumph of the "son" generation, while the assassination of idealized leaders symbolized loss of faith in the American Dream. Mounting rebelliousness by youths and Blacks led many "white ethnics" to embrace neo-fundamentalisms and neo-orthodoxies. The traditional "Southern" ethos of localism and separatism, with which the New White Ethnicity is often compared, is shown as a recurring nationwide rationalization of caste or race position--no matter how unrewarding that position may be. La Barre calls it "one-downmanship." Implicitly, The Ethnic Imperative is a brief for the American Dream of "E pluribus unum." And as Weston La Barre says of the authors in his foreword, "their ideas will have a still wider bearing in the future world village."

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism dismantles clichés about regional distinctiveness and rewrites modern American history through a national focus on topics such as the civil rights movement, conservative backlash and liberal reform, the rise of the Religious Right, the emergence of the Sunbelt, and the increasing diversity of the suburbs.