Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader

Spurred to critically engage questions of race, ethnicity, and nationalism by US reactions to the events of September 11th, 2001, Ortega (philosophy, John Carroll U.) and Alcoff (philosophy, Hunter College, City U. of New York) have gathered nine essays by philosophers and social theorists of color and present them in sections concerned with the tropes of freedom, unity, and homeland. Essays discuss a critique of post-9/11 children's literature as falsely constructing the nation as "innocent" and in danger from dark "others," the gendered and racialized dimensions of a national discourse that calls for freedom for oppressed veiled Muslim women, the impact of the United States' global power on North American philosophy, calls for patriotic unity that privilege Eurocentric knowledge and languages, Muslims in the US as an "exception population" that is subject to the law but not entitled to it protections and rights, American exceptionalism within philosophical and political science considerations of the intersection between US national identity and race, practices in Indian American postcolonial scholarship that promote Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism through the depiction of Indian Americans as a "model minority, and racialized aesthetic nationalism in the New York Times' commemorative vignettes about victims of the 9/11 attacks and in critiques of the work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University.

Linda Martin Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. Her many books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self and Identity Politics Reconsidered (coedited with Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya).