Ethnicities and Global Multiculture - Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Arguing that ethnicity and multiculturalism are essential for understanding globalization, Jan Nederveen Pieterse offers one of the first sustained treatments of the reach of these key forces beyond a limited national context. He shows that multiethnicity preceded the nation-state by millennia; but argues that states, feeling the threat to their national identities, seek to control or suppress it. Contemporary multiculturalism, another attempt to regulate multiethnicity, is a work in progress in which dramas of global inequality are played out. This groundbreaking book adopts a kaleidoscopic and comparative-historical perspective that intertwines strands of social science and western and non-western research as a strategy to overcome the disciplinary and regional fragmentation of most discussions. Moving beyond worn notions of ethnicity and multiculturalism, Nederveen Pieterse proposes ethnicities and global multiculture as alternative, wide-angle perspectives on cultural diversity. Global multiculture, he convincingly demonstrates, offers a fresh account of layered cultural dynamics amid accelerated globalization.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Recommended as a means of stimulating debate in upper-division social science courses that explore questions of identity, class, and power in the postcolonial world.
Multicultural Review

Pieterse has very effectively analyzed the forces shaping the contemporary world and has connected these dynamic tensions to the past as well as to a rationally and optimistically envisioned future. Here is one of those rare books that scholars in the humanities and the social sciences should read as quickly as possible in order to advance to the next level of scholarly discourse.
European Legacy

A comprehensive and timely resource for thinking and teaching about the range of issues raised by the question of multiculture. There is no one better positioned for a study with such global reach than Jan Nederveen Pieterse.
David Theo Goldberg, Director, Humanities Research Institute, University of California

The book is a distillation of years of profound reflection on the interplay between ethnicity and globalization. It is well researched, displays considerable mastery of the literature on the subject, cuts through much conceptional confusion, and offers a most reliable guide to the current state of the world. The beautiful blend of moral passion and sociological realism adds greatly to its value.
Bhikhu Parekh, University of Westminster

This is an exciting new book from one of the foremost commentators on global cultural change. Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains why growing globalization means a growing quest for ethnicity, faith, and difference, and he begins to outline a multiculture in the service of reconciliation and understanding.
Ash Amin, Professor, University of Cambridge, author of Land of Strangers, Polity, 2012