Routledge Translocational Belongings: Intersectional Dilemmas and Social Inequalities (Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity)

This book explores the multiform and shifting location of borders and boundaries in social life, related to difference and belonging. It contributes to understanding categories of difference as a building block for forms of belonging and inequality in the world today and as underpinning modern capitalist societies and their forms of governance. Reflecting on the ways in which we might theorise the connections between different social divisions and identities, a translocational lens for addressing modalities of power is developed, stressing relationality, the spatio-temporal and the processual in social relations. The book is organised around contemporary dilemmas of difference and inequality, relating to fixities and fluidities in social life and to current developments in the areas of racialisation, migration, gender, sexuality and class relations, and in theorising the articulations of gender, class and ethnic hierarchies. Rejecting the view that gender, ethnicity, race, class or the more specific categories of migrants or refugees pertain to social groups with certain fixed characteristics, they are treated as interconnected and interdependent places within a landscape of inequality making. This innovative and groundbreaking book constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship on intersectionality. Review "With a focus on processes of power underpinning ‘difference’ across such axes as class, race and gender, this text provides a sustained critique of essentialist thinking. Its innovative reworking of the concepts of intersectionality, stratification, and political economy is likely to set new agendas on addressing questions of inequality. Incisive theoretical and political analysis at its best." - Avtar Brah, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London "Floya Anthias offers a nuanced and astute account of the changing forms of social inequality in the contemporary global environment. She challenges simplistic accounts of belonging and identity and seeks to show that we need to move beyond dominant paradigms and perspectives." - John Solomos, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK "This book is a masterpiece: with a translocational lens, Anthias focuses on insights from studies on intersectionality, bordering and belonging, migration, nationalism, racism, violence, intimacy and social class and demonstrates how they are entangled in complicated ways. Yet, she is not satisfied with depicting dilemmas but instead provides heuristic tools and theoretical frames for their adequate analysis." - Helma Lutz, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, co-author of Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects "Translocational Belongings, introduced by incisive personal memories of growing up in an activist migrant family, captures the human condition of the migrant, offering a distinctive account of border crossings, in the real world and in sociological theory. Scrutinising intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, ascribed cultural differences and social inequalities, the author grounds new horizons for solidarity politics beyond fixed belonging." - Aleksandra Ålund, Professor Emerita, Linköping University, Sweden "This tour de force considers key debates in sociological and social theory engaging with gender, ethnicity, racialization, and class locations, borders and boundaries, difference and belongings. It transcends disciplinary boundaries speaking also to philosophy and political theory [...]. A fascinating theoretical re-reading, extending and rethinking of feminism, race/ethnicity and class theory. It provides fresh and insightful contributions on the potential and shortcomings of class and stratification theorisations since Marx’s Capital and the revived interest in class via the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, Tilly, Agamben." - Nicos Trimikliniotis, Ethnic and Racial Studies "The power of Anthias’ argument is threefold. Not only d