Synopses & Reviews
International migration is often considered a relatively new development in world history. Yet, while there has been a surge in migration since World War II, the worldwide movement of peoples is a longstanding phenomenon. So, too, are the fundamental issues raised by immigration. How do immigrants fit into and affect the polity and society of the country they enter? What changes can or must the receiving state make to accomodate them? What changes in culture and ethnic indentity do immigrants undergo in their new environment? How do they relate to the mix of peoples already present in their new homeland What determines the policies that govern their reception and treatment?
In this volume, expertly edited by a leading American political scientist-lawyer and a leading French historian, twenty-one renowned experts on immigration address these questions and a variety of other issues involving the experiences of immigrants in the city, at the workplace, and in schools and churches. Their essays examine the issues of nationality, citizenship, law, and politics that define the life of an immigrant population. Focusing on the United States and France, this voluem is a social history and a legal and public policy study that comprehensively portrays the dilemmas immigrants present and face.
Contributors include Sophie Body-Gendrot, Danielle Boyzon-Frader, Andre-Clement Decoufle, Veronique de Rudder, Lawrence H. Fuchs, Nathan Glazer, Philip Gleason, Stanley Lieberson, Lance Liebman, Daniele Lochak, Michel Oriol, Martin A. Schain, Peter H. Schuck, Roxane Silberman, Werner Sollors, Stephan Thernstrom, Maryse Tripier, Maris A. Vinovskis, and Myron Weiner.
Review
"Challenges feminists, the therapy community and the academic community to think about the meanings of abuse to the abused and to the culture at large. . . . A valuable contribution to feminist discourse"-Journal of Moral Education,
Review
"New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept contribute[s] to the project of moving feminist theory and practice beyond reliance, implicit or explicit, on the abstract dualisms of liberal thinking."-Hypatia,
Review
"Written in clear, accessible language...New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory." -Adolescence,
Review
"Timely contribution to the theorization of rape and helps delineate areas in need of further analysis. [Lamb] also address[es] the issue from radically different perspectives and methodologies...particularly noteworthy." -SIGNS,
Synopsis
It is increasingly difficult to use the word "victim" these days without facing either ridicule for "crying victim" or criticism for supposed harshness toward those traumatized. Some deny the possibility of "recovering" repressed memories of abuse, or consider date rape an invention of whining college students. At the opposite extreme, others contend that women who experience abuse are "survivors" likely destined to be psychically wounded for life.
While the debates rage between victims' rights advocates and "backlash" authors, the contributors to New Versions of Victims collectively argue that we must move beyond these polarizations to examine the "victim" as a socially constructed term and to explore, in nuanced terms, why we see victims the way we do.
Must one have been subject to extreme or prolonged suffering to merit designation as a victim? How are we to explain rape victims who seemingly "get over" their experience with no lingering emotional scars? Resisting the reductive oversimplifications of the polemicists, the contributors to New Versions of Victims critique exaggerated claims by victim advocates about the harm of victimization while simultaneously taking on the reactionary boilerplate of writers such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia and offering further strategies for countering the backlash.
Written in clear, accessible language, New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory.
About the Author
Donald L. Horowitz is the Charles S. Murphy Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke University and the author of
The Courts and Social Policy, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, A Democratic South Africa? and numerous other books and articles.
Gerard Noiriel is Professor of Social History at the Ecole Normale Superieure and author of Workers in French Society andLe Creuset francais: Histoire de l'immigration, XIX-XX siecles..