Multiple Identities

In recent years, Europeans have engaged in sharp debates about migrants and minority groups as social problems. The discussions usually neglect who these people are, how they live their lives, and how they identify themselves. Multiple Identities describes how migrants and minorities of all age groups experience their lives and manage complex, often multiple, identities, which alter with time and changing circumstances. The contributors consider minorities who have received a lot of attention, such as Turkish Germans, and some who have received little, such as Kashubians and Tartars in Poland and Chinese in Switzerland. They also examine international adoption and cross-cultural relationships and discuss some models for multicultural success.

Paul Spickard is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (1989), Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and across the Pacific (2002), Racial Thinking in the United States (2004), Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005), and Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007).