Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora Dublin, Ne Orleans, Paris [Paperback]

Elisa Joy White investigates the contemporary African Diaspora communities in Dublin, New Orleans, and Paris and their role in the interrogation of modernity and social progress. Beginning with an examination of Dublins emergent African immigrant community, White shows how the communitys negotiation of racism, immigration status, and xenophobia exemplifies the ways in which idealist representations of global societies are contradicted by the prevalence of racial, ethnic, and cultural conflicts within them. Through the consideration of three contemporaneous eventsthe deportations of Nigerians from Dublin, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the uprisings in the Paris suburbsWhite reveals a shared quest for social progress in the face of stark retrogressive conditions.

Highly recommended.What this study accomplishes, and quite successfully, is constructing an important expansion of modernity to make room for the complications of white racism impacting African diasporic communities.

Elisa Joy White is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii, Mnoa, and holds a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications examine a range of areas, including the African Diaspora in Ireland, Black Europe, ethnicity and new media, human rights, and immigration policy.

White should be applauded for her extensive fieldwork in Europe and North America, where she interviewed hundreds of individuals, mostly new immigrants and asylum seekers, whose accounts made up most of the book's primary research. . . . Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora continues an important conversation on the importance of race and its intersection with modernity in the modern world.Modernity, Freedom, and the African Diaspora . . . is a fascinating look at the way racism and social exclusion are still at work in our modern societies

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. The African Diaspora in DlãT