Ranu Samantrai

Continuity or Rupture? An Argument for Secular Britain

transposes onto anxieties regarding immigration into the liberal democratic nations of Western Europe and North America. The anxious worry that the increasing size and strength of transnational ethnic, religious, and cultural diasporas, together with global information, production, and consumption networks, make a mockery of claims of national distinction and sovereignty. Some caution that while once immigrants assimilated into the modernity of secular political cultures, now diaspora dwellers no longer relinquish their premodern, because presecular, extranational affiliations. In short, newcomers threaten to undermine the traditions of individualism, pluralism, and tolerance that distinguish Western political culture. But not all secularisms are alike.1 They vary, just as their religious counterparts vary. Even those that idealize an attitude of state neutrality toward religious adherence may appear to some to be political expressions of a particular religious base. This objection is voiced equally by those who advocate closing the geographic and metaphoric borders of the West and by those who would forestall that closure. Representing the former position, Samuel Huntington and Fay Weldon caution that the introduction of alien religious practices into Euro-America will irreparably damage traditions of tolerance and secularism rooted in Western Christianity. Each draws on a version of the secularization thesis that attributes decline in the social significance of religion to modernity, while locating the seeds of that decline in the innovations of premodern Christianity.2 This simultaneous affirmation and disavowal of Christianity as the distinguishing characteristic of the West links conservative and liberal articulations of anti-immigrant xenophobia. Huntington, for instance, frames his analysis as a warning against an impending “clash of civilizations” between the Christian West and its adversaries, Islam and Confucianism. As “the single most important characteristic of Western civilization,” Western Christianity is responsible for the “political and intellectual” features that distinguish Huntington’s West, including the separation of church and state, the rule of law, social pluralism, civil society, representative government, and individualism.3 Although primarily defending the West, Huntington also advocates proRanu Samantrai Continuity or Rupture?

AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation

Are the conflicts that accompany the growth of postcolonial ethnic, cultural, and religious diasporas undermining the political culture of first-world nations? AlterNatives explains why the hope of a harmonious, fully consensual society is misguided. Ranu Samantrai argues that the proliferation of sources of dissent can hold liberal democratic nations accountable for their political promises. Eschewing the settlements between majority and minority groups proposed by liberal and communitarian theorists, she proposes a radicalization of democracy grounded in poststructuralist analysis of contingent individual and collective subjects. The black British womens movement of the 1980s (comprising women of African Caribbean and South Asian origin) is the occasion for this historical investigation of a national field of similitudes and differences. Through parliamentary papers and political history Samantrai charts the changing definition of Britain in the post-W.W.II period and tracks a new nationalization of disparate peoples into a narrowly territorial, homogeneous community of kin. In an innovative reading of nationality and immigration law she uncovers the gender anxieties that justified the legal racialization of British national identity. Black British feminism was born in response to the privileging of race as the marker of collective identity and the containment of gender as an internal and relatively insignificant communal matter. In that context the multiracial constituency and anti-communal politics of the movement exposed the instability of majority and minority communities and undermined the ambitions of would-be representatives. Samantrai examines newsletters, political pamphlets, memoirs, conference proceedings, scholarly essays, fiction, and poetry to demonstrate how the movement turned the identity discourse of British racial politics against its intended purposes. Dissensions within its own ranks prompted members to pursue political strategies that value heterogeneity and conflict as motivators of change. AlterNatives tests the efficacy of their strategies in case studies of seemingly intractable disagreements between cultural traditionalists, anti-racists, and feminists regarding the continuity of troubling but culturally significant gender practices.