In this provocative history of our nation's most distinctive and enduring drama, Malcomson offers a way to move forward from our obsession with race. From Puritan enslavement of Indians to the dramas of separatism we enact daily in schools and neighborhoods, he shows that Americans have perpetually engaged with and fled from other Americans along racial lines

One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race

Scott L. Malcomson

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Turkish or European? European or Muslim? Muslim or Communist? Such were the identities that Scott Malcomson found people grappling with as he traveled through Eastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia. Learning the languages and immersing himself in the cultures, Malcomson focused on the tensions between local and universal identity in these countries that are historically at the margins of empires and currently on the faultlines of civil war. In these borderlands, the conflict between nation and empire plays itself out on the world stage only when it reaches crisis proportion. But the issues swirling around these outposts have remained unresolved since the land was first divided two thousand years ago by kings and despots. In Borderlands, young Romanian anti-Semites and Muslim fundamentalists speak alongside peasant farmers and privileged schoolgirls and offer their own perspectives on the age-old conflicts. Malcomson encounters Sufi mystics in Bukhara and rootless cosmopolitans at a Bulgarian disco. Whether at a Romanian coal mine or around the neighborhood in Tashkent, he resists easy judgments; instead, he listens and learns. Part historical essay, part reportage, part philosophical speculation, Borderlands is a stunningly innovative work that explores a world that can no longer claim fixed points of reference.

Borderlands: Nation and Empire

History

Europe

Faber&Faber

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scott L. Malcomson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Scott L. Malcomson

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scott L. Malcomson. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race

Borderlands: Nation and Empire