Becoming Minority : How Discourses and Policies Produce Minorities in Europe and India

**This book will make you revisit the ‘minority question’ as it has been understood, conventionally.** This book subjects to scrutiny some of the well-established social science concepts such as minority, ethnicity, inclusion, exclusion, and self-determination, among others. The purpose of the enquiry is neither to debunk these concepts nor to highlight their relevance/irrelevance, but merely to guard against their unselective usage by scholars. The work is an endeavor to address some of the questions that animate current scholarship on minority and minoritization. In doing so, the book draws upon European and Indian experiences of cultural diversities as these regions are two of the most culturally diverse regions in the world and engage with diversity from within a democratic framework. Cover 1 Contents 8 Preface 12 Acknowledgments 20 PART 1The Making of Minority 22 1 Becoming a Minority Category* 24 2 Contextualizing Minority: The Production of Difference andSameness in Europe 45 3 Re-Turning the Idea of Minority: Going beyond the Politics of Recognition 68 PART 2 The European Experience 84 4 Manufacturing Blackness at the Turn of 20th-century France 86 5 The Constitution of the Swedish Sámi People: Swedish Sámi Policy and the Justification of the Inner Colonization of Sweden* 109 6 Institutional Change and Identity Shift: The Case of Contemporary Scotland 132 7 The European Minority Rights Regime and the Turkish/Muslim Minorityof Western Thrace 151 8 Cultural War of Values: The Proliferation of Moral Identities in the Danish Public Sphere 175 9 Becoming a Minority: Ethno-Manufacturingin The Netherlands 195 10 The Specter of Communalism and the Eugenic Solution to Britain’s Immigration Problem 217 PART 3 The Indian Experience 246 11 Minority Question in India 248 12 The Politics of Hurt Religious Feelings: The Minority as Emotional Subject in India 274 13 The Indian State and the Minority’s Right to Culture 294 14 Waqf and Urban Space: Production of Minority Identity in Hyderabad’s Old City 314 15 The Fragmented Minor: Tamil Identity and the Politics of Authenticity 335 About the Editorsand Contributors 360 Index 365 "The present volume is intended to trace the processes through which minorities perform as minorities, their discursive formation, narrativization and representation. It is thus evident that the book moves away from an uncritical understanding of the term minority as a container of some unchanging core ideals, and leads to a framework where minority comes into existence in the very act of representation"--Provided by publisher 'Becoming Minority' traces the processes through which minorities perform as minorities, their discursive formation, narrativization and representation. The book moves away from an uncritical understanding of the term minority as a container of some unchanging core ideals, and leads to a framework where minority comes into existence in the very act of representation A sense of detachment and aloofness minorities' face and how they are created!