ABSTRACT
This chapter incorporates a theoretical and geographical framework for the chapters that follow. The study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity has often privileged the Western experience, where racial and ethnic exclusions of minority communities have remained a factor in social relations for centuries. Similarly, studies of race, ethnicity and indigeneity in Asia have been the domain of scholars who have focused on a particular nation or sub-region. This volume, by contrast, seeks to provide a holistic and comparative coverage of South, South- and East-Asia, as well as Australasia and Oceania, an area that extends from Pakistan in the West to Hawai’i in the East. The analyses include not only the relationship between ethnic or racial minorities and the state, but social relations within and between individual and transnational communities. This is further enhanced by the variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives adopted by the contributors. Our objective is not to seek a unitary conceptualization of race or ethnicity, but to identify and analyze the racial and ethnic diversity that characterizes multicultural contemporary Asian societies.
