ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book engages the debates about the nature of ethnic identity and the dynamics that structure and alter its varied manifestations in different locales. It is both analytically and practically useful to examine the issue of race and African-American identity within the context of comparative analyses of race and ethnicity. The book contains a collection of articles that add issues of race that are exclusive to the American context and the African American struggle for equality. It reflects both the advances in the utility of racial identity as a political resource and the constraints imposed by race as a seemingly immutable discriminatory marker. The book explains that this contradictory situation of constancy and change in regard to the African American predicament will also provoke new paths of scholarly inquiry.
