The countries or regions under study include the United States, Brazil, Chile, China, Mexico, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. In keeping with the journal's commitment to inter-disciplinary as well as historical inquiry, our nine contributors come from a variety of disciplines (sociology, political science, anthropology, and history), all drawing on debates and themes that cross-cut the social sciences. The significance of the inter-disciplinary perspective is seen not only in the range of cases, literatures, and methodologies brought to bear on the key issues under study; it also forms the substantive core of several contributions that call for a rethinking of conventional disciplinary boundaries and methodological frames.
Editor's introduction (D.E. Davis). Class and Mass Action. The integration of workplace and community relations at the Ford Rouge Plant, 1930s-1940s (J. Stepan-Norris). Mass action and social structure (S. Paul et al.). States and Regulation. How militarization drives political control of the military: the case of Israel (Y. Levy). Protest from the floating world: fashion, state, and category formation in early modern Japan (Eiko Ikegami). Scholarly Controversy: Rethinking Race. Racial histories and their regimes of truth (A.L. Stoler). Implications: a commentary on Stoler (V.R. Dominguez). A response to "Racial Histories" (D. Roediger). For an analytic of racial domination (L.J.D. Wacquant). The essential ambiguities of race and racism (U.S. Mehta). On politics, origins, and epistemes (A.L. Stoler).