Lives in Between: The Predicament of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (Studies in Comparative World History) - Softcover

Focusing on several generations of families who were products of two or more social worlds - Afro-Brazilian, West African Creole, Austrian-Jewish - this book compares the social ascent "up from slavery" and "out of the ghetto" in the Century of Emancipation beginning with the French Revolution. It also explores the "predicament of marginality" in which assimilating individuals often find themselves as a consequence of barriers impeding their social integration and blocking their share of dominant privileges and powers. It studies the connections between individual consciousness of this predicament and the variety of responses to exclusion and subordination -- responses ranging from collaboration to revolt, from adaptation to exile, from resignation, to "passing," to suicide. By probing the connection between individual actions and perceptions of self and social reality, this book illuminates the complexity of the relationship between what Erik Erikson identified as that between life history and the historical moment.

LEO SPITZER is the K. T. Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. He is also a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University and a Research Fellow at the Wallenberg Center, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a National Humanities Center award, he writes on assimilationism, exclusion, and reactions to colonialism, as well as on Jewish refugee memory and its transmission. His most recent book, co-authored with Marianne Hirsch, is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. He is also the author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang, 1998); The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Wisconsin, 1974); and co-editor, with Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe, of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE, 1999). He is currently working with Marianne Hirsch on a book on school photos.