one - Introduction

Summary

As I was putting the very final touches on this book it dawned on me that two phrases epitomise why this book was conceived. These are: ‘if you can't imagine it, you can't enact it’ and ‘define something as real and it becomes real in its consequences’ – which is a phrase we sociologist call the ‘Thomas theorem’. This book was namely conceived as an attempt to discover the unexploited potential that exists as far as what our understandings of ethnicity and race can mean for the study of ageing and old age; potential that can only be exploited if scholars working on the intersection between ethnicity and old age become acquainted with the literature on globalisation, international migration, transnationalism, ethnicity and race, and use that scholarship to re-image what this intersection is about. Thus, this book aims to do precisely what its sub-title indicates, that is, to expand our imagination on the intersection between ethnicity/race and ageing/old age, an intersection I will refer to as ethnicity and old age from now on. As such, this book draws attention to population ageing, the globalisation of international migration and transnationalism since these are the societal trends that have propelled the intersection in focus here into the foreground of the agenda of the social sciences, and presents how scholarship on ethnicity and race have advanced its understandings of what these identification grounds and/or social positions mean.

One of the reasons why I have written this book is that virtually none of the books available about this intersection addresses these societal trends and/or present research on ethnicity and race in a comprehensive enough manner. Another reason is that the field that has paid the most attention to this intersection (that is, social gerontology) is at a crossroads, because although numerous advances have been made by ethnicity and race scholars regarding how these identification grounds and/or social positions are to be understood, these do not seem to have left their mark on scholarship on the intersection between ethnicity and old age. I have therefore argued elsewhere that social gerontology seems to have stagnated in its understanding of ethnicity (Torres, 2015a, 2015b).