Reproducing the State. By Jacqueline Stevens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 307p. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Extract

Jacqueline Stevens grapples with the meanings of political society and affiliation and how we think about what constitutes family, nation, ethnicity, and race. How do we come to know ourselves and others through these political artifices and naturalized identities? Her project is to trouble our complacencies and make visible the arbitrary practices that produce the inclusions and exclusions of the “state-nation” (p. 43). She examines democratic, communitarian, and liberal theories of political society and finds little attention there to the problem of membership and the ways groups are constituted. Birth, the family, ethnicity, and national origin are undertheorized or considered to derive from natural, ancestral ties. Stevens addresses these inadequacies, and superbly reveals the centrality of birth and kinship practices to political societies.