Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever
was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative
merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural,
multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and
controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of
Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic
perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts
ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in
Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and
assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering
the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism,
Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion.
The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and
carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as
a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the
authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural
forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity
in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Legislated
into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has
arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider
both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every
year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of
Christmas - as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory,
and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and
whiteness - at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of
belonging in diverse societies. Contributors include Herman
Bausinger (Tubingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI
Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan),
Christian Marchetti (Tubingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow
(Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac
Weiner (Ohio State).
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!