Neda Maghbouleh, “The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race” (Stanford UP, 2017)

New Books in Sociology · Nov 20, 2017 · 56m

How does a group become defined as white? And does that group define themselves that way as well? Neda Maghbouleh‘s new book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017), uses interview and ethnographic data to better understand how Iranian Americans perceive themselves and are perceived. “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility,” Iranian Americans often straddle a space in which they are sometimes defined as white but other times not. Through the voices and experiences of 80…