The 13 papers in this edited volume, written by noted scholars of race and ethnicity (mainly sociologists) from the United States and United Kingdom, center on racialization – the “processes by which racial meanings are attached to particular issues” (p. 3). In their introduction, Murji and Solomos consider the term's origins and evolution and briefly review the development of race theory.

Chapters 1 through 4 take up issues of terminology, discourse, and rhetoric. Brett St. Louis's opening chapter, “Racialization in the ‘zone of ambiguity,’ ” critiques the rhetoric of “special/target populations” in biomedical research as a case of “biological racialization.” “Historical and contemporary modes of racialization,” by Michael Banton, traces use of the term “race” in historical, political, religious, and literary texts. In “Ambivalent documents/fugitive pieces,” Avtar Brah discusses three contemporary “anti-racist” texts by Ruth Benedict, Steve Jones, and Michel Foucault, raising questions about the relationship between the authors and their texts, subjects, and claims. In “Racial Americanization,” David Theo Goldberg investigates the individualistic rhetoric of choice and personal preference in contemporary American discourse about racialized social phenomena, such as residential segregation and immigration.

Chapters 5 through 8 focus on articulations of racialization. Ann Phoenix, in “Remembering racialization,” studies black, white, and mixed-parentage youths' retrospective accounts of the first time they “became aware of their colour” (104). Similarly, in “The power of recall,” Vron Ware examines childhood racial consciousness in autobiographical accounts by contemporary white and black (mostly American) writers, social scientists, and politicians. In “White lives,” Anoop Nayak provides vignettes from an ethnographic study of two predominantly white British male youth subcultures – one skinhead, one affiliated with black culture/global multiculture – to examine the “deeply contradictory” practice of racialization in the youths' lives (148). In “Recovering blackness/repudiating whiteness,” Eugene McLaughlin examines racialized portrayals of five young white male suspects accused of murdering a young black man, in a 10-year corpus of articles in the Daily Mail, a popular conservative British newspaper.

Chapters 9 through 13 turn toward issues of race, space, and power. In “White self-racialization as identity fetishism,” Ghassan Hage considers Christian Lebanese who identify as European and white, thereby exploring the connections between identity politics, colonialism, class, and race. In “Racialization and ‘white European’ immigration to Britiain,” Tony Kushner analyzes British responses to Jewish refugees in the early 20th century from the perspective of racial formation. Philomena Essed, in “Gendered preference in racialized spaces,” studies professional profiles for messages about privilege that draw upon ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. Similarly, Michael Keith, in “Racialization and the public spaces of the multicultural city,” analyzes how popular and political discourses describe and problematize the contemporary multicultural city, with a focus on London. Finally, in “The uses of racialization,” Ali Rattansi wrestles with the challenge of studying racialization in ways that resist evoking binarisms while opening up avenues of social science inquiry.

Taken together, the papers in this volume address racialization in ways are theoretically grounded, empirically rigorous, and attendant to context, historicity, and the nuanced interplay of social structures, power, ideologies, and inequalities. In this regard, this book serves readers well by not only providing an overview of racialization as a multifaceted, core concept in social science research, but also by productively employing racialization as a “way forward in understanding processes, and claims and counterclaims involving race and racism” (274).