New paradigms for old? Ethnic and racial studies on the eve of the millennium

This article looks back over the first twenty volumes of Ethnic and Racial Studies to consider the extent to which the field has changed during the last two decades and how this has been reflected in the diverse contributions to the journal. The original aim of the venture was to establish a scholarly publication for interdisciplinary and comparative studies of race and ethnic relations, viewed as a global phenomenon and open to the broadest range of intellectual traditions and perspectives. After documenting the major shifts in topics and theories from the 1970s to the 1990s, as seen in a selected sample of some of the more than five hundred articles and other contributions published over this period, attention is focused on an assessment of postmodernism as one of the most influential paradigms in contemporary social science. It is argued that the deficiencies of postmodernism are clearly exposed in any serious attempt to explain contemporary race and ethnic relations, and that 'bringing power back in' is the most promising strategy for both advancing intellectual understanding and promoting constructive public policy.