"One purpose of Before Jim Crow is to demonstrate the analytic impossibility of isolating “politics” from these other “social” realms. This emphasis on the futility of distinguishing political and social concerns represents more than simply a desire to blend the insights of social and political history. A central theme of this book is the instability of social categories. By this I mean first the difficulty of pinpointing the boundaries between such categories as political identity, gender identity, and racial identity. But more important, in pointing out the instability of social, political, and cultural categories in Readjuster Virginia I mean to mark the points at which one category (say, partisan identity) cannot be constituted except through another (for example, racial identity). Rather than simply juxtaposing categories such as race, class, and gender, I try in this book to uncover and explain the dynamic interrelations among categories and to underscore the reliance of any one on a variety of others for definition and formulation within a particular setting."
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