This is a book of great originality that contributes new insights to the politics of representation. Thomassen makes a bold contribution to contemporary struggles for recognition by treating them not primarily as battles to include (or exclude) new political groups, but as moments where people contest the very terms of political and ethnic identities and their interrelations. In so doing, he re-makes multiculturalism from a crowd-pleasing ideal into a window for interrogating the power plays whereby constructions of identity are by turns invoked and renegotiated.