The field of comparative ethnic studies is in transition, from approaches that compare the parallel experiences of racial groups between nations or within the United States to ways of understanding how practices of comparison help to shape processes of racialization. This volume works both to enact and to mark this transition. In their excellent, overarching introduction, Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson place woman-of-color feminism and queer-of-color critique at the center of ethnic studies. Together, the chapters are broadly effective in achieving the volume's goals: “to articulate how racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference has been produced and understood through comparison, as well as to produce new analytics through which to comprehend coalitional possibilities, or in other words ‘strange affinities’” (18). However, like all edited volumes, this collection is a mix, with each of the essays pulling at different threads within these interwoven histories and experiences. Some of the chapters explore the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and nation more fully than others. And, with a few exceptions, such as Lisa Marie Cacho's tour de force opening essay, class is invoked but not fully explored.

Where this volume is strongest, the essays are attentive to the shifting sands of comparative ethnic studies and self-reflective about the comparative process. Cacho's superb “Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead” interrogates the multiple narratives told about her cousin Brandon's death in a car accident at age nineteen. Considering mainstream media representations, family stories, his friend's remembrances, and her own impulses to understand Brandon's life, Cacho explores the complex ways in which comparative processes of valuation and devaluation frustrate efforts to memorialize Brandon, who was not an especially productive, law-abiding citizen, without replicating the normative valorization of traditional citizenship. Chandan Reddy's “Time for Rights? Loving, Gay Marriage, and the Limits of Comparative Legal Justice” is similarly forceful as a timely exploration of both the appeal and the awkward insufficiency of analogous racial thinking in arguments for gay marriage. Reddy asks how we might remember Loving in a way that recognizes the particularity of its history and the limitations of formal equality.

Other chapters focus more on the media and ethnography of neoliberal globalization, including Kara Keeling's theorization of new digitally based identity politics, “I = Another”; Jodi Melamed's “Reading Tehran in Lolita,” an analysis of Azar Nafisi's text through the prism of US liberal multiculturalism; Ruby Tapia's critique of the racial work of liberal feminism in Kill Bill; and Victor Bascara's exploration of the privileged concept of the refugee in Kelly Loves Tony, an autobiographical documentary about two young Laotian (Mien) Americans. Roderick Ferguson's invocation of the African migrant as a challenge to classic narratives of African American studies and Grace Kyungwon Hong's reflection on Chicano nationalism, through Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revenge of the Cockroach People and Ana Castillo's So Far from God, are the essays that most directly and effectively critique older traditions within ethnic studies.

For a volume proposing a new analytics of comparative racial formation, however, the chapters are surprisingly bounded by distinct ethnic groups and confined within the borders of the United States. Martha Chew Sanchez's “Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Mestizaje through the Chinese Presence in Mexico” and M. Bianet Castellanos's ethnography of Mayan workers in Cancun, “Becoming Chingón/a,” are two exceptions in their close readings of comparative racialization in Mexico.

A few essays also address more historical themes, including Sanda Mayzaw Lwin's reconsideration of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1928 novella “Dark Princess and the Problem of the Color Line” and Cynthia Tolentino's layered exploration of “ambiguous sites of empire” in “Miss Florence's Trunk,” Ana Lydia Vega's 1994 short story about a British governess in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Although the links between historical and contemporary essays are not emphasized by the editors, they are present and important. For example, Helen H. Jun's concluding essay on “Black Orientalism” analyzes the ways in which the black press both emphasized Chinese cultural difference and opposed Chinese exclusion, explicating the contradictions of African American citizenship in the late nineteenth century in ways that resonate with Cacho's opening meditation on the cultural politics of Latino citizenship in the early twenty-first century.

Taken together, these essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis. This volume should be a useful resource in graduate classes and, although many essays may be too challenging for undergraduates, it should shape the teaching of undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American studies. On their own and in conversation with one another, the authors locate some of the affinities that exist across varied processes of racial, national, gender, and sexual identity formation. Together, these essays suggest that such affinities are not so much strange as, through processes of comparative racialization, they have been estranged.