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Questions of Cultural Identity
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Questions of Cultural Identity

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June 1996 | 208 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Why and how do contemporary questions of culture become so highly charged questions of identity? The question of cultural identity lies at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. Are the distinctive identities that have defined the social and cultural world of modern societies for so long--gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality--in decline? And have they given rise to new forms of identification, thus fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject? Questions of Cultural Identity offers a wide-ranging exploration of these issues, outlining the reasons why the question of identity is so compelling and yet so problematic. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity providing both theoretical and substantive insights into its contemporary manifestations. Without privileging any one approach to the problem of identity, the book opens up a number of significant questions and offers insights into different approaches to understanding identity. In doing so, it both illuminates and advances debates about identity and its futures. Questions of Cultural Identity will be essential reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across the humanities and social science disciplines.

Stuart Hall
Introduction
Who Needs `Identity'?

 
Zygmunt Bauman
From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity
Marilyn Strathern
Enabling Identity?
Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies

 
Homi K Bhabha
Culture's In-Between
Kevin Robins
Interrupting Identities
Turkey/Europe

 
Lawrence Grossberg
Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is?
Simon Frith
Music and Identity
Nikolas Rose
Identity, Genealogy, History
Paul du Gay
Organizing Identity
Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management

 
James Donald
The Citizen and the Man about Town

`This impressive and timely collection of essays addresses the significance of cultural identity as social phenomenon and provides an insight into a number of new approaches for unfolding its complexity.... This is not only a collection of some of the most respected thinkers in the social sciences but reveals the variety of paths that can be followed in pursuit of the question of cultural identity' - Sociology

`This collection of essays brings together contributions from different disciplines and theoretical traditions in an effort to illuminate and advance the debate about cultural identity and its meaning in contemporary social formations. It is of value to those engaged in social and cultural theory, the social sciences, cultural studies, and the humanities' - Sociological Abstracts

`Hall's opening essay is wide-ranging about theorisations of identities... Ten essay cover many different types of ground, often stimulatingly and at times surprisingly.... As a whole, though dispersed, the book well fulfills its aim to ask why "questions of cultural identity have acquired visibility and salience" across fields of research' - The Times Higher Education Supplement

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