This text explores the questions which lie at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. The contributors consider such issues as: whether the distinctive identities of gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality, which have long defined the social and cultural world of modern societies, are in decline; whether new forms of identification are rising up and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject; and how this "crisis of identity" relates to the wider process of changes which are generating problems for modern societies and undermining the frameworks through which people relate to institutions, each other and themselves. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity and provide both theoretical and substantive insights into different approaches to understanding identity - illuminating and advancing debates about identity and its futures. This book should be useful reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across a wide range of the humanities and the social sciences.
Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change. After spending more than four decades as one of the UK's leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva's new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007. Paul du Gay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University
Introduction - Stuart Hall Who Needs `Identity'? From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity - Zygmunt Bauman Enabling Identity? - Marilyn Strathern Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies Culture's In-Between - Homi K Bhabha Interrupting Identities - Kevin Robins Turkey/Europe Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is? - Lawrence Grossberg Music and Identity - Simon Frith Identity, Genealogy, History - Nikolas Rose Organizing Identity - Paul du Gay Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management The Citizen and the Man about Town - James Donald
`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
