Identity Before Identity Politics

Cambridge Cultural Social Studies

by Linda J. Nicholson

In the late 1960s identity politics emerged on the political landscape and challenged prevailing ideas about social justice. These politics brought forth a new attention to social identity, an attention that continues to divide people today. While previous studies have focused on the political movements of this period, they have neglected the conceptual prehistory of this political turn. Linda Nicholson's engaging book situates this critical moment in its historical framework, analyzing the concepts and traditions of racial and gender identity that can be traced back to late eighteenth-century Europe and America. She examines how changing ideas about social identity over the last several centuries both helped and hindered successive social movements, and explores the consequences of this historical legacy for the women's and black movements of the 1960s. This insightful study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political history, identity politics and US history.

202 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Linda J. Nicholson was Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies, and Women's Studies at the State University of New York, Albany. She is the author of Gender and History (1986), editor of Feminism/Postmodernism (Routledge, 1990) and the co- editor with Steven Seidman of Social Postmodernism. She is editor of Routledge's Thinking Gender series.

Reviews

[Brendan Lewis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried. I really do try to read both sides of an issue, but this is garbage. Irresponsible academics from an otherwise good historian. But her Marxist 60s counterculture intellectual inheritance has her reading into history in plainly ridiculous ways. For example: chapter 1 claims that the "nature/nurture" debate only took hold because the white male patriarchy needed to show minority groups were lower on the Darwinian ladder. Right. Like no intellectual or philosopher would have ever asked the question or wondered about human nature without a dialectical oppressors agenda. I'm offended that academics this bent have jobs. Barf