Identities

by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor)

The study of identity crosses all disciplinary borders to address such issues as the multiple interactions of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, postcolonialism and globalization, and the interrelation of nationalism and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies. Identities will help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity.

Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy explore such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas. This collection of twenty articles brings together the special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "Identities" (Summer 1992), two other previously published essays, and five previously published critical responses and rejoinders, all of which is interrogated in two new essays by Michael Gorra and Judith Butler.

Contributors include Elizabeth Abel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Judith Butler, Hazel V. Carby, Xiaomei Chen, Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Avery Gordon, Michael Gorra, Cheryl Herr, Saree S. Makdisi, Walter Benn Michaels, Christopher Newfield, Gananath Obeyesekere, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, Katie Trumpener, and Joseph Valente.

Genres: Sociology

466 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is a former professor at Princeton University and currently has a position at NYU.

Series:
* Sir Patrick Scott Mystery (as Anthony Appiah)

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I respect so many of the scholars in this collection, especially the editors Appiah and Gates, Identities seems a bit dated in a post-Critical Race Theory landscape, a fact that is somewhat amplified by the array of fields this book touches on without examining in critical depth. Identities is strongest in the sections where critics write essays in response to the earlier selections, as these conversations give life to an otherwise dry text that does not offer nearly as much as its length would imply.