Identities

Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Paper $29.00 ISBN: 9780226284392 Published January 1996

Cloth $37.50 ISBN: 9780226284385 Published January 1996

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.

Table of Contents

Contents

Contents

Editors’ Introduction: Multiplying Identities
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Essays
"British Cannibals": Contemplation of an Event in the Death and
Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer
Gananath Obeyesekere
Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity
Walter Benn Michaels
Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China
Xiaomei Chen
Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look
Diana Fuss
Policing the Black Women’s Body in an Urban Context
Hazel V. Carby
Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition
Sara Suleri
Acting Bits/Identity Talk
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the
Reinvention of the Present
Saree S. Makdisi
What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity
Akeel Bilgrami
Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s
Phillip Brian Harper
Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist
Interpretation
Elizabeth Abel
The Erotics of Irishness
Cheryl Herr
Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity
Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin.
The Time of the Gypsies: A "People without History" in the Narratives of
the West
Katie Trumpener
Critical Responses
White Philosophy
Avery Gordon, Christopher Newfield.
The No-Drop Rule
Walter Benn Michaels
Fashionable Theory and Fashionable Women: Returning Fuss’s
Homospectatorial Look
Molly Anne Rothenberg, Joseph Valente.
Look Who’s Talking, or If Looks Could Kill
Diana Fuss
Response to Identities
Michael Gorra
Collected and Fractured: Response to Identities
Judith Butler
Index

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