Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality

This anthology marks the first time that the key essays in the long tradition of philosophical debate surrounding identity categories have been brought together in one volume. Identities comprises the essays that have shaped discussions of identity across disciplines, including selections from Hegel, Marx, Freud, Du Bois, de Beauvoir, Lukács, Fanon, Hall, Guha, Hobsbawm, Wittig, Butler, Halperin, Robertson, Said, and Laclau. It focuses both on general analyses of the genesis, contours, and political effects of social identities and also on specific analyses of particular identity categories such as race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, and nationality.The breadth and depth of analysis provide a comparative study of identities through multiple theoretical frameworks, making this a perfect classroom text and resource for theorists.

Notes on Authors. Introduction: Identities: Modern and Postmodern Linda Martín Alcoff. Part I: Foundations. 1. Independence and Dependence of Self–Consciousness: G.W.F. Hegel. 2. On the Jewish Question: Karl Marx. 3. Consciousness and What is Unconscious: Sigmund Freud. 4. The Self: George Herbert Mead. Part II: Race/Ethnicity/Ethnorace. 5. The Conservation of Races: W.E.B. Du Bois. 6. The New Negro: Alain Locke. 7. Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle: Amilcar Cabral. 8. The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon. 9. Whiteness as Property: Cheryl I. Harris. 10. New Ethnicities: Stuart Hall. 11. The Latino Imaginary: Meanings of Community and Identity: Juan Flores. Part III: Class and Identity. 12. Class Consciousness: Georg Lukács. 13. Class Consciousness in History: E. J. Hobsbawm. 14. Preface from The Making of the English Working Class : E.P. Thompson. 15. Introduction from Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India : Ranajit Guha. Part IV: Gender/Sexuality. 16. Introduction from The Second Sex : Simone de Beauvoir. 17. One Is Not Born a Woman: Monique Wittig. 18. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality: Iris Marion Young. 19. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color: Kimberlé Crenshaw. 20. Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse: Judith Butler. 21. Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories: John Boswell. 22. Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical Athens: David M. Halperin. 23. Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation: Teresa de Lauretis. 24. Transsexual Discourses and Languages of Identification: Jason Cromwell. Part V: National/Transnational Identities. 25. National Identity and Citizenship: Ross Poole. 26. On the Making of Transnational Identities in the Age of Globalization: The US Latina/o – ‘Latin” American Case: Daniel Mato. 27. Globalization as a Problem: Roland Robertson. 28. Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity: R. Rhadakrishnan. Part VI: Reconfigurations. 29. The Clash of Definitions: Edward W. Said. 30. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism: Renato Rosaldo. 31. Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity: Mike Featherstone. 32. Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity: Ernesto Laclau. 33. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s: Donna Haraway. 34. The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: Satya P. Mohanty. Afterword: Identities: Postcolonial and Global: Eduardo Mendieta. Subject Index. Name Index.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies (edited, with Elizabeth Potter, 1993), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge (1996), Epistemology: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 1998), and Thinking From the Underside of History (edited, with Eduardo Mendieta, 2000). Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is editor and translator of Enrique Dussel′s The Underside of Modernity , co–editor of Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas (1997), and author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl–Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).

"This smart collection of important essays reminds us how profoundly identity questions infuse the politics of the everyday. An eminently useful reader!" John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York University, author of New York Before Chinatown: The Shaping of American Orientalism, 1776–1882 "A landmark reader in the borderlands of our ‘post’ and ‘trans’ existences. Identities demonstrates the historical centrality of identity to Western philosophy and explores the philosophical dimensions of our contemporary struggle with identity, politics, and culture. Alcoff and Mendieta′s selections provide a profound critique as well as a generative overview for anyone interested in difference, power, and construction of the individual and social self." Johnnella Butler, University of Washington, editor of Color–Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies