Identity Politics In Deconstruction

Identity politics dominates the organisation of liberation movements today. This is the case whether fighting over one's birthright to a nation, such as in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict; lobbying for civil rights, such as in gay and lesbian campaigns for marriage; or struggling for citizenry recognition as currently experienced by asylum seekers. In this book Carolyn D'Cruz investigates the nexus between what David Birch describes as ’the seemingly impossible of high theory and the seemingly accessible possibilities of popular discourse’, as encountered in liberation movements based on identity. D'Cruz reworks the logic of such movements through the unique combination of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian discourse and Levinasian ethics. Moving both within and between the domains of philosophy, politics and ’postmodern culture’ this book offers both a clear explication of complex philosophical issues and an understanding of how they relate to the political practicalities of everyday life.

Identity politics dominates the organisation of liberation movements today. This is the case whether fighting over one's birthright to a nation, such as in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict; lobbying for civil rights, such as in gay and lesbian campaigns for marriage; or struggling for citizenry recognition as currently experienced by asylum seekers. In this book Carolyn D'Cruz investigates the nexus between what David Birch describes as ’the seemingly impossible of high theory and the seemingly accessible possibilities of popular discourse’, as encountered in liberation movements based on identity. D'Cruz reworks the logic of such movements through the unique combination of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian discourse and Levinasian ethics. Moving both within and between the domains of philosophy, politics and ’postmodern culture’ this book offers both a clear explication of complex philosophical issues and an understanding of how they relate to the political practicalities of everyday life.

In the last two decades, new political subjects have been created through the actions of the new social movements; often by asserting the unfixed and `overdetermined' character of identity. Further, in attempting to avoid essentialism, people have frequently looked to their territorial roots to establish their constituency. A cultural politics of resistance, as exemplified by Black politics, feminism, and gay liberation, has developed struggles to turn sites of oppression and discrimintion into spaces of resistance. This book collects together perspectives which challenge received notions of geography; which are in danger of becoming anachronisms, without a language to articulate the new space of resistance, the new politics of identity.

How did Bosnia, once a polity of intersecting and overlapping identities, come to be understood as an intractable ethnic problem? David Campbell pursues this question -- and its implications for the politics of community, democracy, justice, and multiculturalism -- through readings of media and academic representations of the conflict in Bosnia. National Deconstruction is a rethinking of the meaning of "ethnic/nationalist" violence and a critique of the impoverished discourse of identity politics that crippled the international response to the Bosnian crisis. Rather than assuming the preexistence of an entity called Bosnia, Campbell considers the complex array of historical, statistical, cartographic, and other practices through which the definitions of Bosnia have come to be. These practices traverse a continuum of political spaces, from the bodies of individuals and the corporate body of the former Yugoslavia to the international bodies of the world community. Among the book's many original disclosures, arrived at through a critical reading of international diplomacy, is the shared identity politics of the peacemakers and paramilitaries. Equally significant is Campbell's conclusion that the international response to the Bosnian war was hamstrung by the poverty of Western thought on the politics of heterogeneous communities. Indeed, he contends that Europe and the United States intervened in Bosnia not to save the ideal of multiculturalism abroad but rather to shore up the nationalist imaginary so as to contain the ideal of multiculturalism at home. By bringing to the fore the concern with ethics, politics, and responsibility contained in more traditional accounts of the Bosnianwar, this book is a major statement on the inherently ethical and political assumptions of deconstructive thought -- and the reworkings of the politics of community it enables.

This book is the first full-length manuscript to draw on the the insights and techniques of deconstruction to analyse international relations. Influenced primarily by Derrida, it critiques the cornerstones of international relations such as modernity, the state, the subject, security and ethics and justice.

Social Postmodernism defends a postmodern perspective anchored in the politics of the new social movements. The volume preserves the focus on the politics of the body, race, gender, and sexuality as elaborated in postmodern approaches. But these essays push postmodern analysis in a particular direction: toward a social postmodernism which integrates the micro-social concerns of the new social movements with an institutional and cultural analysis in the service of a transformative political vision.

Rich with analyses of concepts from deconstruction, systems theory, and post-Marxism, with critiques of fundamentalist thought and the war on terror, this volume argues for developing a philosophy of being in order to overcome the quandary of postmodern relativism. Undergirding the contributions are the premises that ontology is a vital concept for philosophy today, that an acceptable leftist ontology must avoid the kind of identity politics that has dominated recent cultural studies, and that a new ontology must be situated within global capitalism.

Weaponized Whiteness by Fran Shor interrogates the meanings and implications of white supremacy and, more specifically, white identity politics from historical and sociological perspectives.