particular acts by recourse to notions of common identity and purpose, there is also a ‘bottomup’ process whereby interpretations of national identity that emerge from social practice come to inform the abstract frames themselves. The failure to appreciate this two-way process can be seen in primordialism’s inability to account for radically different conceptions of what being Croatian means and modernism’s inability to explain why the identity politics endorsed by various governments and imperial rulers were all ultimately rejected. Second, these five themes show that the
validity of political claims promoted at more aggregated levels of society. There are several areas of empirical investigation – corresponding to various aspects of state–society relations – where recent anthropological findings provide insights into these relations. The remainder of this chapter discusses just two of them, very briefly: identity politics (registers of citizenship), and issues of public authority in local political arenas (legitimacy). Identity politics Political pluralization in Africa, as elsewhere, has heightened political competition and multiplied
theoretical positions can shed light on the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, along with the broader implications of the rivalry across the region. These different theoretical, ontological and epistemological approaches reveal much of the complex interplay between a range of factors shaping the rivalry. The complexity of the rivalry and its regional impact brings together historical antagonisms, political aspirations, identity politics, economic rivalry and security concerns, necessitating a multifaceted approach that
right? To what extent is the nation a ‘natural’ social organisation and to what extent an artificial construct? Is the principle of ‘national self-determination’ still a viable one? Was it ever a viable political principle in international affairs? Why does nationalism still seem to be a powerful influence in the twenty-first century? What is the future of ‘identity politics’ and ‘regional nationalism’ in a ‘globalised
indicates (chapter 5), sexual identity politics can easily become essentialist and simply end up reproducing dominant notions of difference and oppression by another route. The balance between collective strategies and individual freedom has always been a classic tension of all politics, yet because of the commitment of anarchists to notions of individual liberty and responsibility, it has often been more visible in the anarchist milieu than other parts of the political landscape. These difficulties are observed in a number of places in this collection, ranging from the
multiculturalism and ‘identity politics’. While reading Žižek as a European philosopher, they do not – unlike Bjelić ( 2009 ) – additionally situate him as one whose intellectual trajectory passes through the late socialist/postsocialist Slovenian academy. Yet that discursive community is, this book shows, the product of pre-Yugoslav and state socialist racial formations, inflected by the continent-wide peripheralisation of south/eastern Europe and the ‘nesting orientalisms’ (Bakić-Hayden 1995 ) of the region's identity constructions. These formations are connected to, though
collective memory and national identity has perhaps been most intensely debated in the historian’s own country, the US. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as identity politics gained increasing validity, ‘minorities’ such as African-Americans and Asian-Americans pressed claims to an ‘authentic’ self-representation in the country’s influential signifying systems (the media, the schools
), Helgeson (2012), Liljestrand (2012), Svensson (2012), and Wilson (2012). For editorial page commentary on the relevance of the series, see Franchell (2012), Ludvigsson (2012), and Kjöller (2012). For a cultural pages debate about identity politics see Edenheim (2012a; 2012b; 2013), Gardell (2012b), Hilton (2013a; 2013b), Nordenhök (2012), and Wiman (2012b), and a friendly exchange between Gardell and a critic (Gardell and Hilton, 2013). For tabloid publicity see Fårsjö (2012), Fjellborg (2012), Lindberg (2012), Lundberg (2012a), Schulman (2012), and Virtanen (2012). 2
obviously in the Runnymede Trust report. We also want, therefore, to examine the possible intersections between geopolitical markers of supposed ‘marginality’ and other boundaries and hierarchies operating in identity politics – gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality in particular. In this arena we believe that insufficient attention had been placed to the relationship between ‘Celtic spaces’ and other areas of ‘difference’, even within the context of emerging concerns around a ‘New Britishness’: As Robert Crawford notes in the afterword to his influential Devolving
’s writing, this chapter does not wish to play down the variety and hybridity of beur narratives in a quasi-colonialist drive for uniformity and categorisation. Indeed, the very recentness of the emergence of this writing makes any Beur female identity endeavour to characterise its expression of identity politics tentative. Given the diversity of the writers who are conventionally grouped under the umbrella term beur – some writers classed as beur were born in North Africa then came to France, others were born in France of, say, a French mother and Algerian father