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.
| Editors' Introduction: Multiplying Identities | 1 | |
| Essays | ||
| "British Cannibals": Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer | 7 | |
| Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity | 32 | |
| Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: "He Shang" in Post-Mao China | 63 | |
| Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look | 90 | |
| Policing the Black Women's Body in an Urban Context | 115 | |
| Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition | 133 | |
| Acting Bits/Identity Talk | 147 | |
| The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present | 181 | |
| What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity | 198 | |
| Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s | 220 | |
| Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation | 242 | |
| The Erotics of Irishness | 271 | |
| Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity | 305 | |
| The Time of the Gypsies: A "People without History" in the Narratives of the West | 338 | |
| Critical Responses | ||
| White Philosophy | 380 | |
| The No-Drop Rule | 401 | |
| Fashionable Theory and Fashionable Women: Returning Fuss's Homospectatorial Look | 413 | |
| Look Who's Talking, or If Looks Could Kill | 424 | |
| Response to Identities | 434 | |
| Collected and Fractured: Response to Identities | 439 | |
| Index | 449 |
Overview
Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, ...