Introduction

Abstract

This volume sets out to reimagine and extend the theoretical and epistemological presuppositions of existing scholarship on identities. Despite a well-established body of scholarly texts which examine the concept from a wide range of perspectives, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship on multiple, heterogeneous forms of identity. This multi-authored volume is innovative in providing, in distributed and granular mode, a hyper-contemporary and wide-ranging applied analysis that questions notions of identity based on particular properties. It achieves this by mobilizing various components of identity (gender, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, national belonging) and a range of media (cinema, erotic art, literature, music, theatre, video). Emphasizing the extreme contemporary (the twenty-first century) and the challenges posed by an increasingly global society, the volume builds upon previous intellectual investigations of identity with the aim of offering a fresh perspective that transcends their current cognitive and geographical frontiers. One of the key points emerging from the various chapters is the dramatic degree to which significant political, economic and technological developments in the last quarter of the twentieth century have changed our sense of ‘identity’. Regime changes, mass migration, the human rights movement, economic globalization and the internet have had an important impact on the wide-ranging cultural production reflecting that changing sense of ‘identity’ of the many countries represented here. The volume is born out of a series of research seminars hosted by the Culture and Difference research group within the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University (UK) that has explored the impact...