Locating identity construction across a broad range of academic disciplines, Martin Walker's Contours of Identity is an ideal introduction to the study of identity. With a solid collection of creative and analytical essays, objective and pertinent arguments are presented through a complex web of Literary, Linguistic and Sociological ideas. The quest of discovering who we are is an international, multicultural, and timeless enquiry which welcomes innovative and forward-thinking work. Contours of Identity provides a concise and thought-provoking insight into identity formation by utilising some of the most significant literary works surrounding this most coveted topic. A commendable addition to the subject of identity.

Challenging the notion that fashion and furniture were or are separate enterprises and distinct material aesthetic traditions, this collection focuses on three material and conceptual links central to understanding the relationship between interior design and fashion-the body, fabric, and space. The volume considers the changing visual, material and spatial character, methodological challenges posed by, and formal, political and historiographical significance of, a wide range of British, European and North American case studies since the eighteenth century. The volume's eleven case studies allow the reader to understand connecting notions behind the formation of interiors and fashionable clothing. The essays combine a wide range of significant and challenging new examples alongside powerful reversionary analyses of the various periods, artists, designers, and their best and significant objects. Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity is concerned not only with fabric, but also with the body and the implications of embodiment in the practices of both design domains which are equally invested in the comfort, aesthetic pleasure, extension and support of the body in different and yet seemingly identical ways.

This dissertation asks how we should conceptualize white identity in the United States. I examine how we should measure white identity and assess the characteristics of white identity, primarily the robustness and durability of white identification. Taken together, the four papers offer two conclusions. First, traditional measures of white identity underemphasize the relationship between political preferences and white identification. I argue that we should instead characterize white identity in terms of adherence to white racial norms. Second, as opposed to narratives that portray white identity as reactionary, I find that white identity is remarkably durable in the face of both positive and negative information about whiteness.

The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies offers an exceptionally clear overview of the analysis of identity in the social sciences, and in so doing seeks to develop a new agenda for identity-studies in the twenty-first century. The key theories of identity, ranging from classical accounts to postmodern, psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised, and there are substantive sections looking at racial, ethnic, gendered, queer, consumerist, virtual and global identities. The Handbook also makes an essential contribution to the debate now opening up over identity-politics and its cultural consequences. From anti-globalization protestors to new ecological warriors, from devotees of therapy culture to defenders of international human rights: the culture of identity-politics is fast redefining the public political sphere. What future for politics is there after the turn to identity? Throughout there is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity with essays covering sociology, psychology, politics, cultural studies and history. The Handbook’s clear and direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences and humanities.

In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.

The civil rights movement and immigration reform transformed American politics in the mid-1960s. Demographic diversity and identity politics raised the challenge of e pluribus unum anew, and multiculturalism emerged as a new ideological response to this dilemma. This book uses national public opinion data and public opinion data from Los Angeles to compare ethnic differences in patriotism and ethnic identity and ethnic differences in support for multicultural norms and group-conscious policies. The authors find evidence of strong patriotism among all groups and the classic pattern of assimilation among the new wave of immigrants. They argue that there is a consensus in rejecting harder forms of multiculturalism that insist on group rights but also a widespread acceptance of softer forms that are tolerant of cultural differences and do not challenge norms, such as by insisting on the primacy of English.