Illusive Identity is a transnational exploration of the evolution of working-class consciousness within modern Western culture. The work traces how the rise of popular culture blurred the definition and dulled the influence of class identity in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters tackling changing class consciousness in Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States offer rich insight into the movement from a traditional community-based social identity to a modern consumer-based culture; a mass culture influenced by industrialization, new social institutions, and the powerful imagery of new media. Illusive Identity vividly demonstrates the transformative impact of modernity on the laboring classes, as advertising, entertainment, and the rise of the popular press replaced traditionally shared narratives about the nature of work with a new and liberating cultural paradigm.

Based on a study of V. S. Naipaul's postcolonial writings, this book explores the process of postcolonial subjects' special route of identification. This enables the readers to see how in our increasingly diverse and fragmented post-modern world, identity is a vibrant, complex, and highly controversial concept. The old notion of identity as a prescribed and self-sufficient entity is now replaced by identity as a plural, floating and becoming process. Min Zhou shows how postcolonial literature, among other artistic forms, is one of the most representative reflections of this floating identity.

Contributions reprinted in this book highlight some of the wide ranging ways in which the issues of culture and identity can be approached in a literary text, while focusing on the ways in which cultural encounters have been changing both the world and its reflection in literature. The beginning of the twenty first century is an appropriate time to repay careful attention to these issues. Understanding how our perception of the Other changes with the concept of the world we inhabit, we want to emphasize the rising importance of fostering cultural pluralism and global understanding. For its argumentation strongly founded in recent literary studies and humanities in general, its interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the actual global problems of abrupt cultural change and exchange, its heightened understanding of the necessity of coexistence of differences in a changing world, its spirit of tolerance, and its international spirit in general, we assume this collection will not only attract academic literary scholars but will also appeal to the general reading public.

Placing identity within its cultural context, Fitzgerald offers ethnographic case material to examine the meaning and changing metaphors of ethnicity, male and female identity, and aging and identity. He opens up an exciting multidisciplinary dialogue for improving interpersonal and cross-cultural communication. The book provides a clear synthesis of the interrelated meanings of culture, identity, and communication, examining self-concept and its role in the communication process, and exploring cultural and biological research on self, individuality, personality, and mind-body questions.

​This book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective. In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience – and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination. Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works – plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace’s fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity.

Covering fifty years of British dance, from Margot Fonteyn to innovative contemporary practitioners such as Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock, Yes? No! Maybe is an innovative approach to performing and watching dance. Emilyn Claid brings her life experience and interweaves it with academic theory and historical narrative to create a dynamic approach to dance writing. Using the 1970s revolution of new dance as a hinge, Claid looks back to ballet and forward to British independent dance which is new dance’s legacy. She explores the shifts in performer-spectator relationships, and investigates questions of subjectivity, absence and presence, identity, gender, race and desire using psychoanalytical, feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist and queer theoretical perspectives. Artists and practitioners, professional performers, teachers, choreographers and theatre-goers will all find this book an informative and insightful read.

As a follow-up to Towards a Just Curriculum Theory and Curriculum Epistemicide , this volume illuminates the challenges and contradictions which have prevented critical curriculum theory from establishing itself as an alternative to dominant Western Eurocentric epistemologies. Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia re-visits the work of leading progressive theorists and draws on a complex range of epistemological perspectives from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, and Latin America. Paraskeva illustrates how counter-dominant narratives have been suppressed by neoliberal dynamics through an exploration of key issues including: itinerant curriculum theory, globalization and internationalization, as well as utopianism. Foregrounding critical curriculum theory as a vector of de-colonization and de-centralization, the text puts forth Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ITC) as an alternative form of anti-colonial, theoretical engagement. This work forms an important addition to the literature surrounding critical curriculum theory. It will be of interest to post-graduate scholars, researchers and academics in the fields of curriculum studies, curriculum theory, and critical educational research.