Re-inventing/Re-presenting Identities in a Global World is a collection of twelve selected essays which address the concepts of cultural identity formation and enactment, immigration, diaspora and repatriation, and gender politics within a globalized context. With the peripheral having now become the center of contemporary culture, this volume examines cultural and literary diversities that have emerged from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between cultures, politics, aesthetics and disciplines, with an emphasis on cultural identity as a site of crisis and fragmentation. Written in an accessible way, this volume addresses several audiences, from postgraduate researchers and scholars in the fields of Anglo-American and cross-cultural studies, women’s studies, minority and ethnic literature studies, to scholars, students and specialists of American, cross-Atlantic and even global studies. Because of the numerous theoretical concerns which underpin this work and its interdisciplinary approach, the publication is also aimed at researchers and scholars in the fields of trans-atlantic studies and cultural geography, as well as the general reader who is interested in globality and cultural identity.

A radical vision for the future of human rights as a fundamentally reconfigured framework for global justice. Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path—away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the status quo—Mark Goodale offers a new vision for human rights as a basis for collective action and moral renewal. Goodale's proposition to reinvent human rights begins with a deep unpacking of human rights institutionalism and political theory in order to give priority to the "practice of human rights." Rather than a priori claims to universality, he calls for a working theory of human rights defined by "translocality," a conceptual and ethical grounding that invites people to form alliances beyond established boundaries of community, nation, race, or religious identity. This book will serve as both a concrete blueprint and source of inspiration for those who want to preserve human rights as a key framework for confronting our manifold contemporary challenges, yet who agree—for many different reasons—that to do so requires radical reappraisal, imaginative reconceptualization, and a willingness to reinvent human rights as a cross-cultural foundation for both empowerment and social action.

The proposed book explores the theme of identity, specifically as applied to its role and development in virtual worlds. Following the introduction, it is divided into four sections: identities, avatars and the relationship between them; factors that support the development of identity in virtual worlds; managing multiple identities across different environments and creating an online identity for a physical world purpose.

This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.

This volume examines the role and representation of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the media with particular emphasis on the United States. It highlights contemporary work that focuses on changing meanings of racial and ethnic identity as they are represented in the media; television and film, digital and print media are under examination. Through fourteen innovative and interdisciplinary case studies written by a team of internationally based contributors, the volume identifies ways in which ethnic, racial, and national identities have been produced, reproduced, stereotyped, and contested. It showcases new emerging theoretical approaches in the field, and pays particular attention to the role of race, ethnicity, and national identity, along with communal and transnational allegiances, in the making of identities in the media. The topics of the chapters range from immigrant newspapers and gangster cinema to ethnic stand-up comedy and the use of ‘race’ in advertising.

Re-Inventing the Media provides a highly original re-thinking of media studies for the contemporary post-broadcast, post-analogue, and post-mass media era. While media and cultural studies has made much of the changes to the media landscape that have come from digital technologies, these constitute only part of the transformations that have taken place in what amounts of a reinvention of the media over the last two decades. Graeme Turner takes on the task of re-thinking how media studies approaches the whole of the contemporary media-scape by focusing on three large, cross-platform, and transnational themes: the decline of the mass media paradigm, the ongoing restructuring of the relations between the media and the state, and the structural and social consequences of celebrity culture. By addressing the fact that the reinvention of the media is not simply a matter of globalising markets or the take-up of technological change, Turner is able to explore the more fundamental movements and widespread trends that have significantly influenced the character of what the contemporary media have become, how it is structured, and how it is used. Re-Inventing the Media is a must-read for both students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies.

Sociolinguistics is one of the central branches of modern linguistics and deals with the place of language in human societies. This second edition of Introducing Sociolinguistics expertly synthesises the main approaches to the subject. The book covers areas such as multilingualism, code-choice, language variation, dialectology, interactional studies, gender, language contact, language and inequality, and language and power. At the same time it provides an integrated perspective on these themes by examining sociological theories of human interaction. In this regard power and inequality are particularly significant. The book also contains two chapters on the applications of sociolinguistics (in education and in language policy and planning) and a concluding chapter on the sociolinguistics of sign language. New topics covered include speaking style and stylisation, while current debates in areas like creolisation, globalisation and language death, language planning, and gender are reflected.Written collaboratively by teachers and scholars with first hand experience of sociolinguistic developments on four continents, this book provides the broadest introduction currently available to the central topics in sociolinguistics.Features:* Provides a solid foundation in all aspects of sociolinguistics and explores important themes such as power and inequality, sign language, gender and the internet* Well illustrated with maps, diagrams, inset boxes, drawings and cartoons* Accessibly written with the beginner in mind* Uses numerous examples from multilingual settings* Explains basic concepts, supported by a glossary* Further Reading lists, a full bibliography, and a section on 'next steps' provide valuable guidance.