Questions of Cultural Identity

Why and how do contemporary questions of culture become so highly charged questions of identity? The question of cultural identity lies at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. Are the distinctive identities that have defined the social and cultural world of modern societies for so long--gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality--in decline? And have they given rise to new forms of identification, thus fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject? Questions of Cultural Identity offers a wide-ranging exploration of these issues, outlining the reasons why the question of identity is so compelling and yet so problematic. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity providing both theoretical and substantive insights into its contemporary manifestations. Without privileging any one approach to the problem of identity, the book opens up a number of significant questions and offers insights into different approaches to understanding identity. In doing so, it both illuminates and advances debates about identity and its futures. Questions of Cultural Identity will be essential reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across the humanities and social science disciplines.

Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.

After spending more than four decades as one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva’s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.

Paul du Gay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University