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This book explores belonging as a performative achievement. The contributors investigate how identities are embodied and effected, and how lines of allegiance and fracture are produced and reproduced. Questions of 'difference' are tackled from a perspective that attends to the complexities of history and politics.
Drawing on sociology, philosophy and anthropology, this collection brings together leading commentators, including Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a range of new scholars. It examines questions of visuality, political affiliation, ethics, mimesis, spatiality, passing, and diversity in modes of embodied difference. The volume advances conceptual and theoretical issues through testing various propositions around specific examples or questions. What emerges is a rich engagement with the complexity of contemporary forms of belonging.
List of contents
Performativity and Belonging - Vikki Bell
An Introduction
Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures - Judith Butler
Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence - Vikki Bell
Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai in Conversation
Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s) - Anne-Marie Fortier
Ethnic Absolutism and the Authoritarian Spirit - Chetan Bhatt
'She'll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She's Turned Into a Nigger' - Sara Ahmed
Passing through Hybridity
Classing Queer - Mariam Fraser
Politics in Competition
Mimesis as Cultural Survival - Vikki Bell
Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism
On Speech, Race and Melancholia - Vikki Bell
An Interview with Judith Butler
Subject, Psyche and Agency - Lois McNay
The Work of Judith Butler
Performativity, Parody, Politics - Moya Lloyd
Beyond Food/Sex - Elspeth Probyn
Eating and an Ethics of Eating
Playing it Again - Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord
Citation, Reiteration or Cicularity?
About the author
Vikki Bell lectures in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, university of London.
Summary
A revision of the centrality of belonging in contemporary culture. A group of contributors draw on sociology, philosophy and anthropology to examine belonging as an achievement, involving several levels of production, performance and embodiment.
