Performativity and Belonging

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. Performativity and Belonging offers signposts out of the complacency of modernist certainty and the celebration of postmodern contingency, and will be of interest to students of sociology, cultural studies and anthropology.