Identity

Book excerpt: Identity: Beyond Tradition and McWorld Neoliberalism refashions the frameworks of discussion of “who we are”. In the “Introduction”, co-editors Brian Michael Goss and Christopher Chávez’s grand tour re-works previous concepts of identity in prelude to the volume’s global reach. The first section examines the intersection of identity and mass media; to wit, non-ascriptive ideological interpolation in a right-wing British broadsheet, the rise of beur cinema as an organically European movement, and linguistic construction of foreigners in a Thai novel. The second section examines the nation and trans-nation. The discussion traverses the “Global Latino” in advertising discourse, the (practical, theoretical) conundrums inscribed in the European Union, retorts to the global construction of Italianicity, implications of Spain’s World Cup triumph in 2010 for the nation’s unity, and the activism of expatriate Iranian bloggers. The third section of the book addresses social approaches to identity. Matchmakers who coach Israeli daters and a linguistic analysis of female teen conflict on Facebook conclude the trajectory through global sites at which identity is animated in practice, within a volume of scholarly originality grounded in the present moment.