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This chapter offers a specific set of distinctions made in the debates about political art in the 1980s and 1990s by observing a constellation of anthologies, symposia, and exhibitions as a backdrop to understanding the curatorial agenda and reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial for American Art, as well as a comprehensive examination of the exhibition contributions of Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrea Fraser, and Lorna Simpson. The 1993 Biennial provides an ideal case study to examine the representation of socio-political issues in art, as it consolidated perspectives on two key terms for the later part of the twentieth century: identity politics and multiculturalism. A for-or-against debate gives way to understanding identity politics and multiculturalism as modes of describing a historical stage and/or a political strategy. Many artists concerned with these frameworks sought ways of showing how identities worked, not what they looked like. Significant in this respect was the landmark exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (1985), which highlighted a set of constructivist approaches to the formation of subjectivity and the subject, underscoring the social, ideological, psychological, economic, and linguistic structures of identity over essentialist definitions reliant upon notions of inherent communality. Silvia Kolbowski’s Model Pleasure I-VIII 1982-1984 (1982-84), included in Difference, is discussed.

This final chapter covers the last two decades of Butler's life, a time of profound social change in Ireland. It notes the emerging liberalization within Irish society during the sixties and seventies, as well as its growing internationalization. It charts Butler's belated recognition both in Ireland and abroad in the 1980s as a gifted essayist and social critic after the publication of successive volumes of his essays by Lilliput Press in Dublin. It identifies him as a forerunner of the pluralistic values that came to prominence in the Republic at the time of his death.

This chapter explores the ways in which identity claims and identity fragmentation have played a significant role in reshaping the global political agenda. The disruptions to the post-Cold War international order and increased insecurity and political unrest have also impacted the way we debate and conceptualise identity. Globalisation and critiques of ‘identity politics’, however, have important effects for understanding the ‘politics of identity’ and the ways in which ideas about identity constitute not only subjects but states and organisations. This chapter examines some of the contours of these debates with a view to refocussing attention on the politics of identity, specifically regarding how identity works, and the effects (and affects) it produces.

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines expanded the propositions of Conceptual Art.

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.

The essay analyses fashion blogs as discursive and performative sites for the dissemination and production of fashion and provides a critical analysis of the processes of authorship, identity and persona construction from a feminist perspective. It also traces the recent cultural-historical developments, which have paved the way for the representation of identity and selfhood performed and displayed on fashion blogs. The author discusses continuities and dis-continuities in written and visual female authorship from the 1960s to the present.

This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, are shown to harbour a sense of artistic exceptionalism which often precludes representations of the everyday, and therefore also limits political solidarity with those usually defended by Lignes. Despite the racial or gendered exclusions it can produce, literary elitism or conservatism is in itself not necessarily criticised, but the hostility to mass culture inculcated by some aesthetic Marxist approaches is seen to be politically unhelpful in the present moment and other approaches to cultural politics in Lignes are sought. After Alain Badiou’s Circonstances 3 caused a row over anti-Semitism and the critique of Israel, it is suggested that the strategic essentialism of Judith Butler provides a more appropriate stance compared to Badiou’s strategic universalism. Lastly, Lignes’ virtual silence on gender and sexuality issues (a stance softening in recent issues) is contrasted to the Parti Socialiste’s progressive measures on parity, PACs and gay marriage.

The conclusion adresses the political backlash that not only crippled but obscured the campaign. It challenges the false opposition between economic and social justice, the “identity politics” thesis and claim the relevance of the campaign today.

The politics of identity discussed here are still at the heart of current Indigenous Australian struggles for recognition. In the 1960s, for ethical and political reasons, the term Aboriginal became an ethnonym written with a capital ‘A’ to designate the descendants of the first inhabitants of Australia, some 500 groups speaking different languages. Aboriginal groups have not only different language names and cultural backgrounds, but different histories — massacres, forced sedentarisation in reserves, separation from their parents of children of mixed descent, discrimination, criminalisation — all of which broke the transmission of some peoples’ heritage. Yet many claim their ‘Aboriginality’ which gathers all under an Aboriginal flag (since 1972), even if not everyone agrees on the definition of a common identity. Some priviledge an identity of continuity, based on language, localised spirit-children and ritual links with the land, pre-contact modes of existence; others put forward an identity of resistance, rewriting colonial history, valorising a national Aboriginal identity that encompasses all mixed descendants, struggling for land-rights, against bad living conditions, exclusion and exploitation. First published in 1997.

This chapter continues some themes started in the previous chapter and examines the attrition of secularism socially, politically and culturally, towards the end of the millennium. It discusses the turn taken by erstwhile left-wing and nationalist members of the intelligentsia, to pander to what was considered to be popular sentiment, and their acceptance of claims to represent society made by Islamist forces, now coming into their own. This period saw an increased prominence of sentimentalist, identitarian attachment to the Muslim past, and a common insistence on the exceptional character of Islam, often in hostile or at least disparaging contradistinction to previous claims to universalism. The chapter discusses the attrition of the state’s secular credentials, and its patronage of conservative forms of religiosity, first against the Left, later as a form of social control.

Chapter Three discusses the rhetoric of visibility that is prevalent in sexual minorities’ theory and politics today. Noting the shift on the part of oppressed or marginalized segments of the population in Western democracies from an emphasis on making themselves heard to an emphasis on rendering themselves visible, the author shows the formative role in this respect of the struggles of the US“ s most “visible“ yet most overlooked minority. Linking this "visibility drive" to the theatricalization of gender explored earlier, the chapter also probes the connections between "visibility", social identity, and the contemporary drive to power.

This article, written by Mariam Aboelezz’s, focuses on the period following the overthrow of Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamad Morsi in 2013. Concurrent with this was a government-supported emphasis on ‘Egyptian identity’. Using the concept of alterity as highlighted by Suleiman, as well as acknowledging Suleiman’s contribution to the study of the role of language as proxy in identity politics, Aboelezz examines how language is used as proxy in this new wave of Egyptian nationalism. She demonstrates how old motifs have been revived by the government – for example, the use of ʿāmmiyya and the rejection of fuṣḥā as proxies for promoting an Egyptian identity – and establishes a convincing link between language and identity through processes of distanciation, differentiation and identification.

The career of Charles Gaines has been dedicated to resisting or attempting to circumvent subjectivity. The political referent emerged in his work not as a means to represent himself or his political persuasion, but as a way to examine the relation of the poetic syntax of visual language to subject matter. A staunch conceptualist, Gaines has been creating artworks from rule-based processes since the early 1970s in order to question the operation of representation and modes of reference. By the 1990s he began analysing the specificity of tropes, focusing on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and eventually moving to work with particular political referents in a decisively non-descriptive, non-narrative, manner. In his early works Gaines set up a conceptual system from which the appearance of the work would be derived. Often employing chance operation or other aleatoric means to generate form, the work’s aesthetic was determined by systems, highlighting not only the distinction between the meaning of the terms random and arbitrary but also the distinction of the algorithmic from them both.

This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender and other forms of apparent difference. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationship between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. Piper’s use of the autobiographical tone and the body arrived chronologically after an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general inquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not the subject position of its maker.

The story of an individual life, no matter how famous or obscure, is both intensely personal and political. The best biographers not only recognize this truth, but they embrace it. The power of this approach lies in the movement beyond that which is overtly political into the murkier realm of personal politics. Equally important, writing about the idiosyncrasies of a personality transforms otherwise stodgy historical actors into exquisitely flawed human beings. By using individual lives as “windows to a [historical] period and its issues” and through this process of humanizing life stories, biographers accomplish an elusive feat for many scholars: the production of well-researched and informative prose that also captivates a public audience. The individuals in this book are no exception. In the life stories of the Caribbean intellectuals that I’ve selected, the personal was political, and the political was personal.

This chapter focuses on Taylor’s account of the politics of recognition and the broad debates that his essay on multiculturalism stimulated. Taylor was responding to the new politics of identity and the contestation over the implications of cultural diversity, especially in multicultural societies like Canada and Australia. Taylor is shown to bring his own theoretical framework to bear on these topics and to emphasize the cultural underpinnings of identity politics in the values of equal respect and equal dignity. Taylor’s highlighting the broad background experiences of democratic forms of social association is somewhat similar, we argue, to that of Alexis de Tocqueville on democracy and democratisation. Taylor’s reworking of aspects of Tocqueville’s diagnoses of modern society’s potential for ‘democratic despotism’ and the paradoxes of individualism are evaluated. Whilst acknowledging the significance of Taylor’s contributions to theories of recognition and democracy, the critical responses to Taylor’s accounts are outlined and his conceptions are compared with later discussions of these themes, particularly those by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Taylor’s updating of his perspective on recognition and recent analysis of current tendencies for ‘democratic exclusion’ and their remedies are assessed.

Studying security in the Persian Gulf requires a multi-dimensional approach and needs to go beyond state-centered and state-exclusive approaches to security issues. In addition to military, diplomatic, and balance of power considerations, elements of human security also need to be examined, particularly perceptions of otherness that lead to sectarian sensibilities. Also important are mutual threat perceptions that foster and perpetuate security dilemma.