Issues of identity are central to many historical and current debates in Australia. This superb collection of essays represents a significant rethinking of received ideas on identity, and reveals how issues of identity lie at the heart of Australian political thought, and form the foundation of Australian society and culture. It provides a comprehensive introduction to the political discourse surrounding Australian identity through key themes including identity theory, the manipulation of identity for political ends, gender and sexuality, immigration and national identity, citizenship and Aboriginality, and literature and film. The book rejects many of the assumptions underlying contemporary political debates, including the promulgation of a singular national identity in historical fact or as a political goal. This is a thought-provoking study of identity, its links with nationalism, and its potentially divisive effects.

This book investigates the discursive and performative strategies employed by Australian Indigenous rappers to make sense of the world and establish a position of authority over their identity and place in society. Focusing on the aesthetics, the language, and the performativity of Hip Hop, this book pays attention to the life stance, the philosophy, and the spiritual beliefs of Australian Indigenous Hip Hop artists as ‘glocal’ producers and consumers. With Hip Hop as its main point of analysis, the author investigates, interrogates, and challenges categories and preconceived ideas about the critical notions of authenticity, ‘Indigenous’ and dominant values, spiritual practices, and political activism. Maintaining the emphasis on the importance of adopting decolonizing research strategies, the author utilises qualitative and ethnographic methods of data collection, such as semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, participant observation, and fieldwork notes. Collaborators and participants shed light on some of the dynamics underlying their musical decisions and their view within discussions on representations of ‘Indigenous identity and politics’. Looking at the Indigenous rappers’ local and global aspirations, this study shows that, by counteracting hegemonic narratives through their unique stories, Indigenous rappers have utilised Hip Hop as an expressive means to empower themselves and their audiences, entertain, and revive their Elders’ culture in ways that are contextual to the society they live in.

In this award-winning work Carlson explores the complexities surrounding Aboriginal identity today. Drawing on a range of sources including interviews and surveys, The politics of identity explores Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of Aboriginality and the way these are produced and reproduced across a range of sites and contexts. Carlson explores both the community and external tensions around appropriate measures of identity and the pressures and effects of identification. An analysis of online Indigenous communities on social media that have emerged as sites of contestation adds to the growing knowledge in this area, both nationally and globally.

This book explores identity as contingent, fragmented and dynamic across a range of global sites and approaches that deal with citizenship, security, migration, subjectivity, memory, exclusion and belonging, and space and place. It explores the political and social effects and possibilities of identity practices, discourses and policies.

The issue of Indigenous identity has gained more attention in recent years from social science scholars, yet much of the discussions still centre on the politics of belonging or not belonging. While these recent discussions in part speak to the complicated and contested nature of Indigeneity, both those who claim Indigenous identity and those who write about it seem to fall into a paradox of acknowledging its complexity on the one hand, while on the other hand reifying notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘authentic cultural expression’ as core features of an Indigenous identity. Since identity theorists generally agree that who we understand ourselves to be is as much a function of the time and place in which we live as it is about who we and others say we are, this scholarship does not progress our knowledge on the contemporary characteristics of Indigenous identity formations. The range of international scholars in this volume have begun an approach to the contemporary identity issues from very different perspectives, although collectively they all push the boundaries of the scholarship that relate to identities of Indigenous people in various contexts from around the world. Their essays provide at times provocative insights as the authors write about their own experiences and as they seek to answer the hard questions: Are emergent identities newly constructed identities that emerge as a function of historical moments, places, and social forces? If so, what is it that helps to forge these identities and what helps them to retain markers of Indigeneity? And what are some of the challenges (both from outside and within groups) that Indigenous individuals face as they negotiate the line between ‘authentic’ cultural expression and emergent identities? Is there anything to be learned from the ways in which these identities are performed throughout the world among Indigenous groups? Indeed why do we assume claims to multiple racial or ethnic identities limits one’s Indigenous identity? The question at the heart of our enquiry about the emerging Indigenous identities is when is it the right time to say me, us, we… them?

Currently in Bill Gates's bookbag and FT Books of 2018Increasingly, the demands of identity direct the world's politics. Nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, gender: these categories have overtaken broader, inclusive ideas of who we are. We have built walls rather than bridges. The result: increasing in anti-immigrant sentiment, rioting on college campuses, and the return of open white supremacy to our politics. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American and global institutions were in a state of decay, as the state was captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatens to destabilise the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to 'the people', who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Identity is an urgent and necessary book: a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continual conflict.

Shows how transnational corporations use lobby groups to shape EU policy. New updated edition

The last three decades the Australian Left has shaped national life in Australia. Questions of legal liberalism, indigenous rights and sexual identity have become central in Left politics, but mostly not economics. Today's New Left has grappled with the remnant past radicalisms, such as Marxism and radical feminism, but also new challenges.

Kosovo is a frontier society where two Balkan nations, Albanian and Serb, as well as two religions, Islam and Christianity, clash. The tension between conflict and symbiosis lies at the core of this book.

The latter years of the first decade of the twenty-first century were characterised by an enormous amount of challenge and change to Australia and Australians. Australia's part in these challenges and changes is borne of our domestic and global ties, our orientation towards ourselves and others, and an ever increasing awareness of the interdependency of our world. Challenges and changes such as terrorism, climate change, human rights, community breakdown, work and livelihood, and crime are not new but they take on new variations and impact on us in different ways in times such as these. In this volume we consider these recent challenges and changes and how Australians themselves feel about them under three themes: identity, fear and governance. These themes suitably capture the concerns of Australians in times of such change. Identity is our sense of ourselves and how others see us. How is this affected by the increased presence of religious diversity, especially Islamic communities, and increased awareness of moral and political obligations towards Indigenous Australians? How is it affected by our curious but changing relationship with Asia? Fear is an emotional reaction to particular changes and challenges and produces particular responses from individuals, politicians, communities and nations alike; fear of crime, fear of terrorism and fear of change are all considered in this volume.