The crisis of culture : identity politics and the empire of norms
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London : Hurst, 2024
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ROY, Olivier, The crisis of culture : identity politics and the empire of norms, London : Hurst, 2024 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76741
Abstract
Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values? Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz. Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right. Increased left- and right-wing references to ‘identity’ fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level.
Table of Contents
-- Introduction -- 1 The crisis in question -- 2 Anthropological culture : the erasure of shared implicit understandings -- 3 Culture as canon : the fragility of transmission -- 4 The crisis of imaginaries -- 5 Communication : a matter of codes -- 6 Can we choose our sex or race? -- 7 Suffering and reparation -- 8 The joy of norms -- Conclusion : human, not human enough
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Published: 21 March 2024