Self consciousness

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Laura Fair

"The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in an incredible flux framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community in the new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves' ideas of emancipation, and describes how such ideas and practices were gendered."--Jacket.

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Jeffrey T. Nealon

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negativively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In Alterity Politics, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained.

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Germano Facetti and Alan Fletcher

"Approach to the complex interaction between the outward identity of the most familiar objects of our environment and some of their underlying symbolic associations. Advertisements, body prints, clothings and cosmetics, food, games, money, marks and signs are not necessarily what they seem ... a remarkable variety of categories--or 'identity kits'--over 280 provocative illustrations expose the ambiguous nature of identity, jog the preconceptions of the mind and eye and hint at the layers of meaning that lie hidden in the visual flotsam of our everyday lives"--Dustjacket.

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Daniel Walker Howe

Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy. The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests - for elites and artisans, blacks and women - seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights. The desire for personal autonomy and self-construction is a historical bedrock of the nation's ethos.