1st Edition

After Identity A Reader in Law and Culture

Edited By Dan Danielsen, Karen Engle Copyright 1995

    Authored by the leading voices in critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory and queer legal theory, After Identity explores the importance of sexual, national and other identities in people's lived experiences while simultaneously challenging the limits of legal strategies focused on traditional identity groups. These new ways of thinking about cultural identity have implications for strategies for legal reform, as well as for progressive thinking generally about theory, culture and politics.

    Part 1 Sexuality; Chapter 1 A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto, Mary Joe Frug; Chapter 2 The Politics of the Closet, Janet E. Halley; Chapter 3 Identity Strategies, Dan Danielsen; Part 2 Affirmative Action; Chapter 4 Race Consciousness, Gary Peller; Chapter 5 Political Power and Cultural Subordination, Duncan Kennedy; Chapter 6 The Obliging Shell, Patricia J. Williams; Part 3 Community; Chapter 7 Stories and Standing, Gerald Torres, Kathryn Milun; Chapter 8 “The Black Community,” Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification, Regina Austin; Chapter 9 Decentering Decentralization, Jerry Frug; Part 4 Postcolonialism; Chapter 10 An Autumn Weekend, David Kennedy; Chapter 11 Female Subjects of Public International Law, Karen Engle; Chapter 12 Modernism, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction, Nathaniel Berman; Chapter 13 The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity, Rosemary J. Coombe; Part 5 Violence; Chapter 14 Beyond the Privacy Principle, Kendall Thomas; Chapter 15 On Terrorism, Ileana M. Porras; Chapter 16 Outlaw Women, Elizabeth V. Spelman, Martha Minow; Chapter 17 Mapping the Margins, Kimberl&é Crenshaw;

    Biography

    Dan Danielsen is a practicing attorney in Boston and a Lecturer of Law at both Northeastern University Law School and Harvard Law School. Karen Engle is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Utah.

    "An exciting and provocative collection of essays by some of the most important legal scholars writing today." -- Lani Guinier, University of Pennsylvania Law School
    "I don't know why some of the most fascinating new thinking about identity and its meanings should have come out of the legal academy. . .or rather, I didn't know until I read this book, which demonstrates persuasively, from a whole range of directions, the centrality of law to the dense network of questions that we explore under the rubric of identity. No clearer demonstration could be offered of the power of a critical legal studies to illuminate some of the most important questions in contemporary social and political theory." -- K. Anthony Appiah, Harvard University