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Overview
Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience is a fascinating collection of readings that explores how people negotiate identity in the United States today.
- Brings together readings that provide a thoroughly engaging and fascinating look at central issues of identity and what it means to be American.
- Explores the tension between identity and identification to help readers begin to understand how people creatively confront the perks and perils of identity in the United States.
- Offers a look at a wide range of subjects including: violence and video games, queer pilgrimages to San Francisco, Filipina critiques of "sleeping around," and the significance of "lowriders" in Hispano/Chicano culture.
Synopsis
Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience is a fascinating collection of readings that explores how people negotiate identity in the United States today. While individuals stitch together complex identities based on everything from the hobbies they enjoy to the neighborhoods in which they live, these identities rarely conform to the quick and routine identification of people by race, gender, and age. By exploring this tension between identity and identification, one can begin to understand how people creatively confront the perks and perils of identity in the United States.
Life in America offers a look at a wide range of subjects including: violence and video games, queer pilgrimages to San Francisco, Filipina critiques of “sleeping around,” and the significance of “lowriders” in Hispano/Chicano culture. Framed by a lively introduction, this book provides readers with a thoroughly engaging and fascinating look at central issues of identity and what it means to be American.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"This rich volume can be recommended to both advanced scholars of American culture and beginners in this field. The former can find a multitude of quite recent applications of approaches they are already familiar with; the latter may wonder at the dizzying varieties of American experience, as well as look with disbelief at the multitude."
Anthropologie
"Lee Baker has pulled together and provided an extremely useful conceptual frame for some of the best social analysis on current trends in the cultural practices of identity and identification in US society. This collection is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in demystifying identity politics and understanding the complexities, pluralities, and common ground of cultural citizenship in the USA as it is changing in the new millennium." Faye V. Harrison, University of Tennessee
"American higher education’s longstanding myths about cultural assimilation and equal access for all have given way to a new scholarly literature, which rigorously critiques the structures of identity, inequality, and power. In this timely and provocative reader, brilliant anthropologist Lee Baker has selected an outstanding collection of essays about the complex politics of cultural diversity. Life in America provides an insightful exploration into the major contemporary debates and issues that define studies of race, gender, sexuality, and class in American society." Manning Marable, Columbia University
"Life in America is a user’s guide to everyday life and all its contradictory complexity, an indispensable inventory of practices and patterns in US society that produce both creative connections and corrosive conflicts, stimulating similarities and disturbing differences." George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego