Overview

Uses poststructuralist theory to connect inclusion, exclusion and identity, using real-world case studies from British culture, politics and law Lasse Thomassen applies a fresh, poststructuralist approach to reconcile the theoretical and practical issues surrounding inclusion, exclusion and representation. He opens up debates and themes including Britishness, race, the nature and role of Islam in British society, homelessness and social justice. Thomassenargues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be viewed as struggles over how these identitiesare represented. He develops this argument through careful analysis of cases from the last four decades of British multiculturalism, including public debates about the role of religion in British society, Gordon Brown and David Cameron's contrasting versions of Britishness, legal cases about religious symbols and clothing in schools, and the Nick Hornby novel How to Be Good.

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9781474422659

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This is a book of great originality that contributes new insights to the politics of representation. Thomassen makes a bold contribution to contemporary struggles for recognition by treating them not primarily as battles to include (or exclude) new political groups, but as moments where people contest the very terms of political and ethnic identities and their interrelations. In so doing, he re-makes multiculturalism from a crowd-pleasing ideal into a window for interrogating the power plays whereby constructions of identity are by turns invoked and renegotiated.--Lisa Disch, University of Michigan

Author Information

Lasse Thomassen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Deconstructing Habermas (Routledge, 2007) and Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010), and the co-editor of Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack (Manchester University Press, 2005) and the editor of The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Currently he is working on the concept of representation and new forms of radical politics.

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