Based on the ongoing work of the agenda-setting Future of Minority Studies national research project, Identity Politics Reconsidered reconceptualizes the scholarly and political significance of social identity. It focuses on the deployment of 'identity' within ethnic, women's, disability, and gay and lesbian studies in order to stimulate discussion about issues that are simultaneously theoretical and practical, ranging from ethics and epistemology to political theory and pedagogical practice. This collection of powerful essays by both well-known and emerging scholars offers original answers to questions concerning the analytical legitimacy of 'identity' and 'experience', and the relationships among cultural autonomy, moral universalism and progressive politics.

Based on the ongoing work of the agenda-setting Future of Minority Studies national research project, "Identity Politics Reconsidered" reconceptualizes the scholarly and political significance of social identity. It focuses on the deployment of "identity" within ethnic-, women's-, disability-, and gay and lesbian studies in order to stimulate discussion about issues that are simultaneously theoretical and practical, ranging from ethics and epistemology to political theory and pedagogical practice. This collection of powerful essays by both well-known and emerging scholars offers original answers to questions concerning the analytical legitimacy of "identity" and "experience," and the relationships among cultural autonomy, moral universalism, and progressive politics.

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a "post-race" world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

"This collection is wide ranging and provides insights into the complex identity problematic from a fresh and provocative realist perspective, with each essay building upon and extending this theory in new directions."--Rosaura Sanchez, author of "Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonies" and "Chicano Discourse"

"Challenging, contentious, informative and giving full substance to the experiences of the subaltern, this groundbreaking collection carries us through a rich range of materials just where life in the historical humanities is most vital." --Jose David Saldivar, author of "Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

"These authors provide careful, complex, and powerful accounts of why we all should rethink current fashionable dismissals of the value and the reality of identity. Rather than take sides in the older forms of these debates, the essays move the issues forward onto far more productive postpositivist and postcolonial terrain. This reframing of identity, experience, and realism issues is long overdue."--Sandra Harding, author of "Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies

""Reclaiming Identity is an important contribution to scholarly yet politically engaged inquiry across the disciplines. Its well planned chapters converge on an attempt to work out a postpositivist, realist response to poststructural challenges -- a response that involves rethinking and selectively rehabilitating such crucial, contested concepts as experience and identity. The book develops thought-provoking arguments that should engage even its objects of criticism and be of interest to historians and social scientists as well as literary critics,philosophers, and critical theorists." --Dominick LaCapra, author of "Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Representing the Holocaust, and "History and Memory after Auschwitz, among other titles.

"Scholars and social scientists interested in identity--in psychology, sociology, philosophy, ethnic studies, and the humanities--should read this collection of sparkling and provocative essays. Navigating the waters between positivist and post-modern accounts of identity, the essays work remarkably well together to illuminate the point that identity, although obviously constructed and continually reconstructed in the flow of everyday experience, is also real and can be systematically analyzed because it is real in its behavioral consequences." --Hazel Rose Markus, co-editor of "Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence

"Paula Moya's "Learning from Experience is a work of critical intelligence that redefines entire areas of contemporary literary studies, ethnic studies, and feminist studies. Her analyses genuinely illuminate rather than simply reflect an assimilation to critical commonplaces."--Jose David Saldivar, author of "Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

"In this volume, Paula Moya provides a comprehensive and astute reading of Chicana literature and literary criticism, as well as an important critique of postmodern theory as it bears on literary criticism and especially the debates over experience, social identity and multiculturalism. Moya is one of the most original and powerful new voices in feminist and postcolonial theory today, offering a needed corrective of some of the current dogmatisms in social theory. "Learning from Experience offers a refreshing new take on the debates over experience, . . . I doubt its importance can be overestimated."--Linda Martin Alcoff, author of "Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory

""Learning from Experience is a refreshingly provocative and incisively written work that challenges fashionable dismissals of identity politics. In so doing it reaffirms the primacy of discursive and socio-political contexts and the epistemic value of experience. Moya's stimulating work has much to offer."--Rosaura Sanchez, author of "Telling Identities, and most recently co-author with Beatrice Pita of "Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton