This chapter reviews recent research on identity and second language (L2) learning. It begins with an introduction that highlights identity as fluid, complex and intersectional. It then outlines conceptual frameworks commonly adopted in this line of inquiry, including poststructuralism and sociocultural and critical approaches. The chapter then identifies categories in L2 learning, including heritage and multilingual learners, gender and sexual identities, racialized identities and socioeconomic class. In the review of heritage and multilingual learners, we highlight recent research on translanguaging that illustrates linguistic hybridity and complexities, as well as the works that challenge Eurocentric tendencies by focusing on multilingualism in the periphery. The section on gender and sexual identities discusses research on gender nonconformative L2 learners and sexual minorities. The review of the research on racialized identities provides an analysis of racism and coloniality as apparatuses and conditions of L2 learning. Finally, through our overview of the works on social class, we reflect on class not just as an external condition of language learning, but as an identity that shapes and is shaped by language learning. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions for identity and L2 learning.

Scholarship rarely, if ever, reads Mashreq transregionalism with Algerian literature in French, treating these corpuses as non-conversant at best – and silent enemies at worst. By identifying systems of interacting with texts as interpretive sensibilities, I move away from proper languages as the grounds for a historically troubled comparison. Instead, I investigate differing understandings of polysemy in these two literary systems. Poststructuralist reading methods, which emerged in tandem with Maghrebi literatures after decolonization and remain predominant in academic literary studies, valorize polysemy as a sign of emancipatory reading. In contrast, Mashreq transregionalists associated ambiguities of reading with coercive, state-supported hermeneutics that deprive readers of interpretive autonomy. Drawing on critical essays, calls for print reform, and an interview with Youssef, this chapter outlines a new comparative method for literatures across Maghreb and Mashreq, French and Arabic, founded in plural interpretive sensibilities, or systems of interacting with texts.

This chapter explores how poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault redefine the role of concepts in philosophy. It argues that the poststructuralists’ central claim is that the key moment of thinking does not occur with the use of concepts but with the dynamic processes by which concepts are constituted. The chapter begins by setting out the poststructuralists’ criticisms of what they see as a Platonism in traditional accounts of the concept, arguing that such accounts presuppose rather than explain the meaningfulness of our concepts. It then explores antecedents to the poststructuralists in French philosophy, before examining the poststructuralist shift from the discovery of concepts to their creation and reconfiguration. It concludes by analysing Derrida’s notion of différance, Deleuze’s problem-solution framework, and Foucault’s genealogical method to illustrate how poststructuralism challenges traditional accounts of the concept.

As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

This chapter explores the question of whether the epistemology of the secret of international law and the necessities it puts in place can be resisted. No definite answer to that question is sought here and only tentative reflections on the possibility of resisting the epistemology of the secret are provided in the following paragraphs. This chapter proceeds as follows. This chapter starts by elaborating on why it matters to spare no effort to resist the epistemology of the secret and rein in its consequences. The chapter then recalls that a mere termination or discontinuation of the epistemology of the secret, of its necessities, and of all the literary, hermeneutical, critical, economic, and ideological attitudes it entails is an impossibility. Resistance, it is subsequently argued, can only take the form of an act of obnubilation, a notion whose concrete implications for international legal thought and practice are subsequently spelled out.

As Chapter 7 shows, the strong influence of structuralism in French intellectual history resulted into a different perspective of the “linguistic turn,” shifting the focus on a different dimension of language, besides the semantic and the pragmatic: the syntactic. This marks a sharper departure from the idea of political languages as “models of thinking.” Languages would refer to a second-order dimension of linguistic reality, and, as such, would be semantically indeterminated. They would give rise to many different forms of thought on the level of their ideological contents. Lastly, languages established the terrain for the mutual opposition among the different ideologies present in a given discursive context. As the chapter shows, it entailed a fundamental contribution to intellectual history. However, it rendered indeed more problematic the issue of conceptual change, which paved, in turn, the way to poststructuralism. A key figure here is Rosanvallon and his “conceptual history of the political.” He elaborates of the substratum of undecidability of political concepts, its aporetic nature, which makes of them properly political concepts. It thus entailed a further step in the process of desubstantializing of concepts initiated by the “new intellectual history.”

Chapter 10 elaborates on an epistemic mutation that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and that Foucault missed. It is this that opened that conceptual universe within whose frameworks the theories analyzed in this book could emerge. This, thus, provides fundamental tools to understand the structure of those theories, as well as the problems they found to account for the issue of conceptual change. Finally, it discusses how this new episteme, in turn, starting dissolving, thus raising the issue of the constitutive incompleteness of systems. It will mark the transition from phenomenology to postphenomenology and from structuralism to postructuralism, which entailed, in turn, a new radical redefinition of the concept of the temporality of conceptual formations. Derrida´s criticism played a key role here. Lastly, as this chapter shows, this transformation, as the other epistemic mutations previously studied, traverse the whole thinking of the period, comprehending both the natural sciences and the humanities. It thus allows us to draw meaningful connections among the different areas of knowledge.

William Blake’s literary prophecies constantly unsettle symmetries, “pulling the rug out” from under the harmony and balance neoclassical readers were trained to expect in a text or a painting. Blake’s prophecies have long been read through the teleological system of Ezekiel’s “merkabah” (chariot) vision. Each biblical allusion in Blake’s work seems to build to a greater whole, or can be explained through the prophetic “system.” However, what if Blake’s prophecies were refracted through Isaiah’s more dim vision? In the multiple versions of Isaiah’s initiation in Blake’s work, we encounter a prophecy of stutter, glitch, and weakness, and a flickering, partial vision. Rather than presenting a single bombastic image as a method to unlock a biblical allegory, Blake offers Isaiah’s prophetic walking as a figure for the interpretation of the difficult, irregular biblical text. From the perspective of the walker, the biblical text is full of hardened surfaces, desolate rocks, and irregular encounters, which must be read “with the feet,” topologically – not typologically – before the poet-prophet-walker can arrive at their destination.

This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

This chapter traces multiple genealogies for the contemporary “lyric essay,” from the American memoir boom of the 1990s to the experimental writings of language poets, practitioners of postcolonial and Black diasporic thought such as Édouard Glissant and M. NourbeSe Philip, and writers who combine lyric and essayistic writing such as Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Khapil.

The absence of lyrical voice in pieces such as Schumann’s Manfred and Ballads for Declamation may point not only to the absence of the other but also to the absence of the subject itself. ‘Absence of the Self’ explores the potential loss of self implied by the absence of lyrical voice, highlighted in the missing silent ‘inner voice’ of the Humoreske, which forms an apt exemplification of later twentieth-century accounts of the illusory, ‘barred’ subject proposed by such thinkers as Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, or the empty centre at the heart of the Eichendorff Liederkreis that results from the absence of a unified subject position and any sense of narrative continuity.

This chapter starts by arguing that traditionally the writing of history has a strong connection to the construction of identities, be they national, class, ethnic, gender or spatial identities. The theory of history has also re-inforced that link until a range of diverse thinkers came to question this. I am discussing in particular Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Chris Lorenz, Chantal Mouffe, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. The collective impact of these authors has been to produce a greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between history and identity formation in many historians. The book, however, is not about a whiggish story of progress towards self-reflexivity, but it highlights that work which, in the author’s view, has been successful in being self-reflective about the historians’ part in the construction of identities.

This chapter starts by accounting for the early beginnings of social, economic and labour history in different parts of the world at different times. It then analyses the crisis of social history during the 1970s and 1980s. Challenged both by history from below and by political history as well as poststructuralist theories, social, economic and labour history began to decline. However, over recent decades we have also witnessed a renaissance of a ‘new’ social, economic and labour history. The main bulk of the chapter analyses this renewal, discussing sublaltern studies, the cultural turn, the move to global histories of work, the emphasis on practices as well as discourses and the proliferation of new sub-fields. Overall, many of these recent developments have led to a greater self-reflexivity about the writing of history and its links to collective identity formation.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Structuralism emphasizes pattern over substance. Meaning comes in the relation between things. This perspective began in linguistics, with Ferdinand de Saussure, but it continued in anthropology through the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His important books include works on kinship and on myth. Later developments included work by thinkers in Britain, Brazil, and the Netherlands.

This chapter explores the genealogies between Surrealism’s quest to express or represent the unconscious unrestrained by rational thought, and the pursuit in 1970s avant-garde feminism of a new language – an “écriture féminine” – that would be uncontaminated by phallocentric logic. Through a reading of selected works by two figures situated at the intersection of these two aesthetic and theoretical movements – feminist theorist Xavière Gauthier and artist and writer Dorothea Tanning – the chapter demonstrates that these links are not unidirectional but a dynamic dialogue. This dialogue signals not only an allegiance to Surrealism at the heart of poststructuralist/psychoanalytic feminism but also a germinal feminist poetics in historical Surrealism – that would come to full fruition in 1970s Surrealist activity.