Places of Identity

Author: Kevin Robins, David Morley

The first symptoms of the chaos we are experiencing in the 70s, nourished by the depths of modern culture characterized by quantification and commodification, turned into a "legitimacy crisis" in the political systems in Western Europe. With a strange irony of history, just as the Western European intellectual world was looking for ways to cope with this crisis, when the Eastern Bloc was destroyed by the masses chasing the promises of outdated representative democracy and the commodity world, all the problems that we had not paid much attention to before came up one after another: National and ethnic identities, global capitalism bearing the mark of transnational corporations, regional hegemony struggles, micro-nationalism, racism and new communication technologies, which are at the forefront of their economic and symbolic interaction spaces.D. Morley and K. Robins examine in detail these problems that come to the fore in today's world, where history is beginning to be seen not as one but many, where collective and individual identities are not seamless but contradictory and fragile, and where the umbrella of the nation-state is pierced not by communism but by capitalism itself. They pursue these questions by saying that there is a fundamental problem in European culture, that its self-identification by basing its positivity on the negativity of non-Europeans has turned into a narcissistic identity and that it has now begun to retreat in order to rebuild itself: The geographical borders of Europe, which the Iron Curtain simultaneously divides and unites. In an environment where there are no such clear boundaries, where will it begin and end? How will the danger of Americanization, which destroys Europe with the support it receives from borderless forms of communication, while trying to raise European awareness through mass media, be eliminated? Where will the yellow men of yesterday's pre-modern and primitive East, who took over the technology that is the magic of the white man and embarked on a breakthrough operation against the West, be placed in the established international hierarchy of power? The new devil candidates (Islam, the East, Japan, America) on whom the increasing tensions in the tug-of-war between cosmopolitan universalism and parochial and provincial regionalism, which Europe has clarified perhaps since 1492 and exported to all parts of the world since then, will be unleashed (Islam, the East, Japan, America) have thwarted this game. What opportunities do they have to get out of the West and what possibilities can they bet on?... We think that for nearly 200 years, with every step taken towards the West, it has been painfully realized that we are falling further away from the West, and that similar questions are becoming more urgent when we look away from the Others inside. If you think that it is necessary to examine the reasons why a country loves to dream "big dreams" but ends up alone with its own "internal enemies" and border neighbors, from the theoretical and political bearings offered by the world of culture and symbols, you can be sure that you will find more than what you are looking for in this book. .



Number of Pages: 314

Year of Printing: 1997


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Printing Year: 1997

Number of Pages: 314

Language Turkish