In the different versions of multiculturalism that have re-shaped English-speaking societies and political systems, identities appear more plastic than in societies which have constructed their national narratives on more stubborn denials of their colonial and patriarchal pasts; yet, the myth of purity (or authenticity) and separatist temptations remain very real parameters of identity politics. In such contexts, crafting an identity for oneself implies expectations of consistency, linked not only to the individual need to prove oneself and disprove stereotypes and statistics, but also to the broader political goal of dis-alienating or, as it were, de-Othering oneself and one's community. The contributors to this book explore the different ways - from the most institutional to the most intimate - in which people articulate the politics of memory and the creation of national narratives, or communal and personal identities.
About the Author: Cecile Coquet-Mokoko has been Associate Professor of African American and American Studies at the University of Tours, France for the past ten years. She received her PhD in African American Studies under the supervision of Prof. Genevieve Fabre (University of Paris 7) in 1998 and her work, Le predicateur afro-americain et l'art du sermon: une poetique de l'election, was published by Presses du Septentrion (Lille, France) in 2000. Her publications focus on African American religious traditions, oratory, and gender relations. After teaching African American Studies for a year and a half at the University of Alabama, where she did sociological fieldwork in 2009-2010, she is currently working on a comparative study of the representations and self-representations of interracial couples in Alabama and in France. Trevor Harris is Professor of British Civilisation in the Department of English Studies at the University of Tours, France. He has worked extensively on the political and the intellectual history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on British foreign policy, as well as the relationship between these in the construction and evolution of British national identity. His most recent book is Une Certaine idee de l'Angleterre in the collection L'Histoire au present (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006).