The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms [Paperback]

A brilliant analysis of identity politics today by world-renowned thinker Olivier RoyAre we confronting a new culture--global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values?Olivier Roy's new book explains today's fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualized, ersatz.Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right.Increased left- and right-wing references to identity fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level.Olivier Roy, Professor, The European University Institute in FlorenceOlivier Roy is Professor at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of several books, including lobalized Islam; Jihad and Death; Holy Ignorance; andIs Europe Christian? Elegant. --The Wall Street Journal

There's something to disagree with on every page. But this makes the book more enjoyable and interesting, not less; it offers valuable provocation. --The New Yorker

An intellectual nonconformist, Roy has achieved something remarkable: he has written a book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it, but is instead a nuanced cultural dissection of its origins and its contradictions... Proof that truly sinlãy